* Where is the embedded SuSE Linux initiative?
One of the stories buzzing around at last spring’s BrainShare was about Novell possibly returning to the embedded operating system arena with a stripped-down, device-enabling version of SuSE Linux.
According to then honcho Chris Stone (who has, of course, now left the building), Novell was examining three possible ways to provide embedded Linux – develop its own technology, sign a partnership with another embedded Linux company, or buy a company outright. These remarks, by the way, came just a couple of weeks after Red Hat – Novell’s biggest competitor in the Linux market – signed a partnership with embedded computing power Wind River Systems. Stone’s speculation may have been the effect brought about by the Red Hat announcement.
When a reader recently asked me what the progress was on embedded Linux at Novell, I turned to Novell PR extraordinaire Bruce Lowry who says:
“Today we have three Linux product lines, SuSE Linux Enteprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop powered by SuSE Linux, and SuSE Linux Professional. Those cover a wide variety of hardware architectures from the smallest laptop to the largest server and mainframe.
“With these offerings, we already cover parts of the embedded market, particularly the appliance market that is based on these hardware architectures. This would include cashier systems, network or telecommunication switches, network-attached storage and storage-area networks, home multimedia systems, and many other areas where SuSE Linux supported architectures are used. Our minimum footprint as an operating system is smaller then 50M-bytes.
“We have no near term plans to extend this portfolio to embedded devices (particularly small devices like watches, etc.) outside of the hardware architectures we are supporting today, but we are always investigating new market opportunities.”
So it appears that the intiative to develop a stripped-down, device-enabling version of SuSE is dead for now. Probably for the best as Novell has a poor track record with embedded systems. Some of you may remember that there was, some years ago, an embedded version of NetWare – Novell Embedded Systems Technology (NEST). This was announced with great fanfare in 1995 and was supposed to lead to a major push for “NetWare-ready” devices. In many ways it was a response to Microsoft’s “plug-and-play” initiative and NEST suffered the fate of most of Novell’s anti-Microsoft initiatives of the 1990s – it was gone within two years.
There are other embedded Linux distributions available – the previously mentioned Wind River is perhaps the best known – if you really want one. Novell is going to concentrate on the server with Open Enterprise Server, and the desktop with Novell Linux Desktop (which some wags have already dubbed “Little SuSE Desktop”) for now. That’s probably a wise decision.
