WillAffleckUW writes "Fujitsu, which already offers Red Hat Linux on its servers, is announcing plans to offer SUSE Linux as well, according to an Infoworld article. Sadly, it's only for servers and services for Intel, not for AMD. Still, good news, in that you can go Red or Blue and still be Linux true!"

chill writes "ZD Net UK is reporting that Sun is pulling back from their JDS desktop Linux initiative. The big question is what happened to those half-million to million-plus units that were supposed to ship in China in 2004? One hint may be that in April, Novell announced a deal with CSSC to 'cooperate to provide technology, services and marketing to optimise and promote Linux to the Chinese market.' Sun's JDS was based on SUSE Linux, now owned by Novell."

twener writes "Nine weeks after the official release of SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional Novell has made available the FTP edition for everyone as a 4.2GB DVD ISO image (both i586 and x86_64) or 5 CD images (stripped-down, i586 only) on their mirrors. Additionally, all until-now missing RPMs have been uploaded, so you can also do a network installation using the 57MB netinstall ISO." Update: 06/27 19:37 GMT by T : Yes, that's RPMs, not RMPs. Sorry!

Martin writes "TipMonkies has a nice overview of various Linux distros for those of you with little time to research each distro yourself. The article also discusses some of the advantages/disadvantages of each distro." From the article: "SUSE- The 'U' is hard and the 'E' is soft. Almost like the word sue with an S on the end. SUSE is the other big commercial distro. It was when it was still it's own company in Germany, and now even bigger since being purchased by Novell."

An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has signed a major deal with Novell to begin rolling out their enterprise server and desktop products on government systems. The contract provides unlimited use of Novell products to about 70,000 at HHS, including about 30,000 NIH users. Under the arrangement Novell is providing to HHS 'unlimited access, upgrade protection and technical support' for products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Open Enterprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop, patch management, and a range of identity-based services for management, integration and security."

Roblimo writes "Firefox and Opera are the two most popular cross-platform Web browsers. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Kris Shaffer tested them side-by-side on SUSE Linux 9.1, Mac OS X Panther, and Windows 2000, and decided that your choice may depend more on what you *do* with your browser than anything else, unless (as is the case for many of us) Opera is off the table from the start because it's not open source."

seachnasaigh asks: "I love desktop Linux, but the one stumbling block I have with deploying it in some capacity for my userbase is USB Palm Pilots. Once upon a time I managed to get GPilot working with a serial PalmVx, but despite repeated attempts (SuSE 9.2 pro, Fedora Core 3 and several Palm devices) I can't get a synch to happen with the USB version, either through the native Gnome Pilot app or through Evolution (and yes, Kpilot too!). Our standard deployment is a Palm Tungsten T series; most of our desktops are recent Dells. It's embarrassing to have to boot into Windows to synch the Palms. Does anyone have some suggestions out there?"

SilentBob4 writes "Mad Penguin has published a comprehensive review of the latest Libranet release. New in this release are an improved installer and revamped/modernized AdminMenu that rivals Mandriva's MCC and SUSE's YaST. Aside from major desktop versions lagging behing a version or two, this release easily puts Libranet in the same league as Ubuntu, and the review has sparked some "Ubuntu vs. Libranet" arguements so far, one on the Libranet forum itself. Check it out for yourself. The review is complete with many screenshots as well as Flash movies of the AdminMenu & installer in action."

InnerPhalanx writes "Today, SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional was released. After submitting the 9.2 update, I decided I should submit another article. The suggested retail price is $99.95 US. An update version is available for $59.95 US, in case you have an earlier version of SuSE Pro. More information, especially news about the product itself, is available here. As usual, there's a Live DVD release of SuSE 9.3 Pro as well as the 9.2 Pro Evaluation Version DVD ISO."

linuxbeta writes "With the recent SUSE LINUX 9.3 Live DVD ISO released, we get a sneak peek. (screenshots) of this much anticipated OS update. Cool updates in 9.3 includes Firefox 1.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Gimp 2.2, Beagle. Xen, VoIP client, and more." And while Debian's Sarge isn't here yet (give Branden Robinson a chance to find his plush new office!), wrochal points out that the fifth update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 ("Woody" ) has arrived. 3.0 (r5) "mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems." Also, four packages were removed, three for license violations.

llywelynelysium writes "Mad Penguin has an excellent review of the upcoming SuSE 9.3 Professional release. The review is mostly positive, commenting on SUSE's improved speed, improved Gnome suppport, inclusion of Xen, and interestingly, the use of Firefox as the default browser. On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support. SUSE scores three stars in the end."

Zontar The Mindless writes "MySQL Community Edition 5.0.3-beta has been released. This version has support for Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views and many other features, including a number of security enhancements and stability fixes. See the changelog for a complete listing of new features and bugfixes. MySQL 5.0.3-beta is now available in source and binary form for Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Windows, and other platforms from dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and mirror sites. RPMs for Red Hat/Fedora and SUSE Linux are also now available for the first time in the 5.0 series. This is the first Beta release in the 5.0 series, in preparation for a MySQL 5.0 production release later this year."

Agh writes "German company SerNet (founded amongst others by Samba-Team member Volker Lendecke) has a portal for precompiled packages for Suse's and RedHat's Enterprise Distributions (x86 32 and 64bit, s390, and zSeries) as well as Debian sarge and woody: http://www.enterprisesamba.com/ (Heise story here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57389) Offered is always the newest stable version of Samba (currently 3.0.11)."

daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."

SpamMonkey asks: "At work I am trying to implement a central monitoring and alerting service. We have in excess of 250 Windows servers, approx 15 AIX servers and another 30 Linux servers (mainly SLES/Suse). My investigation into systems that will allow us to monitor critical areas on each of these systems has so far led me to a clustered Linux server running Nagios with passive and active checks. What I'm curious about though is how Slashdot readers are carrying out their own jobs and how they can comfortably sit back, without having to repeatedly check that various systems are still operational and how to cut down their own response times when something goes wrong."

Mark Stone writes with a thoughtful look back at the year 2004 in open source, pointing out both major gains and inevitable uncertainties. He writes "2004 stands out as a year in which open source consolidated its position as a valuable and accepted approach to business and technology policy. A less obvious but significant trend underlies all of this: even as open source business models join the mainstream, the open source development model remains a mysterious process on which large technology companies struggle to capitalize. Key issues and developments have played out in four areas: legal, policy, business, and technology." Read on for the rest.

twener writes "The KDE project has announced the first release candidate of KDE 3.4 which brings many new features targeted for release at 16th March. Sources (requirements list, build script), an i486 GNU/Linux Live-CD (375MB) and SUSE 9.2 binary packages are available currently. OSdir.com and tuxmachines.org have screenshots of this release. Source Code and a Live CD are available."

byronmiller desires to get to the root of the following issue: "I have chosen to run for office to represent the people of the 16th district of Pennsylvania. I am looking for software and solutions to help manage a grass roots and budget friendly campaign. What applications are available for everything from district management/contact management solutions to online fund raising and campaign management solutions? We are already rolling out staff PC's running Suse 9.2, OpenOffice.org and of course Firefox. Are there any collaboration suites and mail systems that we can use for calendaring, notes, email and conferencing? Anyone build a campaign using open source technology or is Politics still only putting money where your mouth is? Technology is a major initiative of my campaign and i'm very interested in what political software and civic solutions are available - especially experience and reviews of such."

rednaxel writes "This morning, both companies issued press releases about the merge. French Mandrakesoft is acquiring all shares of brazilian Conectiva for a total amount of 1.79 million EUR (2.3 million USD) in stock." CNet has coverage of the merger as well. From the article: "This won't elevate us to the status of Red Hat or Novell/SuSE yet, of course, but this is a significant growth for us..."

An anonymous reader writes "Following in the wake of its previous certifications, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has achieved EAL4 certification on 'an IBM eServer.' This puts SLES9 in the same league as Windows 2000 for sales in the government sector and is the first Linux distro to achieve an EAL4 certification."