Attachmate Snaps Up Novell (and SUSE)

Attachemate announced that they would purchase Novell for US$2.2 billion. This is good news – or seems to be, at least.

Attachmate merged with WRQ in 2005. WRQ was the company behind the Reflection for X product, which is an X server for Windows. Despite all the free and commercial competition, I always thought Reflection for X was one of the best available servers for Windows – and full-featured too.

Reflection for X has continued on since the Attachmate/WRQ merger, and the product seems to be healthy and vibrant.

I would expect – and hope – that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) would continue and be invigorated with new life in the new corporation. We’ll see how this goes.

GNOME and Mono are also part of the transition, as I think I’ve said before. Being open source, they will likely continue if the original projects are hamstrung or crippled or shut down; however, my experiences with Attachmate suggest that there is a decent chance things will go well for the new SUSE and the new Novell.

Let’s hope so.

Update: GrokLaw has a fantastic article detailing all the legal maneuvers as well as a list of articles from elsewhere on the web. Turns out there is also two different shareholder lawsuits in progress: one from Kendall Law Group, and one from Brodsky & Smith. It also happens that the previously rejected Novell buyer, Elliot Management, will now be a shareholder in Attachmate as part of the deal.

This is interesting…

Life Without Mono: Removing Mono from Ubuntu

I removed Ubuntu from my system yesterday; I’ve already got problems with memory and decided I didn’t want it cluttering up my already sparse memory (1Gb!). One gigabyte isn’t enough? Don’t get me started…

Anyway, I removed it, and it was interesting to see what went with it:

• sysinfo
• tangerine
• tomboy
• f-spot
• beagle
• banshee
• gnome-do

These are good apps, but I don’t need another runtime environment cluttering up my sparse (sparse??) memory. There are a lot of other applications: the Mono folks have compiled a list, and the folks campaigning against Novell (and Mono) have a list also.

Most of these I never use (except F-Spot and Gnome Do) but I won’t miss them. Ubuntu has officially replaced F-Spot with Shotwell, and Gnome Do is not quite as good as the original Quicksilver (I’ve a Mac Mini with Quicksilver installed).

I’m already using some massive memory-abusing apps. For example, consider Google Chrome with a gazillion tabs, or NetBeans, or Gnome itself. I can’t replace NetBeans (unless I want to use the massive Eclipse instead…) but sometimes I use Midori instead of Google Chrome, or WindowMaker instead of Gnome (all very nice and highly recommended!). It also appears that the Google Chrome extension Too Many Tabs will free up memory when you “suspend” a tab; fantastic!

Try some of these lightweight items and see if you won’t have a snappier system!