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Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenSUSE and SLE*

XFCE



OpenSUSE



TUXMACHINES has not been reachable via DNS for almost a week now and since it is a primary source of OpenSUSE news to us, there was not much that we managed to pick.



There were various HOWTOs in a variety of sites, but more interesting it was to find out that Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier now writes for Linux Pro Magazine, not just OStatic, ZDNet and a variety of other publications like Linux Magazine the SourceForge 'family'. These hats are occasionally being used to promote the employer (Novell) and a product (Open/SUSE).

KDE 4.2 was released as well and OpenSUSE's role received this mention.

(Novell's SUSE Linux users tend to use KDE moreso than GNOME; some features from KDE 4.2 were backported into the OpenSUSE 11.1 release last month.)


There is coverage from Linuxtag 2009 and writings about FOSDEM 2009 over at the OpenSUSE Web site. We wrote about FOSDEM before [1, 2, 3] and some people now deny that say they won't go because of Novell. Others do protest against the sponsorship.

There may be some more interesting things in the OpenSUSE Web site, which delivers weekly news as usual.

In this Week:

* FOSDEM 2009 * Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors * Novell’s 2009 Technical Strategy and Process * NTFS-3g - writing to windows partition * Preview/Fix broken AVI files in openSUSE


In another newer post, OpenSUSE is listed not as a primary alternative to what the writer perceives as GNU/Linux leader on the desktop.

The first choice, openSUSE (it’s not “openSuSE”), wouldn’t be my first pick- maybe second or third, but it would still make the list.


SUSE (SLES/SLED)



Francis (nickname apokryphos) from the OpenSUSE project is still boosting SUSE, this time in Slashdot. It's fair enough, but he is among those in Slashdot who try to pressure the editors not to link to us.

There was not much news about SLE*, but there were some bits about the SUSE Linux-based Ideapad, which we previously wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

From Phoronix comes an extensive test:

While there are many different netbooks on the market, one of the models that has been selling quite well and is popular with many enthusiasts is the IdeaPad S10 from Lenovo. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10 can be customized, but is equipped with an Intel Atom N270 processor, a 10.2" anti-glare display, and Broadcom 802.11b/g WiFi. In this latest Phoronix article we are looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 along with providing some Linux-based benchmarks.


Linux Planet brought this article about the product. (also here)

Netbooks are all the rage right now with Linux as one of the primary operating system (OS) options. The Eee PC from ASUS got things started and originally only shipped with a Linux OS. This year's Consumer Electronics Show was overrun with the little laptops from a wide variety of vendors. It was only a matter of time before the big guys rolled out their own mini-laptop offerings. Now you can find a netbook from just about every major laptop manufacturer, with the exception of Apple.

[...]

Installed software on the S10e is impressive including Open Office 2.4 Novell edition, The GIMP, Firefox 3.0, Evolution, Helix Banshee, the F-Spot photo manager and Tomboy for note taking. If you don't find what you need, there's an easy-to-use software update tool to help you find it. You will have to go through a registration process to connect to the Novell-sponsored repositories, but it doesn't take long.


Additionally, there was this press release about OES2.

Xandros



On the server side, there was this one press release about Scalix but nothing particularly special about the Xandros-branded products.

Scalix, the premier Linux email, calendaring and messaging company, today announced that key staff will showcase the latest Scalix (http://www.scalix.com) email, calendaring and messaging solutions at ITnT (http://www.itnt.at/en/index.html), Vienna, Austria, January 27 - 29. ITnT is the leading trade fair for InformationTechnology and Telecommunication focused on Central Europe.


As we stated before, these weekly links are no longer delivered on Saturdays (not strictly anyway). Adding to the delay is the fact that we are having hosting issues (growing pains). The MySQL server was restarted some while ago while isolating our main database. It has been doing 286,000 queries per hour since (79.47 queries per second), so we must reach out for permanent solutions that prevent this from recurring. We can't handle heavy loads, so Squid will probably be installed soon.

The longer story is that we measure over 80 DB queries per second right now (86 at this very moment). It was a lot more yesterday, which potentially crashed the database server while a write operation was applied to one of the databases.

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