Hello everyone,
Welcome to our latest update newsletter. Since our last newsletter, Linux World 2007 in San Francisco took place, and that can only mean one thing… TONS of NEWS! In this issue: Uh-oh SCO, the significance of “31,880″, virtualization-a-plenty, Happy Birthday to openSUSE, Casio+Xen, some nice HOWTO’s, upcoming training opportunities, LAST CALL for our 1st Newsletter CONTEST, and a ton of other goodies await you in this edition of the newsletter.
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If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Regards,
–Novell’s East Open Platform Solutions Team
Linux Specialists
http://opseast.wordpress.com
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Articles
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Uh-Oh SCO. You Lose.
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It’s official, SCO doesn’t own the copyrights to UnixWare and UNIX, Novell does. Judge Dale Kimball states, “[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.”
There’s still more work to be done, but this is a major development in the open source world. Huge thanks are owed to Novell’s legal team!!
Read the ruling yourself or see what Groklaw had to say:
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Top 5 Reasons to Move from RHEL to SLE
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RossB checks in with another attention grabber. Want the details? You’ll have to visit the blog via the link below.
In another of my many “people are always asking me ______” moments, I thought I’d jot down the top reasons why we find customers wanting to switch from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a SUSE Linux Enterprise environment. These points are gathered from countless discussions, presentations, questions and even osmosis. I hope that these points are useful for our customers who are SLES-curious, our partners who are representing SLE to customers and I welcome any feedback or suggestions you might have.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5321/0/
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Add 31,880 more to the Scoreboard for SUSE Linux Enterprise!
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Another major win for SUSE Linux Enterprise – this time from India! “The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) in India is rolling out SUSE Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers in Tamil Nadu’s schools, after ELCOT itself has migrated its entire IT infrastructure from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell.”
They are so excited about the benefits they’ve seen from their adoption of open source, they even created their own success story video and are sharing it on YouTube.
Check out the video and press release…
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Physical or Virtual Servers? Survey says…
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When does it make sense to use a Virtual Server as opposed to a Physical Server? That’s a question that a lot of people are currently discussing amongst themselves and with us on the technology side. Ross gives us a good review of a few data points he recently uncovered.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5323/0/
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How and Why to Secure Your Virtual Servers
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We know that over 50% of IT organizations currently use or are doing pilot programs using Virtualization, thanks to Forrester Research’s recent surveys, what we should know know more about is both the security benefits of virtualization and the best practices of how to secure those virtual servers.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5324/0/
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Virtual Servers: Tools for Capacity Planning
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Our good friends over at TechTarget have posted an interesting article about capacity planning for virtualization, including a discussion of the various major products and some specialty products that allow you to do “what-if” scenarios for capacity planning.
Of course we at Novell have our own solution for this, the Zenworks DCA Orchestrator, which does so much more than just cap-planning, it’s a complete datacenter management overlay that has just been released into general availability.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5325/0/
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How to Expand Linux – Novell CEO’s Linux World Expo Keynote
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TechTarget’s Jack Loftus gives an impassioned report of Ron Hovsepian’s Linux World Expo keynote and the slightly-less-than-controversy surrounding the press reaction to it. A good read, and some great points.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5326/0/
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Novell at Linux World 2007 – VIDEOS too!
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A collection of “Novell at Linux World” links including a link to a video of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s entire keynote, Novell CMO John Dragoon’s video blogs, and even some fun videos…
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5327/0/
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How Many ___’s Does SLES Support?
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There is a series of questions I answer over and over again, particularly when current or potential customers are just getting into the planning or investigative stages of using our SUSE Linux Enterprise line of products.
There are a set of authoritative tables that we all refer to in these instances, where for example someone who wants to run a system that has 2 CPU Sockets, 2 Cores in each socket and 16GB or RAM would typically ask me if that’s supported in the SLES product, and what the limits are.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5328/0/
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Law Firm Goes SUSE Linux: Deposition at 11
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A Vancouver B.C. law firm has overruled Microsoft Windows’ objection to being replaced with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10. The firm’s IT manager, Richard Giroux says that level of downtime he’s seen in other firms is, “Simply unacceptable.”
After testing a number of competitive desktop Linux distributions, Giroux chose SLED 10, citing it’s speed and included applications as a deciding factor in SUSE’s favor.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5329/0/
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ZENworks Orchestrator now available for your Virtualization pleasure…
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Novell announced the availability of ZENworks Orchestrator 1.1 in this press release at Linux World. ZENworks Orchestrator is an exciting new data center management solution that can help manage both physical and virtual resources.
The virtual machine management capabilities offer “full lifecycle management” for SUSE Linux Enterprise running Xen virtualization. Orchestrator is by design, heterogeneous, so it can manage not only Xen virtualization environments, but also VMware virtualization, and eventually Microsoft virtualization. Think of it as an added layer of intelligence to help you manage the growing number of virtual servers you have running… and if you already have something like VMware Virtual Center already, it will help add additional intelligence and automation to your VMware environment.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5330/0/
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Manage and Protect Your Open Source Reputation
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One’s reputation in the community is a valuable item. When everything you code or produce is freely available for the world to see and especially your peers to review and (ahem, constructively) criticize, the stakes are pretty high.
An engine (not just) for the management of your reputation as a developer is Ohloh.net. As a collector and processor of what’s being written, committed and credit being given for in the Open Source development world, what they do is catalogue code, do statistics on and report on the individual contributors to Open Source Projects. This is a fascinating use of technology to attempt to give credit where credit is due for Open Source coding.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5331/0/
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Can you use SLED for an HPC node?
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To my knowledge, there is no EULA limitation that says you can not use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) for an High Performance Computing (HPC) compute node. However, depending on the specific application and libraries required, SLED may not satisfy your needs in a supported way. For more follow the link…
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5332/0/
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WebSphere Application Server CE to be included in SLES
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At the recent Linux World conference in SF, it was announced by IBM and Novell that WAS CE will be included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). WAS CE is the WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and v2.0 will have standards-based Java EE 5 certification. As part of this bundling, Novell will provide support for this application server for customers.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5333/0/
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Run Windows Apps on Linux with Codeweavers
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As you know, there are plenty of options for using Windows-only apps on Linux (you knew that, right?)… Well, here’s an interview with Codeweavers – one option…
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5334/0/
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Peugot to Start SLED Desktop Use
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Automaker Peugot is nearly ready to begin deploying the SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) to 20,000 of it’s 72,000 users, including salesforce and manufacturing workers. Peugot has an Active Directory and MS Office environment, which SLED and it’s Novell-supported version of OpenOffice.org will be integrated into.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5335/0/
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Happy Birthday, openSUSE!!
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openSUSE is celebrating its 2 year birthday — yea!! (insert singing etc. here). Here’s a related press release from Linux World. If you haven’t been to the openSUSE website lately, it’s been given a new look (love it!) and some new features as well… including the Build Service.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5336/0/
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Lenovo to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
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Lenovo announced they will be pre-loading SLED on ThinkPad notebooks.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/4977/0/
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Dell to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
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Well, at least in China… (Contact your Dell team and ask them to offer it in the US too! 
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5337/0/
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Wyse Thin Clients to Support SUSE Linux
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This is a very exciting development… While we have been working with Wyse and have done some nice work in getting SUSE Linux Enterprise to run on several thin client platforms (including those from Wyse), an announcement was made at Linux World which formally announces support for this configuration.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/4978/0/
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HOWTO: Setting Up AutoYaST
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AutoYaST is a capability built into SUSE Linux Enterprise that allows you to do scripted installation of servers or desktops. Here are a couple of my favorite overview articles on AutoYaST. Got others? Please share.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5338/0/
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HOWTO: Lock down SLED (and more SLED Management tips)
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Sander van Vugt wrote a nice article on TechTarget about how to configure and manage SLED desktops using just GNOME’s management features.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5339/0/
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Success Story Spotlight
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Casio Using Xen to Cut Costs
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14 Aug 2007— Novell today announced that global electronics giant Casio Computer (Casio) is using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell with integrated Xen virtualization software to reduce the cost of consolidating servers while improving flexibility compared with alternative, proprietary virtualization software.
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5340/0/
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Upcoming Events
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ATT Online – Shell Scripting with BASH
9/20 – online
ATT Online – Linux High Availability Storage and Clustering
9/21 – online
ATT – Migrating from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
9/25 – 9/28 @ Atlanta GA
ATT – Optimizing and Troubleshooting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
10/9 – 10/12 @ New York, NY
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Just For Fun
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The fine folks at TechTargetTV put together a just-for-fun video of all the great “Schwag” they were able to collect at the Linux World 2007 event in San Francisco. If you weren’t able to go yourself, you can at least see all the goodies you missed out on. (at the bottom of the blog entry)
http://novellevents.novell.com/t/2060208/55177502/5327/0/
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Did You Know…
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Did you know that you can use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) for NOT only an alternative to Windows desktops, but also as the OS for thin client devices (Wyse, HP, etc.)? When we say SLE is for desktop-to-data center, we mean it!
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Contest
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Most Innovative Management Method (Last Chance)
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Soooo… You’re a crack sysadmin. All your machines are running great, the boss thinks you’re a wizard, the users just got you a PS3 for Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and your latest source compile just returned a zero, could it get any better? Oh yeah. Life isn’t complete without impressing all the readers of our newsletter and blog with your prowess. Announcing the first of many contests to come, this one is for the Most Innovative Management Method. In other words, now that you have all those servers in production, how do you manage them without going nuts? Tell us what you do, how you found out about the tools, do you use scripting, GUI apps, the shell, IP over Carrier Pigeon, whatever it is and we’ll pore over the entries.
The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners (drawn by our entirely subjective method of reading them and placing them into piles) we’ll announce the winners and award the prizes, all of which are guaranteed not to cause you to have do declare additional income on your taxes, and to sport conspicuous SUSE/Novell logos.
Submissions must be postmarked, er, dated no later than September 28th and we’ll announce the winners and prizes in the following newsletter. Send all submissions to rbrunson (at) novell dot com
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Also Of Interest…
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Audio podcast on the Citrix aquisition of XenSource
Anatomy of the Linux Networking Stack
Google to Distribute Sun’s Star Office for Free
The Sky is Falling…
MS Vista Does WHAT??
Pimp Your Firefox
Virtual Desktop Instances
Protocols for Business, Not Just Networking
Red Hat Desktop Delayed
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General Novell Reference Links
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Connection Magazine
Novell Success Stories
Novell East Blog
SUSE Linux Enterprise Home
