OpenSuse aims to gain ground for Linux on tablets, notebooks

For the time being, Apple dominates the mobile platform market, though Google, Microsoft, and HP are hungrily eyeing that pie. But there’s also a dark horse contended in the field — or perhaps more accurately, a flock of dark penguins. A newly released version of OpenSuse draws upon various flavors of Linux to bring further support to tablets and netbooks — and to a far lesser degree, smartphones.

At the same time, the new 11.3 release comes packed with open source alternatives to virtualization offerings from EMC VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix, as well as options galore for developers. In all, the free package highlights one of Linux’s greatest attributes: It can draw on a broad array of freely available technologies — from desktop platforms such as Gnome and KDE to virtualization technologies including Xen and KVM — to give users plenty of choices.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Rumor has it that HP is delaying its Android tablet in favor of WebOS. | InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman says why Windows 7 slates won’t happen and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 will fail big time. | Stay ahead of advances in mobile technology with InfoWorld’s Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

OpenSuse’s strongest mobile-platform play appears to be in netbooks. Users have two flavors of netbook desktop environments from which to choose: the KDE project‘s Plasma Netbook Workspace or an OpenSuse-tailored version of the MeeGo project, headed up by Intel and Nokia. Both are designed to deliver a visually rich netbook UI, as well as support for social media networks.

On top of that, OpenSuse includes the SpiderOak cloud-based storage client/service, with further strengthens the OS’s potential for netbooks and tablets, considering such devices aren’t necessarily up to the task of storing users’ increasingly growing collections of files and apps.

On the tablet side, OpenSuse has already appeared on offerings from lesser-known vendor TabletKiosk. The platform has evolved with even broader support for tablet in this iteration: The KDE SC 4.4.4 component of OpenSuse includes a keyboard widget that offers a virtual keyboard for touchscreen users. According to OpenSuse, this release supports touchscreen technologies such as HP TouchSmart. Notably, Nokia and Intel are reportedly grooming the aforementioned MeeGo platform for the tablet as well.

As for smartphones, well, OpenSuse doesn’t seem to be headed in that direction. The latest version does, however, provide support for managing smartphones running iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Moreover, OpenSuse includes Gnome 2.30.1, which offers access to iPhone and iPod Touch files from Nautilus, the graphical file manager for Gnome.

Just as OpenSuse draws on an array of open source technologies to strengthen its position on the desktop and mobile devices, it does the same on the server side. In terms of virtualization, for example, it includes Xen 4.0, an enhanced version of KVM 0.12.3, and the newest version of VirtualBox-ose, which includes improvements such as live migration, branched snapshots, and memory ballooning.

For admins, this version includes the newest version of MariaDB, a backward-compatible, drop-in replacement alternative to MySQL Database Server. It also includes the latest MySQL Cluster package, released last April, which includes the MySQL Cluster relational database and the MySQL Cluster Connector for Java to accelerate development cycles. There’s also Conntrack, which enables filtering of network packets for iptables.

Finally, developers can draw on a plethora of tools, including GCC, GDB, and Mono, as well as IDEs such as Netbeans and Qt-Creator.

OpenSuse 11.3 is available for free download.

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