Practical Technology

Novell’s history has been full of ups and downs. Once, with NetWare, it was the networking operating system powerhouse. Then they tried to be a consulting company. More recently, Novell has been both a Linux company and a friend to Microsoft. VMware has long been the go-to business virtualization company. But now everyone is in [...]

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Hardware companies don’t tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don’t have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand [...]

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Want to buy your very own Linux company? Two important ones, Mandriva and Novell are looking for buyers. There’s a world of difference though between the two. Mandriva, which at one time was a major Linux distributor, is in serious financial hot-water. Novell, which has been targeted by two hostile takeovers attempts in the last [...]

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There’s nothing like starting a technical conference, like Novell’s BrainShare, off with a bang. Or, in this case telling Elliot Associates’ unwelcome offer of not quite $2-billion for the company that Novell has no interest in selling out, not for that little anyway. I think this was a smart move by Novell’s management. I think [...]

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Elliot Associates L.P., a hedge fund, which claims to already own 8.5% of Novell’s stock made an unsolicited bid to buy the Linux company lock, stock, and code for $1.8 billion on March 2nd. This move may be good for Novell stock owners, but I fear it may be death for Novell’s commercial SUSE Linux [...]

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