Summary: SUSE news ranging from a LinuxCon keynote to some vendor support for SUSE

BEING an idle week for SUSE (with staff mostly away), there was not much news to be found. But there are a few exceptions.

First and foremost, there is a new release of Evolution, which is a Novell product.

Evolution team is happy and proud to announce the evolution 2.28.0 release.

Zonker from the OpenSUSE project (and Novell) attended the major Linux conference (not OpenSUSE Conference) where he spoke positively about the prospects of GNU/Linux the desktop.

Brockmeier called on PC vendors to help promote Linux beyond offering it as a check-box in an order form.

"We are outgunned. We need some help and so I'm asking not only Novell and Red Hat and other companies that are in the Linux space, but also the OEMs to put some of their marketing muscle behind Linux because we need that to succeed."

Sam Varghese remarked on the above:

As that doughty publication The Register reports, Brockmeier is one person who wants the Linux desktop to grow; others like IBM and the Foundation itself appear to be more or less content with the current state of affairs.

Brockmeier sees mainstream success on the desktop as crucial, wants PC vendors to promote Linux "beyond offering it as a check-box in an order form" (El Reg's words) and exhorts Linux backers to work more closely to promote the operating system in toto.

This, coming from the representative of a company which signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft, seems a bit rich. One of the better known free software hackers, Jeremy Allison, even quit the company in protest at this act which was widely seen as a sellout.

More coverage of Zonker's talk was published in the Linux Foundation's new Web site.

Brockmeier's LinuxCon keynote "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux," used his extensive knowledge of music to entertain and inform the audience about how Linux can be perceived through the lens of rock and roll.

"Music is a way of bringing people together, because a lot of people get excited about it," he told the crowd. Brockmier wanted to take this approach because he believes the car analogy breaks down, especially when talking about Linux's future.

SGI has introduced powerful new desktops (which it dubs or markets as "supercomputers") and SLES support is included.

SGI said the systems will run a choice of Microsoft HPC Server 2008, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems.

Another minor new bit of information about SUSE 10 support:

The company said that the Office 4 supports Apple Remote Desktop, direct IP printing to Macintosh workstations and both PowerPC and Intel platforms. In addition, it also supports iPrint on Novell SUSE 10 OES2 SP1, Canon GARO print driver, and security features at the print spooler.

We have already commented on Novell's role in the Linux "bloat" remark. One of its members of staff has used the incident as an opportunity to promote SUSE Studio.

You can make these changes using tools that make it fast and easy to create your own fully supported, mass customized Linux. See SUSE Studio for a great example of this capability.

At Novell we think this is the future of Linux. We expect to see more and more customization of the OS for specific platforms, applications, or use cases. SUSE Studio gives users the ability to create their own software appliances in a matter of minutes, test them, then deploy. This level of flexibility will further drive Linux adoption across the board, from cell phones to data centers, to the cloud. And it’s a great diet plan.

Novell is quoted in this article about the growth of GNU/Linux in enterprise servers.

Michael Applebaum, senior product marketing manager at Novell (www.novell.com), is optimistic about future Linux server deployments. “Linux adoption is widespread across countries [and] industries and different sizes of customers,” he says.

“Growth is occurring across the board,” says Nick Carr, Red Hat marketing director. Carr notes that Linux is widely used by Web and infrastructure services and also by most of the global service providers.

Otago University is now looking to consolidate products that include Novell (maybe Netware, maybe SUSE, maybe something else).

Its main data centre storage area network (SAN) is also nearing the end of its useful life and the University wants suppliers to provide information on a replacement that uses Oracle, Novell and vSphere host servers.

As for Xandros and other distributions of Ballnux, not much could be found except this.

Easy Mode is very similar to the simple user interface Asus developed for early Eee PC models that shipped with Xandros Linux.

Microsoft played dirty to change things at ASUS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Xandros will slip into oblivion if it is not able to keep up presence and appearance. It has already happened to TurboLinux. ⬆