Summary: Despite being an idle week for SUSE, there is good news from HP and also a service pack



BY FAR the most important development was probably to do with HP's preferential support of SUSE on the i7 Compaq desktops. This was covered in:

i. Compaq Desktops Eye Businesses, Bang for the Buck

Both are designed for the budget-conscious small businessperson, and support various flavors of Windows 7, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows XP Pro, Novell SUSE Linux, and FreeDOS. The Compaq 500B series desktops will be available on October 22, with a starting price of $359 for the 500B and $409 for the 505B.

ii. HP's Business PC Upgrades to Elite Status

The new HP Elite 7000 Business Desktop PC can be equipped with high-performance Intel Core i7 and i5 processors; up to 8 Gbytes of DDR3 SDRAM; up to a 1-terabyte SATA hard drive, with an option for a 64-GB SSD; DVD and Blu-ray burners; either ATI and Nvidia discrete graphics, and up to four PCIe expansion cards. The HP Elite 7000 supports the several flavors of Windows 7, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Business, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, and the FreeDOS operating system.

iii. Compaq offers 500B, 505B budget desktop PCs; start at $359

The 500B (pictured at top) starts at $359 and nets you Windows 7 Professional (or XP Pro, or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11), Intel Pentium dual-core or Celeron processors, up to 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM (1333Mhz), 160GB SATA 7,200 RPM hard drive (up to 500GB), a DVD-ROM drive (writer optional), Intel GMA 3100 graphics (Nvidia GeForce G210 or ATi Radeon HD 4350 optional) and 802.11 b/g/n.

iv. HP goes berserk: new desktops, notebooks and touch systems

The HP Elite 7000 business desktop PC comes with Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, and runs Windows 7 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 is available as a preinstalled option).

SUSE support is also mentioned in relation to IBM's Domino and there is a success story told by Information Week:

It's not easy to run an organization with 1,500 PCs on almost no Microsoft products, but that's what Mosaic, a faith-based nonprofit organization that provides services to the developmentally disabled, is doing with the help of open source and cloud computing.

Mosaic began investigating client virtualization and desktop Linux in 2004 as a possible cost-cutting exercise, and slowly began repurposing its old PCs as thin clients running remote instances of Novell SUSE Linux.

Information Week also has this new article about SUSE Studio.

Once, if you wanted to create your own Linux distribution, you had to jump through more hoops than your average Cirque du Soleil performer.

Now it's possible to automate the vast majority of the process, thanks to a Web service created by Novell and SUSE: SUSE Studio. All you need to create your own SUSE-based distro is a Web browser that runs Flash, a decently fast Internet connection, and some working knowledge of Linux.

Heise is probably the first news site to cover the release of SP3 for SLE* 10.

Novell has released service pack 3 (SP3) for its SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 products. In addition to including all of the previous bug fixes, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES) SP3 includes improved Infiniband support (version 1.4.1), Tomcat 5.5.27 and a number of driver updates. On 32-bit Intel-based systems, the vmi, vmipae and kdumpae kernel flavours have been added for use with VMware.

SUSE is mentioned in a couple more articles about other companies' products.

What is a harder choice for users, he said, is whether to go with Ubuntu or to choose a more widely-known enterprise Linux vendor. "Red Hat or Novell are a safe choice, but … there are certain circumstances where Ubuntu can be the right operating system for a corporation or a federal agency."

Xandros, which signed a patent deal similar to Novell's (but probably a worse one if Linspire is accounted for), tries to maintain some public presence using Nokia's latest event. Here is a press release about it:

In this session, Pascal Lauria explains why Xandros has standardized on Qt since v1.3 and how it was used in delivering the ASUS Eee PC which launched the netbook revolution. His talk covers Xandros’ experience in adopting Qt as its main R&D framework. He discusses specific aspects of developing GUI software components for netbooks, including the massive 18-language localization of our Qt-based Linux desktop suite. He concludes with a look at future R&D requirements, including suggested Qt enhancements.

Compared to the amount of news about non-Ballnux distributions, the above is almost negligible. This shows that signing a patent deal with Microsoft is not the route to material gains. ⬆