ReadWriteEnterprise

Service packs for enterprise Linux distributions are typically pretty conservative affairs that are only noteworthy for the bugs that they fix. SUSE is bucking that trend with the second service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11, by adding new features and providing customers with the 3.0 Linux kernel released last year.

SLES 11 SP2 comes with a few new tricks besides the new kernel. Customers will get a new version of Samba, for example. Most notable is the supported inclusion of the Btrfs filesystem and tools to manage snapshots. Snapper, a GUI or CLI tool to manage the snapshots, integrates with SUSE's Zypper and YaST management tools to allow roll back system updates.

It's been a long, strange trip for SUSE. What started in 1992 as a small German company (SUSE was an acronym derived from "Software und System Entwicklung," or "software and systems development") with a derivative of Slackware Linux became a mighty Linux distribution in its own right. Money problems led to a sale to Novell in 2003, which had its own share of troubles.

Finally Novell was sold to Attachmate in a deal that closed in April of this year. Attachmate then decided to spin SUSE off into its own business, and tapped Nils Brauckmann as president and general manager of the unit.

Jay Lyman, senior analyst for the 451 Group, spoke at LinuxCon North America 2011 on the changing Linux landscape. Sessions are short at LinuxCon – about 50 minutes in total, give or take. So there's not a lot of time to get deep into the nitty gritty and perform a detailed analysis or explanation of a market that's now nearly 20 years old. Lyman went through a brief discussion of the major players in the market, and touched on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for each.