I recently picked up a copy of SuSE 9.0 Professional. I have never used or been familiar with a SuSE product before as I've only used Mandrake, Red Hat, and a bit of Debian. After using Red Hat for a while I decided to evaluate SuSE and I am now sorry for not having tried it sooner.

Adobe has disowned the anti-Mac comments made by one one of its employees in a recent book. Adobe's PR director, Russell Brady, who joined the company afer working at Apple, strongly denied any deliberate snub to Apple or any lessening of commitment to the Mac.

With today's announcement that Sun Microsystems, Inc. and AMD have formed an alliance to deliver a broad range of AMD Opteron processor-based systems, Sun also announced it plans to offer its Java Enterprise System on the AMD Opteron processor and is significantly extending the reach of its Solaris Operating System and leadership in the 64-bit space. The alliance intends to provide increased market opportunities for ISVs, OEMs, and channel partners by offering an industrial strength, affordable platform that has been fully optimized and tuned for the 64-bit AMD Opteron processor.

Apple has forced one of its employees to halt development of a popular shareware application, sources confirmed to Think Secret. Last month, the developer stopped sales and downloads of Netflix Fanatic after Apple claimed ownership over the source code. On other Apple-related news, Fink 0.6.2 released.

CoyoteGulch just posted an analysis of GNU C and C++ optimizations, using a genetic algorithm to discover the most effective optimization flags for different algorithms.

IBM writes: "So, your boss says you're moving from Windows to Linux. He's decided he wants the stability, flexibility, and cost savings of Linux, but you have many questions in your head. Isn't Linux like Unix? Isn't Unix hard? Will you be able to do it? Where do you begin to make sense of all of this? Is there a map you can follow?"

Preaching virtues of the open-source software, CEO leads firm to profitability while challenging Microsoft.

The new PostgreSQL version, 7.4, includes a host of new features which make PostgreSQL a more powerful and scalable database for large enterprises. These include AMD Opteron optimization, improved index maintenance tools, and enhanced support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets. Combined with the recent contribution of the eRServer replication solution, these advances fulfill PostgreSQL's potential to run high-availability, large-scale data centers. Press release here.

The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers.

The next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, code-named "Longhorn," marks a significant change not only in terms of how the operating system works, but also in the way in which applications are built.

It has been years since Microsoft had any real competition for its Office productivity suite -- the software package that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Once-popular competitors like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 have been reduced to tiny niche players. This article evaluates Star Office in comparison to MS Office.

Timesofoman site has an Apple article exploring its abilities as an alternative to Windows, while the MacNightOwl site has a report about how well Panther performs on G3s.

Novell's management has changed from the early days when it flubbed its Unix System Labs and Word Perfect acquisitions, notes Meta Group analyst Earl Perkins. "The team in place now knows that there is too much at stake not to do this one correctly."

DesktopLinux.com, in coordination with the Desktop Linux Consortium, is making select presentations from Monday's conference at Boston University's Corporate Education Center available. The first presentation in the series is from IBM's Sam Docknevich, Linux and Grid Services Executive for IBM Global Services. His presentation discusses IBM's push into the Linux desktop market, an initiative from inside "Big Blue." Elsewhere, LinuxJournal has a review of some of the presentations in the conference.