SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas

We have quite an international group of readers, judging not only from the emails I get but from the stats, and a good-sized group in England.

If you’re in the Maidstone area, you might want to drop by and attend the Kent Linux User Group meetings, they’re held at the Maplesden Noakes School.

Much thanks to Colin McCarthy for his spreading the word on Twitter, if you have any questions about the group or meetings, make sure to visit the site, get signed up for the mailing list and get the address for the meetings.

Have a Lot of Fun!

RossB

I was just sitting down to write all about this, when I found David’s article explaining the new Extended Support Policy, so here that is instead, nice work David!

From the article:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or shortly SLES is a Linux distribution widely deployed by many enterprise environments. The first version SLES 8 was released in April 2001. The successor SLES 9 was released three years later in 2004. And the latest available revision SLES 10 was released in the middle of 2006. The prepared SLES 11 is planned for the current year 2008.

Let’s suppose we were using SLES since its starting point. We began to install SLES 8 on our servers. Then we upgraded some to SLES 9. And after all, we preinstalled a few new servers with SLES 10. So we began in 2001 and ended in 2008! Now, have you ever thought about your server lifetime? Or have you ever realised that your older installations would have to be migrated to the most recent release of SLES due to its maintenance and support cutoff?

Oh, and here is the official support policy and lifecycle pages, just in case you need the actual explanations and policies.

Enjoy,

RossB

View the Intel engineered MIDs here
This i certainly can see taking space away from the iPhone, infact i hope it does.

One thing that chaps me though is that its Ubuntu based, Ahhhh!!
See the community link which seems to be sponsored by Intel at http://www.moblin.org/

openSUSE community, where is our embrace in this space?

From the article:

Linux on mainframe: Backing into the biggest benefits Baldor’s key motivation for change was to reduce complexity and boost availability. But the switch came with another big bonus: saving money. Ultimately, the conversion is expected to slash IT costs from 1.8 % to 1 % of company revenue, Shackelford said. Typically, manufacturers allocate 2.5% of revenue to IT, but SAP systems drive the average higher, he said. In addition, the switchover has chopped energy costs, cutting electricity consumption by 80% and helping IT become greener, he said.

Read the complete article.

How many of you use RSS to it’s fullest? I don’t mean like Robert Scoble does, similar to storming a castle, but to keep up to date with all the stuff that you are involved in?  I’ve tried all kinds of RSS reader applications, but none has beaten the Google Reader yet, although on my Blackberry, Viigo comes close.

The Google Reader blog did a quick analysis of the most popular keyboard shortcuts that people use in Reader, which is interesting in itself, but also really creepy when you realize that the Big G can get down and dirty with every keystroke you type in their interfaces… I’ll pause while some of you delete certain emails and chat messages before the Suede Denim Secret Police (or Miss Manners) put out a hit on you.

Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, here is a comprehensive listing of the ones for Reader, which all kidding aside enabled me to stop reading 300 websites a week and now parse 1000′s of blog entries a day, all from my laptops, Blackberry and iPod Touch.

What are your favorite feeds? You can grab my subscriptions export file, and import it into Google Reader, it’s a great way to start your own collection, (mine is heavy on Open Source, Linux, Virtualization and Mac OS X stuff), I get new ones emailed to from people all the time.

Enjoy,

RossB

The guys over at Linuxhaxor have put up a great list of free e-books about Linux and Free Software, there are some real gems! Take a look and make sure to look over the rest of the site too, some good stuff.

Originally I found a Digg article about 10 Sites Offering Free Linux Courses Online, but it was dead, so here’s a backup link to that one, more good stuff.

Enjoy,

RossB

Link Farm is a new feature for our blog, it’s come about because sometimes a set of links or stories just don’t deserve their own post, they’re not that earthshaking, but they’re neat or informative and I want to get them out to the troops.  Therefore, the Link Farm is born.

Just like the recently available ASUS EEE PC, with it’s tiny Linux-based goodness (7″ screen, very light, good battery life, Linux OS with OO.o etc.) Everex has announced the Cloudbook, same format and general style, but a little stouter, (30GB HD, 1.2 GHz CPU, in other words, a real honest-to-goodness laptop writ small) to ship in early next year.  And don’t forget to order your OLPC from the Give 1 Get 1 program over at laptop.org, you get one, a child in a developing country gets one, and you get a tax deduction.  Looks like the ultra-portable market is about to get really hot, and I’m very excited to see what else will be coming out.

Someone at TechTarget wrote an interesting article about Mono, why it’s a little under-appreciated but shouldn’t be, while someone else put openSUSE 10.3 on his friend’s PC with good results, and on the collaboration front is an article about Knowledge Tree, an open source knowledge-management product that handles Open Document formats really well in addition to it’s other workgroup-centric features.

That’s it for the inaugural issue of the Link Farm,

Enjoy,

RossB