The VAR Guy

SUSE Linux, now owned by Attachmate, will unveil some partner and customer surprises at Novell BrainShare (Oct. 10-14, Salt Lake City), the company confirms. Meanwhile, Michael Miller, VP of global alliances and marketing, has been polishing partner and cloud services strategies for SUSE. And Miller has been busy meeting with strategic SUSE partners like Microsoft, SAP, VMware, IBM, Dell, HP and Fujitsu. So, what’s the message from Miller to SUSE Linux partners and customers? The VAR Guy got the answer.

Seeking to promote Ubuntu to resellers and distributors, Canonical is making a surprise appearance this week at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C. Here, Canonical is outlining seven potential profit opportunities for partners that back Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has mobile, desktop, server and cloud computing capabilities. Equally important, Canonical is promoting Landscape — a remote management tool — for VARs and MSPs.

In three separate announcements today, Attachmate, Novell and SUSE Linux disclosed their organization structures going forward. The news surfaces a few weeks after Attachmate completed its acquisition of Novell. Here’s the update plus perspectives from The VAR Guy.

SUSE Linux is best-known as a server operating system. But Novell is looking to challenge both Windows and Ubuntu Linux in the netbook market. The effort involves the SUSE MeeGo OS for netbooks. Here are the details.

Novell turned some heads in 2009 with SUSE Studio — a tool for building SUSE Linux application appliances. Now, Novell is back for an encore — this time with SUSE Appliance Toolkit, which is designed to help ease the development, deployment and management of software appliances. Here are the implications for solutions providers.

It has been a few months since Novell launched the SUSE Appliance program. So we checked in with Novell to see how the effort was going so far. Matt Richards, director, emerging technologies, and Steve Hale, VP and worldwide data center channel lead, offered me a few updates on Oct. 30. Here’s a recap of my conversation.

There’s a lot of buzz about Google Chrome and the impending Google Chrome OS. But something strange happened Oct. 28. Gizmodo briefly posted an article saying Chrome OS was out. But was the report true?

There’s no question that Ubuntu dominates the desktop-Linux world.  With commanding market share and a huge user community, it’s by far the most well supported and documented open-source platform in the desktop world.  On servers, however, the situation is different–and Canonical needs to address it if it wants to become a real player in the server market.

Ubuntu Linux is moooovin’ on up in the Linux server neighborhood. When Sun announced a major open source initiative targeting small and midsize businesses this week, a lot of people failed to realize that Sun would include servers certified for Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop.