IT HAS BEEN an exceptionally quiet week for Novell, but more news about SUSE (and OpenSUSE in particular) will be caught up with next week.

OpenSUSE

Heise published a list of GNU/Linux distributions and OpenSUSE was one of them.

The only other real news is OpenSUSE 11.1 being added to click2try's catalogue. Then there is this blog post about SUSE Studio.

Some months ago I casually signed up for a beta program online that seemed to mix cloud computing with Linux distributions. This program being SUSE Studio. I was impressed by the concept and I took it for a brief whirl. It is quite powerful and apart from adding packages from the regular openSUSE repositories of the latest stable release version, you can add/remove your own repos. Furthermore, you can customize the artwork and share this custom distribution with the world. You can watch this video to see how to use SUSE Studio to build a custom Linux distribution based on openSUSE.

SLES

There was also not much about SUSE. In the context of GNU/Linux servers, the Var Guy mentioned Novell as follows:

Rewind to the 1990s, and Microsoft wisely evangelized Windows 95’s connectivity to Novell NetWare servers. Fast forward to the present, and Microsoft should do the same with Linux servers and open source.

Earlier on we mentioned the US Postal Service moving to Free software, but the role of SUSE was not mentioned at the time. Here it is:

The Postal Service is moving 1,300 Sun Solaris midrange servers to a Hewlett-Packard Linux environment, using Novell’s SUSE Linux on the mainframe and distributed computing platforms to forge greater interoperability between the two environments.

In an article about IBM, SUSE is mentioned very briefly at the end alongside its main rivals.

IBM will begin shipping the Istanbul variants of the System x3755 server on August 26. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Microsoft Windows Server, and Sun Microsystems Solaris 10 are all supported on this box.

This is nothing of significance, but it's the little that could be found.

Turbolinux

Turbolinux is one of the 4 server/desktop companies that signed a Linux patent deal with Microsoft. Turbolinux seems quite irrelevant in English-speaking parts of the world, but in Asia it is sometimes used and it got some scarce attention in the English press, even a press release this week. There is usually nothing at all about them, not even a mention. ⬆