Summary: News about SUSE, about Xandros and about Samsung, all of which pay Microsoft for Linux

THIS week was all about OpenSUSE and there was little to see elsewhere at Novell. Nonetheless, it turns out that Paul Cutler from GNOME received some financial help from Novell.

Thanks to Novell and Google’s sponsorship, nine of us are converging in Google’s Chicago office for two days.

SUSE Studio was mentioned again by Tux Radar, which generally likes (and has always liked, even under the "Linux Format" banner) the OpenSUSE/SuSE distribution.

Novell recently launched SUSE Studio, a service that enables you to create OpenSUSE respins from any browser. At the time we went to press this service was so exclusive it was strictly invite-only, though you could request an invitation via www.susestudio.com.

Ross Chevalier wrote about the SUSE-based OES 2 and more use of SLES can be seen in this new article.

Boardsports, be it snow, skate, or surf, is a multi-million dollar industry, populated with large manufacturers and cottage shops, all trying to get a piece of these sports' action. With such competition in place, particularly when the current economic climate is discouraging discretionary spending on boarding equipment, it's no small feat to reduce part of an IT budget by 80 percent.

That's exactly what happened when The Burton Corporation shifted its SAP-related infrastructure from HP-UX on proprietary big iron to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on commodity boxes last year.

The Indian press -- and one publication in particular -- did something interesting. It is suspicious that they just publish three Novell case studies out of the blue (without any for other companies to be covered), namely:

i. Clustering on SUSE Linux

HRI employs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to power its supercomputing clusters, enabling globally recognized research projects in cosmology, high-energy physics and condensed matter physics, writes Nivedan Prakash

ii. Managing data center migration

Gupta added that PlateSpin Migrate enabled them to take snapshots of their systems and move them across a 155 Mbps line to new hardware in the new facility, “We moved each server during weekends on a four-week cycle, preparing the target platform and then using PlateSpin Migrate to migrate the data. The whole migration was completed within six months, with no significant disruption to users.”

iii. Moving towards an improved desktop environment

The migration from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop at ING Life, India has generated considerable cost savings for the company. The company has also gained a faster and more stable working environment.

It's like 3 Novell adverts that are labeled "casestudy". Here is another new case of Novell:

The demand for such tools has attracted the attention of a variety of vendors, including BeyondTrust, which last month unveiled what it termed the first first privileged account management product for heterogeneous IT environments, along with CA, Quest Software and Novell.

Xandros

Xandros, which consumed Linspire and Scalix, is generally very quiet these days, but some press releases are still floating about without getting attention from reporters. Corel is said to be close to being bought.

[Xandros] BridgeWays Partner Inframon Brings Cross - Platform System Center Services to the United Kingdom

ASUS and Xandros appear in conjunction again:

If the machine does have an ARM processor, it also won’t be able to run Windows XP or Windows 7, although it’s not clear if it will run Google Android, Google Chrome or a Linux distribution such as Xandros, Ubuntu, or Moblin.

Samsung

Another Microsoft-encumbered distribution which we wrote about this week would be Bada, and it's still appearing in some places.

Samsung's first Bada-powered device has been leaked in photo form - it would appear to be a style-conscious touchscreen device

[...]

Following on from the widespread adoption of the Android operating system, several smartphone players are branching out into alternate, open source interfaces, as we saw with the Vodafone 360 H1 – a phone also made by Samsung.

Samsung pays Microsoft for Linux. All too troublesome to be accepted. ⬆