Summary: News about SUSE, accumulated over the past week



IN RECENT weeks we have witnessed a lot of coverage of Novell's "me-too" product, which enabled us to build Bloatnux. There is still some coverage of that (probably successful marketing job from Novell) and it is mentioned here very briefly. A long review came from Steven Lawson, who mostly wrote praises:

The studio works on a system of templates. You choose a product on which to base your distro from openSUSE 11.1, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

Then you must decide which desktop environment you're going to have. The options include:

Just Enough OS GNOME desktop KDE desktop (versions 3 and 4) Minimal X with IceWM

[...]

SUSE are to be applauded for providing the Linux community with such a service, though I do wonder how they will handle the inevitable flood of interest and subsequent network strain once the product comes out of its beta stage and becomes available to the general computer-using public - assuming that is the intention, of course.

Further, wouldn't it be great SUSE Studio's success - and it deserves to succeed - prompted similar efforts from the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian?

Here is another new review and two more that are noteworthy:

i. A Walk Through SUSE Studio

SUSE Studio is a new Web based service for creating Linux appliances based on openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It allows users to build custom Linux distributions including selected software packages and configurations.

ii. The Excellent SUSE Studio (and tips)

My only gripe is the SUSE Studio itself is closed source. Hope you’re listening, Novell!

Well, Novell does a great deal of closed source, so people's gripes might not change anything.

The Register is still offering free publicity to SUSE and Novell's marketing chief has used the pay-to-say IDC to promote SUSE on the client side.

Dragoon's confidence was buoyed by an IDC report released this week which predicts that Linux related revenue will grow from $567 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2012 and $1.2 billion in 2013. Although 2008 was a rough year for many companies, Linux revenue industrywide grew more than 23 percent, according IDC.

This is the same IDC which is marketing Windows and showering it with praise whenever Microsoft pays the bill. Even the very same analyst (Gillen) does this doublespeak, which makes a classic contradiction. Later on in the weekend we'll show just how morally corrupt analysts can be. Here is more on that that study.

That executive summary also said that "the big get bigger," with Red Hat and Novell accounting for the lion's share of commercial Linux support revenues, and more interestingly, in many regions of the world Red Hat and Novell have the majority of unpaid but installed Linux licenses, as well.

Do not be insulted when the very same firm attacks GNU/Linux. It all depends on who's paying and what for.

Here is a new article about SUSE and RHEL in the datacentre. It is mostly comparative.

While RHEL and SLES are technically similar, there are some significant differences between the two companies and their strategies. How will these differing strategies affect you, the IT manager, short term and long term? We take a look at some of the important differences between Novell and Red Hat products and strategies, and draw some conclusions on when and how these differences can affect your data center strategy.

This new report from IDG in New Zealand suggests that there is a chance of SLED coming to Inland Revenue.

Ongoing relationship with Novell "confidential", Inland Revenue says

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IRD’s CIO Ross Hughson said at the time that completely replacing Microsoft on the desktop was “a possibility, but I wouldn’t say it’s a probability at this stage”. He said the business was “up for grabs”.

IRD runs Novell’s SUSE Linux on many of its servers

Why doesn't Inland Revenue use a distribution which is not burdened by Microsoft? Is there any particular reason for the tax office to favour Microsoft-taxed distributions of GNU/Linux? ⬆