Not much Novell and SUSE news in the past week...

Here is what was found and picked nonetheless.

OpenSUSE

Stephan Binner of OpenSUSE had an interview with him published.

On this ‘People of openSUSE’ week we interviewed the greatest openSUSE and KDE addict yet. He is also one of the administrators who takes care of both English and German openSUSE wikis and a bunch of other openSUSE related things: Stephan ‘Beineri’ Binner.

PCWorld had a short article that which a review of OpenSUSE 10.3 as a desktop.

Ultimately, OpenSUSE's bid to be all things to all users betrays its origins as the developmental branch of SUSE Linux, and as a result, this distribution will be most attractive to Linux hobbyists. It's free, so nothing is stopping you from giving it a whirl. But business power users will benefit more from a polished, commercial desktop Linux distribution such as Xandros, while new users will likely find Ubuntu's limited menu more palatable than OpenSUSE's buffet.

Francis went through KDE4, which runs under OpenSUSE, and provided screenshots, along with annotation.

Plasma is actually progressing pretty well. You shouldn’t expect it to be bug-free, but I can really see everything coming together. Plasmoids are definitely going to take off, and I’m sure you’ll be able to eventually find one for just about anything you want.

A comparison between Ubuntu Linux and OpenSUSE gave high marks to both.

My default distributions is PCLinuxOS and I am not a fanboy of either Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. I have tried to be as impartial as I can, but I am human after all and can be biased. This comparison is written purely with people new to Linux or for people who wants to get things done easily. Advanced users may find it lacking or might even differ with my views, apologies to them, but I am basing this for average user.

Andreas took a look at YaST's new functionality, which has counterparts in other Linux distrubutions.

The casual reader of news.opensuse.org knows that openSUSE 10.3 contains a YaST tool for creating images using KIWI.

Novell's Products and Business

A project led by Novell won an innovation award.

Further validating its position at the forefront of technology innovation, Novell has announced the Bandit project's DigitalMe information card selector is the winner of the HP-International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Privacy Innovation Award, in the technology category.

Novell Teaming + Conferencing, which was introduced and mentioned last week, gets NMS Open Access.

Novell Teaming + Conferencing, designed to help boost end user and team productivity and reduce overall customer costs, improves the everyday business processes people engage in to create, share, discuss and manage information. With NMS Open Access boards , Novell Teaming + Conferencing users can now collaborate using voice over IP (VoIP) based clients or directly to a remote member’s telephone, while using the Teaming + Conferencing web collaboration tools.

The following NetworkWorld post offers some praises to NetWare.

Anyone who has ever run Netware knows the stability of it. It doesn't crash. You don't need to reboot it just because it's been running for a month, or a year, or two.

With Netware, you can change key components of it, e.g. the printing subsystem, without rebooting - UNLOAD SERVICE, (a little file copying), LOAD SERVICE. Even Windows 2003 forces you to reboot for "changes to take effect" all too often.

From Jim Ebzery, Senior Vice President for Identity and Security Management at Novell, comes this.

Security information and event management (SIEM) can help administrators track security data in a networked environment and counter potential threats

On the SCO front, not much has happened, but Novell and IBM are still trying to intercept SCO's plan to sell UNIX.

IBM and Novell on Thursday asked a bankruptcy court judge to block The SCO Group's sale of its Unix technology to a private equity firm, which the software vendor has proposed as part of its Chapter 11 reorganization effort.