Monday, November 29, 2004

OpenOffice conference in San Diego Got the Call for Papers this morning for the first North American OpenOffice.org conference next February. It is being held in conjunction with the Desktop Linux Summit hosted annually by Linspire (formerly Lindows) at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in San Diego. With some good fortune, maybe I'll get there (if the book is under control). 3:25:31 PM    comment []

New Novell-ized SUSE Linux site For the last few weeks, visitors to www.suse.com  were notified that the site was being moved to the Novell servers. Late last week, that work completed and Novell unveiled the new  Novell: SUSE Linux site. Among other things, the home page confirms and clarifies Novell's product plan. Various recent interviews with Novell and SUSE people have indicated that SUSE Linux Professional is now the only "Enthusiasts" version, while the Enterprise get the SUSE Enterprise Server and the newly-released Novell Linux Desktop, along with the Novell Open Enterprise Server. This means that the Personal edition is defunct, but people are still able to freely download and install the Pro version (although you may need a broadband connection to actually do that). All the Support sites have new Novell.com addresses, except for the SUSE Support Portal, where the SUSE Support database remains, at least for now.  They've also set up support forum newsgroups on the Novell server for all the desktop products, accessible via newsreader (KNode, Evolution, Thunderbird, etc.) and with a web interface. The forums have volunteer SysOps and are monitored (in some fashion) by Novell. If a post does not get a response within 4 days, a bot generates a "did you get your problem solved?" posting like this. That's pretty cool. Adding these options to the already thriving SUSE mailing lists should help all the new people Novell is driving to desktop Linux. Some other pages are still on the suse.com server, but have been Novell-ized in look-and-feel. All in all, a nice job. 1:41:14 PM    comment []