Novell said that it has received a warm welcome for Suse Linux Enterprise 10, which launched on July 18. To date, over 165,000 users from around the globe have downloaded components of the Suse Linux Enterprise 10 suite, which includes the Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop products.

Approximately 286,000 unique visitors have been to the Novell Customer Center website to register and try out Novell's new tools for managing subscription and software updates, the company said. Meanwhile, the www.novell.com/linux homepage has experienced over 312,000 hits in the past 10 days, with daily software downloads from Novell.com increasing by an average of 800 per cent.

Suse Linux Enterprise 10 is the world's first major Linux distribution to support the Xen open source virtualisation technology.

Chief executive Ron Hovsepian described the product in an email to customers as a "major milestone" in the evolution of Linux, and the most important in Novell's history.

Novell has also changed its pricing structure for the application. Support subscriptions for the server software start at $349 per server including an unlimited number of virtual server images. Desktop Linux support is available at $50 per device per year.