With SUSE Linux 11, Novell draws even closer to Microsoft

The latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell Inc.'s commercial distribution of the open-source operating system, bears more fruit from Novell's controversial two-and-a-half-year-old interoperability alliance with Microsoft Corp.

One version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, what Novell likes to call SLE 11, will allow companies to run applications built with Microsoft's .Net platform to work on Linux without recompiling them. That version, called Mono Extension, even runs on IBM's System z, enabling IBM'S mainframe computers to run .Net apps.

The desktop version of SLE 11 includes Moonlight, a Firefox browser extension for Linux, and Unix operating systems that enables users to view rich media built for Microsoft's Silverlight platform. The two companies have been talking about Moonlight for several years, though the first mature release, Moonlight 1.0, was made available only in January.

SLE 11 desktop can also play Windows multimedia-formatted files and bundles the Novell version of OpenOffice.org, which supports the latest Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML document formats. SLE 11 also includes a number of back-end improvements that make it more manageable both as a physical and virtual operating system by Windows system administrators.

"We want SUSE to be the best-managed Linux under Microsoft System Center," said Justin Steinman, vice president of solution and product marketing.

When rival Red Hat Inc. signed an interoperability agreement with Microsoft in February, some took that as a sign that Red Hat was displacing Novell as its most-favored open-source vendor.

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