Nothing extraordinary, but a few minor developments

With Linspire out of the picture [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and with almost zero presence or exposure for Turbolinux in the English-speaking media, we can finally pay more attention to just two companies that signed a software patent deal with their vicious competitor.

SUSE (SLES/SLED)

Mentioned earlier in the week was this story about GNU/Linux laptops at a school. What we did not share at the time is information about the distribution. Lenovo, being close to IBM, seems to favour SUSE on its laptops and this one situation was no exception.

The program enriches the education of students by equipping each student with a computer. The program has given Whitfield’s students and faculty new avenues for interaction and learning by using Lenovo ThinkPads (powered by Linux) in the classrooms.

[...]

Whitefield picked the Lenovo ThinkPad R61, R50e, R51 and Z60t notebooks and Novell (News - Alert) SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for the program.

A first-of-July press release spoke about Invitrogen becoming a loyal Novell client (also found here).

Novell today announced Invitrogen has selected SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise as the core operating platform to standardize and virtualize the company's servers. A global provider of essential life science technologies for research, production and diagnostics, Invitrogen conducts business in more than 70 countries and offers 35,000 products and services. With the flexibility of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell(R), the company will reduce server licensing costs, virtualize with support on the VMware platform and simplify migration from Windows and UNIX servers to Linux*.

Behold this one lazy editor who merely rewrites and parrots the press release, putting it up for display as though it's an 'article'. Here is a slightly better 'derivative' of the press release. It still feels like 'bot journalism', which is bad because whatever Novell announces gets blindly echoed without scrutiny. The press then becomes just a marketing arm. Sys-Con is equally bad.

Matt Asay mentioned this development too. He's clearly watching his former employer at some level of capacity (RSS feeds most likely).

Invitrogen is a billion-dollar supplier to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, with 4,700 employees worldwide and a history of supplying many of the world's leading laboratories in groundbreaking research like the discovery of the AIDS virus.

To help promote its innovative work, Invitrogen announced this week that it is standardizing on Novell's SUSE€® Linux Enterprise for its servers.

Repton does some promotional legwork for Novell.

VAR claims reorganisation has yielded upturn in business as Novell comes knocking

[...]

Jill Henry, channel director Novell UK & Ireland, said: "Repton’s recognition of the customer benefits of our SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server and its interoperability with the Microsoft platform underlines our strategic relevance to datacentre environments.”

The nonsense about interoperability is likely to remain a form of self-serving FUD. The message Novell bears here is that unless you buy SUSE (and pay Microsoft), things in a Microsoft-centric datacentre will be catastrophic.

SAP too is doing its promotional work for Novell, but being so close to Microsoft, none of this has ever been particularly surprising.

SAP uses the SUSE Linux Enterprise-Server itself as a Linux development platform thus ensuring full operability of the SAP applications under Linux from the start.

The cooperation of SAP and Novell is to go far beyond Linux. The focus: a perfect consolidation of the two companies’ decisive technologies; providing customers with a high-value solution to help them fulfill regulatory requirements and optimize their applications for a virtualized IT environment.

Xandros

Moving on to Xandros, there's this new article that shows Microsoft's 'special' treatment of those who pay it for mythical patents.

Microsoft is extending its System Center product line to Linux and Unix machines. The company plans to offer support right out of the box for the HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems. Redmond also turned to third parties for help. Quest Software, Novell, and Xandros plan to use Microsoft's Cross Platform Extensions to enable customers to monitor open source applications, such as Apache and MySQL, as well as proprietary applications from companies like Oracle.

One last thing that was mentioned earlier in the week is the Eee PC and the mysterious arrangement when it comes to Xandros (and Microsoft, by association). The Xandros brand continues to be mentioned because of ASUS, but it isn't entirely clear how that works. Regardless, new models of the Eee family continue to come.

Most specifications for the system remain a mystery, though the 904 name implies it will be a close relative of the 901, which has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of memory, and in most versions will come with ASUS' customized version of Xandros Linux.

Perhaps -- and just perhaps --Xandros will be replaced one day. ⬆