By Brian Proffitt,
Managing Editor
SUSE LINUX has unveiled what the company calls “an irreverent
new advertising campaign,” as well as a new corporate logo and
design for their Web site.
The changes come in anticipation of the company’s
soon-to-be-released SUSE LINUX 9.0.
According to a press statement issued this morning, SUSE felt it
needed a corporate identity to broaden it’s appeal to a business
audience. Its new slogan, “Simply Change,” is “on one hand a
challenge to switch from monopolistic software to the flexibility
of SUSE and on the other signifies how simple this shift can be,”
the statement said.
The new all-caps look of the company name is a delibrate move as
well. Joseph Eckert, VP of Corporate Communications, was asked if
the upper casing was meant to make the name more English-friendly
to help penetrate the North American and Australian markets. Eckert
indicated that this was not the reason for the change. “As part of
the overall effort to update our look, it was felt that upper
casing all of SUSE LINUX brought more attention to the name,”
Eckert said.
“SUSE was looking to more effectively reach our business
audience–capitalizing on our strengths as the pioneer in
commercial Linux as well as our reputation as the Linux engineering
experts,” said Dr. Uwe Schmid, vice president, Marketing and
Business Development, SUSE LINUX. “At the same time, we wanted to
maintain the irreverence, creativity, and innovation inherent in
the open source movement.”
J. Walter Thompson worked with SUSE to bring new dynamics to the
SUSE logo, consistency to its corporate design and to develop the
new advertising campaign, which will have testimonials depicting
people “sticking out their tongues in a gesture that says goodbye
to expensive proprietary systems that sometimes lock users into an
unwelcome dependency.”
The changes have been added to the company’s Web site, though
some evidence of the old SuSE brand still remains.
The announcement of the name change was accompanied by the
formal announcement of October 24 as the release date for SUSE
LINUX 9.0.
SUSE LINUX 9.0 is designed to enable easier Windows migration by
supporting NTFS file systems, according to the announcement. The
company also indicated that the new offering will give experienced
users a sneak peek at the enhanced capabilities of the 2.6 Linux
kernel–with many of those capabilities back-ported into the 2.4
default kernel as well.
Some of the new features include support for 32-bit and 64-bit
platforms (specifically the AMD Athlon 64 processor), as well as
WinModem support, and advanced auto-detection of DSL
connections.
Software included with SUSE LINUX 9.0 will be KDE 3.1.4 and
OpenOffice.org 1.1, as well as the KDE instant messenger Kopete,
which now supports all common services such as AOL, MSN, IRC, ICQ,
and Yahoo Messenger.
The improved graphical user interface of k3b, the Linux-based
burning application, will enable DVD creation as well as CD
burning. Several audio packages will also be included in the new
consumer offering.
SUSE’s system assistant YaST will include a new module which,
along with Samba 2.2.8a, enables inexperienced Linux users to
network Linux and Windows systems. DNS, DHCP, and web servers for
the home network can be configured by means of graphical dialogs.
The new XNTP module allows the host to be synchronized with an
atomic clock time server. Apart from the widespread Internet
protocol IPv4, the next generation IPv6 is also supported.
SUSE LINUX 9.0 now includes User Mode Linux (UML). This systems
enables users to host one or more complete Linux instances
simultaneously. Experienced users can perform tasks like kernel
debugging, virtual hosting, and security environments in SUSE LINUX
without endangering their running system.
SUSE LINUX 9.0 will be available at the SUSE online shop and
software retailers from October 24. The recommended retail price
for SUSE LINUX 9.0 Personal (three CDs, User Guide, 60 days of
installation support) is $39.95. The price for SUSE LINUX 9.0
Professional (five CDs, one double DVD, User Guide and
Administration Guide, 90 days of installation support) is $79.95.
SUSE LINUX 9.0 Professional for AMD64 is $119.95.
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