Novell plans to overtake Red Hat as the world's biggest distributor of Linux.

At Novell's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City this week, executives dismissed Red Hat's claims that it was the leader in the open source market.

"Red Hat has been the market leader in North America but not in the rest of the world or Europe," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, office of the chief executive at Novell.

Stone said that the company's acquisition of SuSE Linux gave it a far stronger position in Europe, and that both SuSE and Ximian were helping it grow in North America.

"Our goal is to be number one provider of Linux worldwide," he added.

Novell chief executive Jack Messman said: "We have a better technical operating system and offer up-the-stack services, which is something Red Hat doesn't.

"We believe that the hardware providers don't want one Linux provider as they don't want another Microsoft situation, but they don't want three providers due to technical integration."

Messman also told vnunet.com that the firm planned to create a single Novell Linux desktop, combining the technologies and features of the SuSE KDE and Ximian Gnome user interfaces.

"They are two of the leading Linux desktops, but our customers are saying 'pick one', and that's what we are doing right now," he said.

But Red Hat has insisted it will remain in pole position.

Paul Salazar, Red Hat's director of marketing for EMEA, said: "I am confident that Red Hat will maintain the number one position, as we have the offering for the market today.

"In addition to the US we have a very strong market share in the UK and France - in addition to Germany, this is where the battle is going to be fought."

Novell plans to allocate 17 per cent of its revenues into growing its market presence in the Linux services market.

But Messman told vnunet.com that he did not see any future acquisitions on the scale of last year's SuSe Linux or Ximian deals. However, he added that 'niche' acquisitions were likely.

"You get a toe in hard and then you grow it organically," he said.

"Our customers are interested in more Linux applications, so that means there might be a need for some [acquisitions] that will help some existing apps run on Linux rather than Windows."