On the desktop side, our partners Dell and Lenovo began shipping PCs preloaded with SUSE Linux enterprise desktop or SLED.

The Dell deal was a replacement of red flag Linux in the China market, and we are excited about the reach this gives Novell in this very important market. Our Lenovo partnership is truly global with SLED preload offered on Lenovo high-volume Enterprise notebook lines as a completely alternative to Windows XP or Vista. This offering includes a one or three year subscription and level one support directly from Lenovo. Our shipments just started last month (and) the product is being well received in the market.

It's not just as simple as pre-loading Linux onto a hard drive, either. It's pre-loading it into PCs or notebooks that provide value. Fahmida Y. Rashid examined the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 this week, pre-loaded with SLED 10. It didn't just "work," but it worked well and at a competitive price point. And it's hitting the market at a time when Microsoft is struggling just to place Windows Vista on par with Windows XP. (See Samara Lynn's review of Vista SP1 from earlier this week.)

Other publicity Microsoft received this week surrounding Vista surely didn't help.

Just getting beachhead, though, isn't the entire story. Novell and other Linux distributors like Canonical (with Ubuntu), Red Hat and the Fedora group, and all the rest, could just as easily find themselves kicked back into the ocean unless their gains continue. For now, though, evidence of Linux' momentum on the desktop is growing.