08.31.07

Do-No-Evil Saturday: OpenSUSE Faster and Better, Novell’s Financial Results Lift Stock

Posted in Europe, Finance, GNU/Linux, HP, IBM, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, Opensuse, Red Hat, Servers at 8:51 pm by Roy Schestowitz

OpenSUSE

Francis Giannaros has compared the boot times of various popular GNU/Linux distributions.

Here is the run-down with bootcharts:

• openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 in 27 seconds
• Fedora 7 in 41 seconds
• PCLinuxOS 2007 in 32 seconds
• Kubuntu Tribe 4 in 31 seconds
• Mandriva 2008 Beta 1 in 29 seconds

These things are easy to customise (even tweak for the sake of a desirable benchmark), but it’s interesting nonetheless. Out-of-the-box OpenSUSE seems to have been optimised for performance at startup, which is particularly important for laptop use. These changes were all along expected. OpenSUSE has also got a new package management system, which will maybe resolve the notoriety of previous attempts at packaging in SuSE/SUSE (I’ve been in SuSE’s “RPM hell” since 2003). Here is one new complaint/suggestion and here is another possible milestone.

The openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2 release brought down another major obstacle in developing YaST: the famous YCP language is not strictly needed for the YaST development anymore. A developer can use Perl, and to lesser extent, Python or Ruby.

The latest beta of OpenSUSE is beta 2. LinuxSeekers.com took a look at it.

As far as notebooks are concerned I don’t see any reasons why openSUSE needs to continue holding back from bundling the Intel Pro Wireless firmwares into openSUSE 10.3, which are even present in Fedora 7!!!! By the way, Boot time and shutdown time of openSUSE were fast. I was thrilled: the Suspend to disk and Suspend to RAM worked flawlessly on my Dell Inspiron 600m. The dozing- off-Tux as splash for the Suspend to disk was very cute.

TuxMachines has another detailed report.

Another developmental release of the upcoming openSUSE 10.3 was released a few days ago with some improvements, some regressions, and some minor eye candy changes.

Screenshots of the second beta were put up on the Web by LinuxMonitor.net.

In OpenSUSE’s relatively new blog, Andreas Jaeger gets his well-deserved attention. He recently got promoted from OpenSUSE Project Leader.

Today we present the interview with Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform/openSUSE and also the very first person who came up with the idea to launch the project ‘People of openSUSE’.

Novell’s Linux Business

There are several noteworthy articles where Novell’s SUSE gets a mention in a positive context. Here is one about the increasing use of GNU/Linux servers at a school district.

Stewart Savage, director of IT at the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District in Fairfield, Calif., said the school system first brought Linux into its data center in 2002, primarily to cut costs. Now it uses Novell’s SUSE Linux to support its Oracle databases and myriad applications, such as a Web content filtering tool.

As we mentioned earlier this week, Novell signed a big contract with German universities.

The agreement will give 560,000 students and employees across 33 universities access to key enterprise management and Linux services from Novell, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Munich, on the other, chose to create its own derivative of Debian GNU/Linux. Mr. Jaffe could not contain some excitement when he posted an item titled “The Linux desktop has truly arrived” to his blog.

Soon after I joined Novell, I started blogging about our technology directions. My first entry back in April 2006 was entitled “The Linux Desktop has arrived: The better desktop”. I argued that with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 – due to ship that summer — that the time had come for more significant inroads for Linux into the desktop market.

Novell has reasons for optimism because its Linux revenue is up sharply (up 77% when compared to last year).

Novell Inc. said Wednesday that its net loss in the third quarter narrowed compared to the same period a year earlier amid an increase in sales.

Negative takes on these financial results were published earlier this week, but this post is intended to be pro-Novell, so let’s carry on. Novell’s target price was raised while analysts remain “neutral” on Red Hat. It’s too early to predict a demise.

Miscellany

Novell has a little “oopsie” fixed earlier this week, but it was not Linux-related.

A bug in Novell Client can be exploited to crash the software or inject and execute arbitrary code. It resembles the hole that was reported by the Zero-Day Initiative and was fixed no more than a month ago. Novel has released an update to fix the vulnerability.

An open source conference is scheduled to take place in Utah. Novell will be its foster family and parent.

Utah Open Source Conference 2007 will be held at the Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) at Novell.

Novell might be getting a bit of a “de facto” status for certain computing tasks. Here is one on energy-efficient clustering.

Implementing a three-pronged approach can help cut power and cooling costs, according to Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager for the Systems and Resource Management business unit at Novell (www.novell.com). This approach involves using the high-performance foundation of Linux (www.linux.org), virtualization to reduce primary and secondary infrastructure costs, and intelligent management (or automation) to allow managers to create a data center that dynamically reconfigures itself based on policy and adapts to changing conditions.

Here is another on performance battles between Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

In the SPECfp_2006 benchmark, which measures speed, a single core of a 4.7 GHz POWER6 processor in an IBM System p 570 server running SUSE Linux scored 22.4, the highest result in the industry. System p 570 results are 23% better than an HP Integrity rx6600 running HP-UX result of 18.1.(1)

We have not heard much about Novell’s open source directory and ecosystem (not recently anyway). Here is a little bleep on the radar.

KnowledgeTree delivers a simple, powerful commercial open source document management solution to Novell Linux customers.

That’s all until next week. Summer vacation is ending, so the week ahead might have a lot in store.

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