An alliance is forming between virtualization providers Novell and VMware with a strategy for teamwork. At the same time Novell is providing a glimpse of its upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 11.

Last week Novell announced a layoff of almost 100 employees "in response to the global economic downturn," without any further details. New information now brings into question the software house's commitment to openSUSE.

Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.

Linux.conf.au came to a close Friday after dozens of excellent talks, great social events, and the unexpected shaving of Bdale Garbee for the Tasmanian Devil.

The remote package update manager program apt-dater is now available in version 0.7. It performs software updates on a mass of remote hosts.

Developer Stefan Dirsch is responsible for maintaining the openSUSE build scripts of the fglrx driver. In a message on the openSUSE developer mailing list, he appeals for a successor to take over the maintenance.