It's amazing what rats can do. Chew your carpets, consume cheese, and, while they're at it, eat your cables. At least the last one befell Cable & Wireless last week, a source tells us.

Apparently, rats chewed through underground data cables in More London, the stunning new office park overlooked by Ken Livingston's City Hall.

The resulting outage caused ongoing downtime throughout Wednesday, with several large businesses unable to communicate externally for sustained periods of time.

Cable & Wireless has a different take on it: a spokesperson from the telco told us that there hasn't been an outage, and that no rats were involved.

So we're off down the sewers to investigate.

So Apple's forthcoming operating system will use the next-generation file system ZFS, it's been confirmed.

Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz gave the secret away on Wednesday when he said ZFS would succeed HFS+ in Leopard, Apple's name for the successor to OS X.

Zettabyte File System was originally developed by Sun, and it's significantly better than traditional file systems.

My US colleague Declan McCullagh blogged with more details.

One ZDNet.co.uk reader, mariomiy, raises the issue that potential customers might think Novell is superior now that it has Microsoft's backing. Well, it's a kind of backing, given there's been a catfight or two along the way.

Valid point, mariomiy. We know RedHat were rather stung by the partnership, much as it might boldly argue otherwise. But does the partnership make Novell credible, and RedHat not? Of course not.

It is interesting to see Microsoft extend its Linux partnerships, now taking the smaller distributor Xandros under its wing. Is the software giant starting to take over the open source world, critics are beginning to ask.

I also wanted to come back on mariomiy's other point, about the sales of Dell PCs with pre-loaded Ubuntu. We know that some systems have been sold, our reader says, though we will soon see the figures.

That's true, although I can predict the sales for the UK exactly. And it will be zero.

And it will stay zero until Dell bothers to launch them here.

It's all systems go at Novell this week. Firstly, the Linux vendor (and Microsoft's apparent best-friend in a fledging relationship) names its new chief for Great Britain and Ireland. Jacqueline de Rojas was appointed yesterday as country manager covering both the UK and the Emerald Isle.

De Rojas has been around for a bit and is best known for spells at Computer Associates, Business Objects and Cartesis.

"Novell is leading the way in open source and helps customers to achieve mixed IT environments," said De Rojas, pretty much as soon as she got in the door.

It took Novell about one hour after De Rojas' appointment for the company to crow about its latest customer win.

Car manufacturer BMW is to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Xen virtualisation software in its datacentres to try to cut hardware costs and simplify datacentre deployment, Novell said.