Novell and Microsoft may stubbornly insist that they are separate entities while openly describing themselves as "partners". As we pointed out several times before, those two companies seem to be getting only nearer as time goes by and here is an illuminating new bit.
In the following press release, Novell and Microsoft are mentioned tightly as though they are one. Watch this:
BtoB’s March issue names the top business-to-business agencies in the U.S. PJA is included along with large agency winner BBDO and mid-sized agency Doremus, both in New York. The magazine recognized PJA’s creative work for clients Novell/Microsoft, Trend Micro and TriZetto.
IT Services is also planning the removal of the Novell login, moving to Microsoft Active Directory and a new network authentication login that will help keep the university’s network safe.
[...]
Landry said in his broadcast that those departments, such as organizations on campus that share specific Novell drives, will be transferred over to a new Microsoft file system by the beginning of summer.
To put things in perspective, when Novell wins a SUSE deal, Microsoft gets paid for it. In the example above, Microsoft hurts Novell’s profits. It’s truly a one-way relationship. How can Novell be pleased?
Meanwhile, Novell’s new press booster, namely Zonker, continues to do some legwork. It turns out that he’s a publisher at OStatic now. It’s worth keeping an eye on this because of the Om Malik relationship (he AstroTurfed for Microsoft in exchange for payments). █
H-P did not quite stop there and for quite some time there have been rumours and leaks about H-P’s response to the ASUS Eee PC. One of the key bits in these rumours was the inclusion of GNU/Linux, but the chosen version was unknown — until now.
Sadly enough, despite the company’s history of installing other distributions, it chose SUSE this time around. It’s not OpenSUSE either. It’s the version Microsoft gets paid for. Have a look at this short report from Laptop Magazine.
The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (starting at $599 for Windows Vista Basic, $499 for SuSE Linux, and $749 as configured) is a bit more expensive and weighs more than the competition, but the system’s unique strengths make it a good investment for students, mobile professionals, and anyone else looking for an affordable, highly portable computer.
Like the three aforementioned machines, the Mini-Note is not aimed at the mass market. It starts on the low end at $499 for the Linux, SSD version, but a fully configured device with Vista can top out at $1,200.
Like in the recent case of SAP (see the post about Intel-SAP-SUSE-Microsoft, aka a "Partners Triangle"), H-P is very close to Microsoft. We last showed this only about a week ago when H-P lobbied for OOXML in France. It is primarily in Microsoft’s best of interests to ensure that its favourite and largest OEMs choose distributions that are financially-tied to Microsoft. But why should customers be careless or naive enough not to see it?
Given those historical collusion stories, it’s simply hard to get past the idea of secret software patents tax. There are more reports of this kind, one of which we cited here just a couple of days ago. Here is another newer one:
Dell giving the shaft to open source ubuntu customers?
[..]
Seems that with FreeDOS I could get a processor with a (relatively) whopping 4MB L2 cache, 2.33GHz clock speed and 1333 front side bus. I could also get a significantly larger hard disk of 500GB. These improvements would cost a mere $170 extra, not bad.
Now, there were some other differences between the setups so we’re not really comparing apples to apples. For example, the ubuntu PC had an option for a firewire port (IEEE adapter) whereas the FreeDOS option did not. But then, the FreeDOS had an option for a dial-up modem which the ubuntu PC did not have. Other than that the systems were almost identical. They have the same capacity for an nVidia GeForce 8600-DDR3 256MB video card which is respectable for a non-gaming PC and consequently one of the more important factors to consider when using ubuntu since ATI graphics cards are notorious for having problems with ubuntu.
Still, the trend is clear, Dell offers FreeDOS PCs better hardware upgrade options. In the end I opted for the FreeDOS computer simply because it comes with beefier hardware. I can install ubuntu by myself; I actually prefer it that way.
More curious, however, have always been the comparisons between Windows- and Linux-loaded PCs, where the customer gets extra for the Windows bundle and for Linux the customer receives nothing, for no apparent reason. This is definitely something to keep an eye on in case Dell’s involvement in the Novell/Microsoft deal includes payments to Microsoft for Ubuntu Linux (more details in the previous post). Based on something I was told last week in private, some of these suspicions may be justified. But they are just unconfirmed (and ‘unconfirmable’) suspicions. █
To Novell’s credit, as we mentioned earlier in the week, it’s doing some advocacy in Australia trying to rid CIOs of misconceptions about open source software in general. Here is an article which contains Novell’s rebuttal to accusations about poor (or lack of) open source support.
The problem with open source software is a lack of understanding, not a lack of support, according to a Novell executive who hit back at the CIOs from some of Australia’s top government agencies.
In the following article, the choice of SUSE Linux at Baldor Electric is explained. It replaces mainly Windows servers but some UNIX ones also. The picture above is of Ken and Dennis (of UNIX fame) in case you wonder
Adding to the workload burden, some application servers ran on one of 20 Windows servers, while others ran on one of nine Unix servers.
[...]
The SUSE/IBM conversion was so successful that it captured management’s attention. “Our CEO does not know or want to know that we are using SUSE Linux,” Shackelford said. “He is interested in driving business value. We have delivered a highly available system that delivers business value at reduced cost, and that is what is important to our shareholders.”
Siemens’ IT services arm will use SUSE Linux over Unix as the de facto operating system for running 350 business-critical SAP systems and 120,000 user accounts – along with numerous web applications, web servers and Oracle database servers.
Linux certifications seem to be getting hot nowadays, but as it turns out, vendor-neutral ones are good also. This means that staff employed by the businesses above could cope well with Debian and Red Hat, for example. Novell is hopefully building no walls (lock-in), either practical or legal.
The LPI certification, unlike the Red Hat and Novell certifications, is vendor-neutral. The long-delayed, top-level LPIC-3 arrived in 2007.
To obtain this certification, roughly equivalent to the RHCE or the NCLE (Novell Certified Linux Engineer), a Linux administrator must have already achieved the LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certifications.
Covington Group of Funds (“Covington”) is pleased to announce that Novell, Inc. (“Novell”) has completed its acquisition of Covington investee PlateSpin Ltd. (the “Company”). The acquisition for USD$205 million (all cash transaction) will see PlateSpin’s customers benefit from the larger resources and global reach provided by the amalgamation of the two entities.
Novell Inc. said Monday it has completed acquisition of PlateSpin Ltd., whose products are expected to allow Novell customers to use their computer systems more efficiently with a greater variety of applications.
There are two new stories about virtualisation where Novell is involved. The first one is said to be “a Virtual Iron success story.”
One of the challenges has been the growth in the number of servers required. Each high school has one Novell Netware workgroup server and six Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 Terminal Servers. Each junior high school has one Netware and four Windows 2003 Terminal Servers. Each elementary school has one Netware and one to two Windows 2003 Terminal Servers.
The second story is related to an announcement which was made at BrainShare 2008. Novell got together with Sesame Street, which now claims savings from virtualisation.
Broadwater recently faced a budget crunch at the same time he needed new Web servers and was physically running out of room in his data center. His solution: new HP blade servers based on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise server software, which builds in Xen’s virtualization software (Xen is the leading open source alternative to VMware’s offering.)
The next (and last) post of this kind is a potpourri of news about Novell. As always, we encourage to those not interested in the Saturday posting to filter out items with “Do-No-Evil Saturday” in the title. The site maintains its focus on Novell, but weekly news became to be slightly more dull and far less analytical. █
Three weeks ago we explained why the Linux Foundation must assist, if not even promote, the products from Novell. It does not matter how Novell has sinned because the Linux Foundation is funded by Novell, making it unable to bite the very same hand that feeds it.
“By association, therefore, the Linux Foundation must be civil towards Microsoft (its beneficiary’s partner).”It’s an interesting dilemma of course because Novell is a Microsoft partner. By association, therefore, the Linux Foundation must be civil towards Microsoft (its beneficiary’s partner). Therein you can find the dangers of allowing Novell to become more dominant.
Yesterday we wrote about the interview involving Jim Zemlin (of the Linux Foundation) and Ron Hovsepian (CEO of Novell). It wasn’t as much of an in-depth interview as much as a commercial for Novell. Ron Hovsepian spoke like a salesman, possibly mimicking the CEO of its ally.
But there’s also a big downside to this approach, as the latest interview shows. It’s with Ron Hovsepian, the CEO of Novell. Reading the transcript, I found myself constantly wondering when Hovsepian was going to say something new or, well, interesting. Instead, what we got were a series of marketing platitudes.
And then I realised what the problem was. The name “Microsoft” occurs just three times in the whole interview, which runs to many thousands of words. And none of those instances refers to the Microsoft-Novell deal that has proved so divisive in the open source world.
Now, I fully understand why Zemlin moved gingerly around this topic: it’s deeply problematic for Hovsepian, and he is understandably unwilling to explore its deleterious effects on the free software community. Equally, Zemlin is naturally unwilling to put important open source figures like Hovsepian on the spot since this will make his job much harder in the future.
This is where cynical journalists like me come in. We have no compunction in sticking the interrogatory knife in to interviewees and twisting when we find the pain point.
Microsoft and Novell Announce Departure of OpenSUSE Project, Renewed Patent Strategy
Customers will continue to embrace SUSE Windows Enterprise; technical collaboration between Microsoft and Novell will expand Windows Vista distribution to create Windows 7
REDMOND, Wash., and WALTHAM, Mass. — Apr. 1, 2008 — Over one year after signing an agreement to exchange protection money and securing several kneecaps, Novell Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced that OpenSUSE developers had reached a state of unrest. As such, Microsoft and Novell decided to revise their strategic partnership and combine the best of two platforms’ intellectual property, protected by an extensive portfolio of valuable patents.
The two companies will continue to swap intellectual property (IP) and create Microsoft Windows 7, accompanied by a derivative release named SUSE Windows, ensuring that OpenSUSE developers, formerly of SuSE, can continue to develop GNU/Linux solutions with peace of mind. In addition, Novell and Microsoft announced an expansion of their strategic collaboration to create the Oligarchy Invention Network (OIN), whose purpose is to litigate — albeit by proxy — against disruptive technologies whose market cost is zero.
“This agreement has been about Novell’s shareholder since day one,” said Jam Jaffe, executive vile precedence at Novell. “Investors told us they wanted to indulge in the wealth that was built around Windows. Novell is also becoming the preferred patent troll for litigation strategies against companies which refuse to pay for imaginary property and unsubstantiated claims.”
Achievements to Date
Today Novell and Microsoft announced that 15 new customers, including SCO (Nasdaq: SCOX), have sought the services of the joint collaboration, whose potential in spreading fear is immense. “I have been looking for such opportunities for over 5 years,” said Darl McBride, whose expected departure was wrongly announced by the press in the month of February.
Novell concluded by assuring technical enthusiasts that their GNU/Linux* distribution will be stripped of most or all of Novell’s contributions to it, in order to avoid further legal damage and threat over frameworks such as Mono. “The hobbyists were not exactly what we needed at Novell anyway,” summarised Just in Stein at the press conference announcing this major development.
About Novell
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers infrastructure software for the Patent-happy Enterprise. Novell is a leader in desktop to data center operating systems based on Ballnux and the software required to secure and manage mixed IT environments. Novell helps customers around the world minimize cost, complexity and risk, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth. For more information, visit www.novell.com.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in bribery, extortion and blackmail that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Novell and SUSE are registered trademarks of Novell Inc. in the United States and other countries.
* Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
If further evidence of this is required, here are a couple of stories from last week’s news. The first article we can present here talks about Novell’s decline in the messaging and collaboration market.
Novell’s lagging position in the messaging and collaboration market
[...]
That said, many (including me) talk about Novell’s lagging position in the messaging and collaboration market behind Microsoft and IBM, the defection of GroupWise customers to other platforms, etc. If Novell is lagging behind its competitors, why is that the case?
One might call this an old business of Novell, but Novell has attempted to evolve in this space, yet it seems to continue to fail.
It’s a difficult management challenge, and it’s one I broached during a conversation last week with Ron Hovsepian, the CEO of Novell. Hovsepian said that in the past year, he has had to replace 24% of his workers to gain the skills Novell needs.
“One thousand of our 4,000 employees are new to Novell,” he said. “Candidly, among all the good revenue stories and the profit improving, people don’t realize how much we’ve really gone in and changed our workforce to get the right skills here.”
When I asked Hovsepian why he didn’t retrain his employees instead, he said Novell “absolutely retrained the ones that we felt had the right aptitude and the right capabilities,” and he stressed that his company continues to invest in training. But the reality is that companies often don’t have the luxury of the time it takes to retrain.
Excuses pushed aside, Novell will have to show more compelling proof of success. While it has some cash reserves in the bank (attributed to ‘old Novell’), it’s hard to know how the company is really doing at the moment. The only sure thing is that the company is shrinking, evidence being the gradual layoffs (more to come soon). █
Novell today announced one of the world’s leading providers of online
gaming and entertainment has selected Novell to secure its IT
infrastructure and enforce compliance mandates. The bwin Group has millions
of users for its betting, poker, casino and games offered over the Internet
and other digital distribution channels. Using Novell’s security and
information management solution Novell(R) Sentinel(TM), bwin can now
automatically detect threats to user data and meet the stringent auditing
requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
Here is a more significant announcement from Western and Southern Life, which became a Linux user and bragged about considerable savings.
Novell today announced that Western & Southern Life, a subsidiary of
Fortune 500 financial company Western & Southern Financial Group, has
implemented SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R) in each of its
branch offices for 25 percent of the cost of an equivalent proprietary
solution.
Pat Bernard is wasting no time in using her recent appointment as Novell’s vice president of global channel sales to emphasize the company’s dedication to its channel partners. At Novell’s BrainShare 2008 conference in Salt Lake City, Bernard outlined the company’s four-point strategy aimed at strengthening its relationship with VARs.
Teaming + Conferencing
Quite a few announcements were made here.
Novell has just uploaded this one video which is perhaps more entertaining than all the boring text.
GWAVA, Novell’s largest collaboration partner for GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing, announced today the next version of Retain for GroupWise, improving the speed and extending the reach of the already robust search and archiving capabilities of the fastest selling compliance solution in GWAVA history.
GWAVA, Novell’s largest collaboration partner for GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing, has announced comprehensive support for Novell SiteScape with its GWAVA Redline.
For Novell GroupWise administrators that have installed SiteScape or Novell Teaming + Conferencing into their GroupWise infrastructure, Redline tracks the entire SiteScape infrastructure in real-time, notifies users via email or pager, and provides a Web-based viewer that lets users see all of the details of components in a single view and produces reports.
Getting back to boring text, here is a boring press release which talks about people begging (pretty please! Down on your knees) for Novell’s Teaming + Conferencing solution. This has “commissioned study” written all over it.
Novell today released details of a study by IDG Research Services that
found while collaboration tools are very important for companies, their
effectiveness leaves much to be desired. The study, commissioned by Novell,
surveyed 100 senior IT executives on their experiences with and plans for
collaboration software. A full 80 percent said it is of critical or high
importance that individuals in their companies have the ability to
collaborate securely within and beyond organizational boundaries, but fewer
than half said their current collaboration solutions are extremely or very
effective in enabling collaboration among individual knowledge workers or
among teams and virtual teams.
WorkLight, the Enterprise 2.0 security specialist, say that Novell’s vision for the future of collaborative business working via social networking sites – unveiled at the company’s Brainshare event in Utah on Monday – highlights the power that services like Facebook offer technically aware modern businesses.
One has to wonder if this kind of feedback was genuinely earned or paid for. Anyhoo… we digress. Here is another recent one we did not mention. As announced briefly by Novell:
Honeywell Releases Security Convergence Study Results
Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today released survey results that reveal how some organizations are integrating physical security measures such as video surveillance and access control with traditional IT security systems. According to “Enterprise Threat Management and Security Convergence: A Benchmarking Study,” significant barriers still exist that prevent organizations from converging their systems and many of these organizations remain conflicted on how to best attain optimal results.
[...]
“This study reinforces that companies are increasingly concerned with protecting their information assets as well as their physical assets, and they recognize that integrating once-disparate systems can be effective in addressing threats,” said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president of Identity and Security Management at Novell, which recently collaborated with Honeywell to develop a converged physical-IT security system.
Blech.
SAP and Novell’s SUSE
We wrote about SAP and SUSE in the past. SAP, unlike Oracle, is still fairly close to Microsoft. By association, it’s also close to Novell and it shows.
BrainShare(R) 2008 — In order to deliver expanded support options to companies running their business operations on SAP applications and the SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise operating system, Novell and SAP AG today announced an extension of their long-standing relationship. In a move that will help meet the growing demand for SUSE Linux Enterprise and provide support for the open source community, Novell and SAP are planning to offer enhanced options for customers who choose to run open source. As part of this initiative, the companies will work together to enable SAP’s industry-leading enterprise applications to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell’s virtualization and identity management technologies to provide new data center options for customers. In addition, the companies plan to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP’s data center infrastructure requirements, further promote SAP(R) Business All-in-One solutions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and collaborate within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to help strengthen customers related to the SAP governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices.
Novell and SAP are extending their relationship to improve support for manufacturers running on SAP applications and the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.
Very unoriginal, but never mind. You can see how similar the article is to the PR, including the headline.
US-based software firm Novell has extended its partnership with SAP to deliver expanded support options to companies running their business operations on SAP applications and the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.
Novell and SAP are out to get even the smallest SAP user running mission-critical applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP’s enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies.
Bits of interest even in the Financial Times, which find big names like SAP difficult to ignore.
SAP hopes to woo mid-sized businesses with a range of pre-configured solutions that combine Intel-based hardware with a range of software.
The software includes Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise operating system, SAP’s MaxDB database and its Business All-in-One enterprise suite.
Infrastructure Plans
Novell is throwing around the word “integration” quite a lot nowadays. Even when it speaks of SUSE/SLED it prefers to describe it as a “solution”, not just software. Shades of Microsoft.
This platform will be created as an appliance. Novell said the new release will aim to harmoniously integrate mixed-IT environments. Novell outlined a broad focus for the SuSE Linux Enterprise release which includes supporting appliance development in the data center, helping customers looking for easier UNIX to Linux relocation. Other than that, the leveraging of Xen technologies to deliver virtualization, which will help realizing the benefits of green IT and increasing technology for Windows optimization.
Against a backdrop of efforts aimed at remaking itself, Novell executives today seized the opportunity to help put its sizable Linux and system management initiatives into some context for enterprise IT buyers.
“Novell is first and foremost a software infrastructure company,” said John Dragoon, the company’s chief marketing officer, during a press conference today at Novell’s (NASDAQ: NOVL) annual Brainshare user conference in Salt Lake City.
Add another fancy word and what have you got? “Modular infrastructure”. Yes. Shiny.
Novell details modular infrastructure plan
Novell has laid out a technical strategy that would let users mix and match physical and virtual machines along with management tools, identity services, collaboration software, and open source operating systems.
QLogic
QLogic made this announcement, which went by without much attention.
Novell BrainShare 2008 — QLogic Corp. (NasdaqGS:QLGC – News), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced that it is the first HBA vendor to ship production ready N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) solution for a shipping Linux distribution. Enterprise Linux customers can now get NPIV-capable Fibre Channel HBAs for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the latest Linux platform from Novell that features significant enhancements in virtualization, high performance computing, security, interoperability and system management. QLogic(r) market-leading 2400 series HBAs provide hardware-assist features that enable dynamic provisioning and flexible usage of HBA resources, helping IT managers to extend SAN best practices into virtualized data centers.
Aliso Viejo-based storage networking products firm QLogic said Thursday that the firm has shipped an enhanced version of the firm’s host bus adapter (HBA) storage networking products for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. QLogic said that it is now shipping a production ready HBA with support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), a storage industry standard used for supporting virtualization software.
Novell today announced it will be offering a first look at
next-generation data center management at BrainShare 2008. This event will
showcase the offerings available today from Novell(R) and PlateSpin* that
deliver complete workload lifecycle management, helping customers plan,
provision, protect and optimize their data center provided services. These
solutions reinforce Novell’s ability to harmoniously integrate mixed IT
environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. The combined
solutions allow customers to seamlessly move workloads between physical and
virtual environments creating greater agility and reducing server sprawl,
complexity and costs in their IT infrastructure.
Quite a few companies are developing technology that can help organizations move from seeing their datacenter as a number of silos to seeing their systems as a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated according to their own policies, guidelines and service level requirements and then reallocated as conditions change. Novell and PlateSpin have both offered interesting technology in the past to address parts of the requirements of such a solution. Putting the pieces together is likely to make the task somewhat simpler.
I’ve been in Salt Lake City at Novell’s Brainshare. As in years past, Novell presented an enthusiastic rendition of its messages, interesting demonstrations and even labs allowing folks to actually use the newest editions of the company’s products. It’s an event worth attending if you’re interested in Novell’s technology.
Leftovers
There were all sorts of relatively minor announcements, including this one from Condrey Corporation.
Condrey Corporation announced today at Novell BrainShare the immediate availability of DocXchanger 1.0, a product that allows users to easily discover and securely access their network files and folders from any location, enabling interactive document sharing capabilities that eliminate email attachments.
Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced at the Novell BrainShare event that its storage area network (SAN) has been certified with both Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and NetWare 6.5 operating systems, helping make it seamless for Novell administrators to leverage the Compellent SAN to lower storage costs and energy consumption. The Novell Yes Certified designation applies to both Fibre Channel and iSCSI server connections to the Compellent SAN.
At the BrainShare 2008 conference this week, Novell Inc. executives shared their visions of the future with customers, partners and developers as they outlined new products, services and strategies.
But some of the most interesting tidbits came in interviews held away from the glare and video cameras of the keynote spotlights.
That’s it for BrainShare. There’s the possibility of ‘spillover’ affecting next weekend’s reports. █
There are buckets of reports owing to BrainShare. A day may not be enough to cover them all, so it’s likely that BrainShare focus will come tomorrow. In the mean time, here are the news about OpenSUSE and SLED/SLES.
Let’s start with something relatively entertaining. A new advert was coughed up at YouTube just under a day ago.
The eighth Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (commonly known as FOSDEM) takes place during the last week-end (23&24) of February 2008 in the city of Brussels, Belgium. It’s an annual 2-day event hosting talks, tutorials, and booth for the free software/open source community. It is organized by volunteers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Access to all parts of FOSDEM is free of charge (but donations and sponsors are welcome to help fund the event).
The video recordings and slides from the openSUSE dev room at FOSDEM2008 are finally up: http://en.opensuse.org/FOSDEM2008. You’ll find some openSUSE KDE 4 slides there as well as many other interesting talks.
All in all I am very impressed with openSuse 10.3. Its an improvement 10.2 and is definitely moving forward at a noticeable pace. I am using it as my current production RoR development environment and I haven’t stopped smiling since I installed it. openSuse 10.3 is definitely worth a look at if you are looking at an alternative to your current desktop OS.
I’m still not sure about KDE 4. While I have no problem living on the bleeding edge, I tend to like my bleeding edge reasonably useful. KDE 4 is just different enough from KDE 3 that I would tend to install KDE 3 on openSUSE 11. But then again, my impressions are with a rapidly evolving desktop, and KDE 4 is advancing with incredible speed. Who knows how it might behave 30 days, or even a week from now?
I knowingly tempt the Fates by saying this, but based on what little exposure I’ve had to it so far, I think openSUSE 11 just might be a really good release.
The quest to get GNU/Linux to run well on a laptop has been a long running challenge. In this piece, Ed looks at his success with OpenSUSE on a Dell Latitude laptop.
An OpenSUSE-based JeOS (pronounced juice) is now out there. The name was first heard when Canonical introduced it.
A new project called Lime JeOS (LInux Minimal Edition Just enough Operating System) has been created at the openSUSE community.
It has been over a month since the last version and it’s still a month until KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 so it seems a good time to create a new Live CD with the openSUSE KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages.
More about KDE4 at BrainShare here. It’s just a short blurb really.
The KDE Team here at Novell have worked our KPats off all over KDE 4 to make it great and the Novell customer base deserve to know about it.
Francis Giannaros has got some more bits of new information in the newsletter.
Issue 14 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out![0]
In this week’s issue:
* Videos and Slides from FOSDEM 2008
* openSUSE to Participate in Google Summer of Code 2008
* Novell Free Hugs at CeBit 2008
* KIWI-LTSP 0.3.14 Now Out
* LimeJeOS, the openSUSE-based JeOS is Born
* Banshee 1.0Alpha1 is Available with 1-Click-Install
* New KDE Four Live and updated KDE 4.1 Snapshot Packages
* HP to preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on Notebooks, Desktops
* In Tips and Tricks: Best Practices for Editing Configuration Files
* Upcoming: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3 (today)
Here is an interesting new thing. Novell is now entering the field of custom-made/tailored appliances and applying these old principles to SUSE.
The next version of Novell’s Suse Linux operating system will make it easier for ISVs to create software appliances, the company said at the Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City.
Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced at opening day of BrainShare 2008 that the Fujitsu LifeBook U810, LifeBook T2010, LifeBook P1620 ultra-portable convertible notebooks and the LifeBook S6510 thin and light notebook have been YES Certified by Novell. The certification means the notebooks have been stringently tested for compatibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell.
The bigger news are the preinstalls of SLED 10 by Hewlett-Packard. Steven Vaughan does not hold his breath yet.
I would have liked to have been able to tell you in great detail exactly what desktops and laptops will soon be coming from Hewlett-Packard equipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.
We will probably elaborate on this tomorrow.
SLED 11
Novell has started previewing and throwing around some big hints about SLED 11, which had the press humming for a while. One reporter described it as some kind of a war on Sun and Red Hat (it makes an eye-catching headline, doesn’t it?).
The next version of Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server will focus on migration technologies and virtualisation, in order to entice users from Unix and take market share from Red Hat, according to a roadmap announced at the company’s BrainShare meeting in Salt Lake City.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 to focus on innovation in mission-critical data center technologies, UNIX migration capabilities, virtualization, interoperability, green computing and desktop Linux
For your reading pleasure, here is a ‘buffer overflow’ comprising other reports:
Novell opened the kimono on its development plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 11 at Brainshare 2008 this week but let it be known the product won’t ship until 2009 or possibly 2010. In fact, the Cambridge, Mass. won’t even provide a planned ship date until the end of this year.
The company president sits down with ComputerWorld Canada to discuss the latest update to its enterprise open source operating system, while a Canadian customer discusses his desktop deployment
To finish off, here is a new Geek My SLED video. It’s part of a series that they had in previous years (at least one year back).
Linspire
This post is not about Linspire, but then again, there is not much to be said about it anyway. Here is a quick review of Linspire.
Having been round the houses with Linux systems I’ve eventually ended up back with Linspire.
The CNR press releases keep coming, but no reports appear to be covering these announcements, which are non-events really.
Linspire, Inc. developer of CNR.com, an easy-to-use, one-click digital software delivery service for desktop Linux software, and Basilisk Games, an independent game developer, today announced the immediate availability of Eschalon: Book I for Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 & 7.10 (32 bit) desktop Linux users.
As you can imagine, there’s loads more to go through. Skip the “Do-No-Evil Saturday”-labeled posts if you have no interest in general Novell news. █
In the following article, the choice of SUSE Linux at Baldor Electric is explained. It replaces mainly Windows servers 
Novell’s dilemma is 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA