Practical Technology

A friend recently asked me if I really wanted VMware, a company with a former Microsoft guy in charge, VMware, to buy Novell? His unspoken message was “Wouldn’t that be horrible for Novell’s Linux?” Bless his heart, clearly he hasn’t been paying attention to the relationship between VMware and Microsoft. VMware, a semi-independent fiefdom of [...]

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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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If you spend much time in a CIO or CTO’s office, you’ll have heard the phrase “software stack” a million times. It usually means a suite of operating system, utilities, and applications designed to deliver various services. For example, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack is what lies behind many Web sites, and the [...]

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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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Novell launched SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) 11 SP 1 today, May 19th. At first glance, this major update to both SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is quite impressive. Technically, SLE 11 SP1 is based on openSUSE 11.2, the Novell community Linux distribution, which was released in November, and the [...]

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