A little more or a lot less of Linux?

Here’s a question for you, dear reader: How much Linux coverage should we have in this newsletter? Drop me a note and let me know your thoughts.

I’m prompted to ask the question since Jack Messman and Chris Stone were evidently the darlings of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo last week. Messman gave a keynote presentation and the staid old networking company (which typically releases one press release every two months) issued reams of press release papers about Linux, Novell and NetWare.

For example, Novell announced that SuSE Linux obtained a new level of security certification (known as EAL3), for SUSE running on IBM. EAL3 is an important and internationally recognized threshold for bidding on many government contracts, and it is the highest EAL security certification for a commercial Linux distribution on the market today. Since SuSE will be the Linux platform for NetWare 7 when that’s released next year, this is something of interest to those of you connected to government contracts (either as buyers or sellers – or just admins on government networks).

Novell also re-announced exteNd 5 (see the previous newsletter) which now supports both SuSE and Red Hat Linux in addition to the previously supported NetWare, Windows and Solaris platforms. It’s the server-application development and deployment environment of choice for NetWare, but NetWare was not really mentioned in the discussions associated with its launch.

Of interest to developers for Novell platforms (including NetWare) was the company’s announcement that it is joining Eclipse, an open source tools development initiative that brings together leading industry vendors, including IBM, Borland, Red Hat and others. According to the announcement, “Novell will for the first time provide a common tooling strategy for developers who build on Novell technologies, significantly reducing complexity by providing a unified environment for building, testing and debugging solutions across the entire Novell technology portfolio.” That means NetWare as well as Linux and that’s a good thing, I’m thinking.

The company also announced a beta of GroupWise for Linux (well beyond the scope of this newsletter). Finally, came the announcement that Red Carpet Enterprise, a Linux server and desktop management solution developed by the Novell Ximian Services group, now supports the range of IBM zSeries eServers – another item which won’t see extensive coverage in this newsletter.

Still, developments for SuSE should impact NetWare 7. Developments on the open source front could impact NetWare 6.x. It could be a brave new world for NetWare stalwarts, but I do want to be sure I’m giving you the information you want. So let me know how much (or how little) Linux “stuff” to include. To quote the immortal Dr. Frazier Crane, “I’m listening.”