Slashdot Mirror

Why compile from scratch? Get apt-get! Here's a link on how to set up apt-get and then here's another link on how to set up your /etc/apt/sources.list files. Then just apt-get install mplayer, windows codex and lame. I use SuSE 9.3 and it plays multimedia better than my WinXP box any day of the week. BTW...you did not need to pay $100 for SuSE 9.3. You could have done a network install for free.

Check it out it here :)

http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ev olution.html

Unbending the truth

I agree with Martin Taylor that transitioning software on a Linux platform can be difficult. I also believe transitioning software on ANY platform is difficult. If it wasn't, none of us would have jobs.

I also agree with Martin Taylor that going to a Linux platform may prove more costly than first expected. I also know from experience that Microsoft roll-outs have additional cost.

For Example: MS Exchange server compared to SuSE OpenExchange (now Netline OpenExchange). Similar Products. Exchange is cheaper out of the box until you add Spam Control, Virus Control, etc... Also, Exchange counts licenses by CAL connection, OpenExchange is Licensed by concurrent connections - much cheaper. If you want you can even download the Netline Open-Xchange for free with no license restrictions.

Martin Taylor is correct on many points. Unfortunately his logic breaks down because those points are universal and not specific to OSS.

Either I really missed something, or there is a flaw in Mr. Schwarz's journalism.

You missed something. http://www.novell.com/newzealand/promotions/school _promo.html

The Novell deals lets schools buy software for the same cost as Microsoft products, about $99 per product per server for a year-long licence.

This is a strange statement, due to TFA later saying the following:

The ministry won't comment on the cost of the contract.

Further investigation to this shows the following server costs from Novell's site:

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserv er/pricing.html

These are all non-haggled prices, too. There is nothing on there for $99, and I wouldn't think that they would be buying new servers just to change over the OS. Elseware I saw that these prices are supposed to include one year of matenence as well. Either I really missed something, or there is a flaw in Mr. Schwarz's journalism. Anybody have any insite into this little paradox?

Looks like their web designer has been hanging around Novell's web site too much.

I'm familiar with their eDirectory product, which is not free but very, very cheap (and good), but that's not open-source ... have they open-sourced anything else?

Sure, Linux is one way.

However, I'm very impressed by Novell NSure.

Do not overlook this product if you're looking for a solid LDAP based Identity Management solution.

To paraphrase a past president, "I feel your pain!"

I recently upgraded the laptop I'm typing this on to Fedora Core 4 by wiping Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, which worked well, completely off the drive first to ensure a totally clean install. Fedora Core 4 installed properly, but I could not get the wireless card to work with my 128-bit WEP network to save my life. It worked in FC3, but not in FC4. Oh, and don't get me started with all the other hardware and software that I would have to get working in FC4 manually, including the soft-modem, sleep mode, RealPlayer, DVD playback, and Java. I use FC4 at work and it works well, but getting FC4 working on a laptop made me so frustrated that I ultimately destroyed my FC4 DVD on a mad rampage and then discarded it.

Looking for a replacement distro, I decided to give Novell SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 a try through its free FTP-download-based installation method.

Until Fedora Core gets its act together, I'm not going back after having the extreme pleasure of installing and using SuSE Linux Professional! Really, it's that much better. SLP 9.3 and Fedora Core aren't even in the same league. Seriously, it's like comparing Windows 3.1 in all its AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and WIN.INI glory with Mac OS X, with FC being Win 3.1 and SLP 9.3 being Mac OS X.

Not only did SLP's YaST, the system's comprehensive configuration management tool, detect _all_ of my laptop's hardware, it noticed that my eth1 was a wireless network card and graphically prompted me for the WEP settings. And it worked! No futzing with /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 files and the like! It also noticed that I had a softmodem, installed the proper software to control it, and proceeded to the modem's configuration screen. It even installed a ThinkPad control panel (I have an IBM ThinkPad) without me having to do that manually! Sound, video, 1394, even Bluetooth were all set up without me having to futz with any configuration files. As a very pleasant surprise, and something that James Gosling can appreciate, "the lid works!" (sleep mode and hibernate)

I believe that I have finally found an OS besides Mac OS X that I can recommend to others. I was previously a FC fanboy, and I still like FC3, but I could never recommend FC to others, and I certainly cannot recommend FC4, especially on laptop computers.

It's really hard to describe the awesomeness that is SuSE Linux Professional 9.3, so try it out for yourself! Go to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/d ownloads/suse_linux/index.html , scroll to the bottom, and read the instructions for the "SUSE LINUX 9.3 ftp version." One caveat that I must mention is that the autopartitioner, at least on my system, didn't automatically create a /boot partition at the beginning of the hard drive. Depending on your hardware, you really should ensure that a ext2 (or ext3) /boot partition is created at the beginning of the drive (100MB should work fine). Otherwise, GRUB might not be able to load SuSE (that was actually the only problem that I ran into, which is more of an installer issue than a system issue). Other than that, everything should "just work" :-).

Oh, and SuSE includes Sun Java 1.4.2 and 1.5, Java Eclipse (not a buggy GCJ compiled version), Macromedia Flash, RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat 7, and other goodies built-in; no hacks or editing of files /etc/yum.repo.d required. If you want DVD playback and Windows Media Codec support in Kaffeine, the media player, follow the easy instructions (even all-GUI) at http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/dvdplay/ . Every Windows Media Player movie that I opened with it worked (I believe it's using official Microsoft DLLs coupled with winelib, and Wine is also built into SuSE), and every DVD that I tried worked prope

Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages, and I'm not very sure that is going to happen. Without that, software still has to be packaged separately for each distribution

A few conditionals in a single .spec file are often all that is needed for RedHat-Fedora-CentOS/Mandriva/SuSE . Very little effort indeed if you're depending on LSB rather than using RedHatisms.

Yes, you might still need to build different binary RPMs for the different RPM distros, but they can all come from the same source RPM.

An article here http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11256. html goes into some depth with further references.

I am having trouble finding a link showing that Suse 9.3 Pro comes with Crossover office or that it costs only $40. Am I misunderstanding you ?

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/profe ssional/index_all.html
http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_dynamic.main? cat_id=1&pn=7&sid=27477

maybe you meant that on top of the $99 suse pro price, for $40 you can add crossover ?

ok..i did some checking and this looks like the current pricing $99+$39.

Well, you can get them anyway - just send a SASE. But it would be kind of silly to put a NLD sticker on your RH box...

Wow! Good thing Novell recently released Linux 9.0!

If you're wondering... the reason you have to Google for NetDrive rather than just downloading it from Novell is that NetDrive is licenced as part of Netware. So it's not exactly "free". But it's funny, Novell even tells you to go download it off the net.

After digging deeper, I found this information about how to set up their "SimpleServer" and avoid having to purchase the whole suite:

http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/cvs/cvsbrows e.php/*checkout*/ifolder/ifolder/HOWTOs/SimpleServ er-Setup-HOWTO.txt

This looks great as a free client and for a workgroup environment. But, if you want to have the server for this, it looks like you will have to cough up at least $995:

http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserve r/pricing.html

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

This can either have a client based on Mono or web based. This allows for versioning as well.

Depending on your University's server software, some options might already be available. Someone posted a M*crosoft option already.

If your school uses Novell-based technologies, then you may want to look at iFolder. The client portion is OSS, but I don't think the server portion is. It works with M*crosoft and Linux clients, although it does say "Novell Linux Desktop" (ie: SuSE).

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/overview.ht ml

Look for it on the Novell Forge

Many, many moons ago, Cisco supported Novell Directory Services:

http://developer.novell.com/research/devnotes/1999 /january/05/

This seems like something that ought to have been done by a commercial entity, but whether it has, I know not. And if it hasn't, then it would certainly be a nice opportunity for a startup.

All the little consumer desktops seem to be merging with Mandriva so this is just one more shake out of the desktop space.

The OOM killer is there because Linux does something called memory overcommit.

What this means is that Linux will allow processes to allocate more memory than is actually available and doesn't actually reserve a page until the process writes to that memory.

This works well in some cases, since not all processes use all memory they allocate, but it also makes the identification of processes that should be killed harder, since the process that caused the OOM condition may not be in the process of allocating memory.

The way to fix this is to simply disable overcommit.

See here for the possible overcommit settings and how to disable it.

Hula: Hula is a calendar and mail server. We want to build a real web-based calendar: to make it trivially easy to publish a calendar, to invite anyone with an email address to an an appointment and process their RSVPs, to get to your calendar via HTML or RSS or with an instant messenger or with SMS.

It's an actively developed open-source derivative of Novell's NetMail

-metric

If you haven't used Evolution in a long time, its worth checking out. There have been significant improvements, especially since the 2.0 release. I've been using evolution for about four years now exclusively with great results. Calendaring is ical based, connects to exchange and others. The e-mail client and todo list is top notch too.

Even runs on linux...

eDirectory is a requirement so grab the 250,000 free licenses first and then read the documentation like there's no tomorrow.

eDirectory is a requirement so grab the 250,000 free licenses first and then read the documentation like there's no tomorrow.

eDirectory is a requirement so grab the 250,000 free licenses first and then read the documentation like there's no tomorrow.

eDirectory is a requirement so grab the 250,000 free licenses first and then read the documentation like there's no tomorrow.

Novell's eDirectory satsifies all of those requirements. It installs as an rpm (everyone else will have to alien it to a deb or whatever you like). The ldap schema is completely hidden unless you want to extend it in which case you can use either a web frontent (iManager) or a java app (ConsoleOne). The same two tools will let you manage everything you would ever need to touch on it as well as manage just about every other Novell application. Both tools work fine under the browser/os of your choice as well. If you're using SUSE the PAM setup takes about 2 minutes using YaST. Otherwise, you just have to create and /etc/ldap.conf file and modify whatever services you want to authenticate via ldap under /etc/pam.d/. If you want it even eaiser you can setup the entire thing from the web interface with very advanced ACLs for who can access what server which will setup pam_nam automatically for you.
I've used OpenLDAP a number of times and while it works well in smaller environments, the ability of eDirectory to scale out to millions of objects and transparently replicate bidrectionally with no setup required makes it quite a bit more useful. It's not OSS, but they practically give it away so you usually never even have to pay for it.

First of all, Novell is the company name. "Novell" doesn't have a network file system, NetWare does.

One, the network file system they use is antique. It has no global namespace, no kerberos authorization, doesn't use an ACL model, doesn't support symlinks, etc.

It sounds like you're confusing the filesystem with the network file system. TFS (the "Traditional File System" is fairly old, but also quite secure when security is implemented properly.

FAT/FAT32/NTFS are not Network File Systems; they are file systems. CIFS is a network file system. DFS is a network file system. NFS is a network file system. Mixing terminology in the way you are is common amongst those spreading FUD.

Kerberos authentication and authorization is not the perview of the filesystem; the filesystem is responsible for managing how file pointers resolve to the actual data in the files, and who has access is based on an authentication credential in a different part of the operating system.

In the upcoming eDirectory 8.8 product, there is a GSSAPI provider that allows you to use Kerberos for authentication if you choose.

Doesn't use an ACL model? Please, check your facts. Going back to NetWare ELS Level 2 at *least* there has been support for access controls in the filesystem, including inheritance of rights and the use of inheritied rights masks.

The NFS implementation supports symlinks - hard and soft - and has for a while.

Second, while the directory service might be cool, it isn't useful for anything beyond Novell's own products.

Totally untrue, this is FUD based on an understanding of the product as it was nearly 12 years ago, not the current version. Here's a little free advice: don't use Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign or their competitive marketing papers to get your information about their competitors. They can't stand up to the current versions of the software, so they still refer to the old versions, because they don't want their user base to know there's something better out there.

There are extremely large companies out there who use eDirectory to manage web-based identity services. Many use Nsure Identity Manager to synchronize identity data between various different systems - including between eDirectory and Active Directory - and yes, that includes password synchronization.

There are very few client applications that are written for NDS.

True, if you are saying that there are very few applications written that use the NWDS APIs. Why? Because the LDAP interfaces are faster and more efficient on the wire.

You can see NDS as an LDAP server, but if you do that then what is the point of using NDS at all?

Because it's fast, secure, and scalable. eDirectory (the current directory product, why does everyone insist on talking about NDS? Those who do sound like Microsoft marketing propaganda, because that's all they ever compare AD to) is used in extremely large shops, but in large-scale implementations tends to be used on Solaris SPARC or other high-end UNIX platforms rather than on NetWare. If you think that there's no point to using "NDS" if you're going to write to LDAP, then you disagree with some of the largest organizations in the world.

eDirectory is not about managing NetWare, though it is used for that very successfully.

And, an extended third problem is Novell's architecture has always been to close the administrator out, and put him/her behind a set of pre-written GUI tools that prevent any flexability to the system.

Now I'm laughing so hard there are tears in my eyes. At BrainShare 2005, Novell opened up more APIs to eDirectory than ever before (and there was an awful lot already available). Novell provided a Microsoft ADSI provider before Microsoft did for their own products. Spend a little time up at Novell's Developer Website before making statements that ar

I say you are incorrect.

Novell aren't focusing NLD on the desktop in the consumer market - it's target is the corporate desktop market.

SuSE Professional is aimed at the consumer/hobbyist market.

From http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/overview.ht ml :

"Novell® Linux Desktop 9, powered by SUSE LINUX, provides a leading end-user productivity environment designed specifically to empower businesses to leverage Linux and open source with confidence. It can be deployed as a general-purpose desktop platform or tailored for use in information kiosks, call-center terminals, or stations for infrequent PC users. Novell Linux Desktop also provides an ideal alternative to high-cost UNIX-based engineering workstations. Novell Linux Desktop users who are seeking to avoid single-vendor lock-in of their desktop systems can comfortably interoperate with Windows-based users, within or between organizations. Finally, Novell Linux Desktop, backed by Novell support, training and partners, allows businesses to deploy Linux systems with confidence."

Now, compare and contrast with the SuSE Professional info from http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/h omedesktop.html :

"SUSE LINUX Professional 9.3 includes all of the latest desktop productivity tools to help you with your most common home computing tasks. Whether it's instant messaging and commmunicating with friends, creating and designing graphics, or organizing digital picture and music files, you'll find what you need on our easy-to-use desktop. And to make finding things even easier, we've included a preview of the latest Linux desktop search technology: Beagle* the powerful new open source search engine that puts all of the content in your personal information space at your fingertips. Plus, powerful tools for spam blocking and virus scanning are built right in."

I say you are incorrect.

Novell aren't focusing NLD on the desktop in the consumer market - it's target is the corporate desktop market.

SuSE Professional is aimed at the consumer/hobbyist market.

From http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/overview.ht ml :

"Novell® Linux Desktop 9, powered by SUSE LINUX, provides a leading end-user productivity environment designed specifically to empower businesses to leverage Linux and open source with confidence. It can be deployed as a general-purpose desktop platform or tailored for use in information kiosks, call-center terminals, or stations for infrequent PC users. Novell Linux Desktop also provides an ideal alternative to high-cost UNIX-based engineering workstations. Novell Linux Desktop users who are seeking to avoid single-vendor lock-in of their desktop systems can comfortably interoperate with Windows-based users, within or between organizations. Finally, Novell Linux Desktop, backed by Novell support, training and partners, allows businesses to deploy Linux systems with confidence."

Now, compare and contrast with the SuSE Professional info from http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/h omedesktop.html :

"SUSE LINUX Professional 9.3 includes all of the latest desktop productivity tools to help you with your most common home computing tasks. Whether it's instant messaging and commmunicating with friends, creating and designing graphics, or organizing digital picture and music files, you'll find what you need on our easy-to-use desktop. And to make finding things even easier, we've included a preview of the latest Linux desktop search technology: Beagle* the powerful new open source search engine that puts all of the content in your personal information space at your fingertips. Plus, powerful tools for spam blocking and virus scanning are built right in."

Agreed. I've been using it for several months now to tie in our ASP.NET apps to eDir for identity management.

I tried using the microsoft classes they provide for ldap stuff, but it's so damn Active Directory -specific that it's almost useless. Add to that the fact that you can't do things like explicit binds and I would have been rolling my own code without that ldapcsharp component.

I have found a couple of bugs working with it, but nothing show-stopping. Unfortunately their mailing list doesn't work very good: a lot of stuff shows up on their archive that never makes it to my inbox. Or people are posting to the site instead of being on the list. There just doesn't seem to enough traffic to make it useful.

I've seen a few other projects make use of it, too, like this one.

I have to agree that they can leave the impression their are hiding some of their best tech. I don't remember how I found that project, but it wasn't easy.

According to the article, my contacts at Novell, and Novell themselves - http://www.novell.com/news/press/item.jsp?contenti d=879a46d41fe14010VgnVCM1000000100007f____ , they have already signed the multi-million dollar deal. Novell has begun using it as part of their advertising campaign.

So are you saying they spent millions of dollars on a multi-year deal just to secure a better deal with Microsoft?

Wouldn't they have just threatened to go with Novell if they were trying to pressure Microsoft for a better price?

I'm not too worried about the future adoption of Linux, because 50 governments (all levels) are switching to Linux http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11507. html

That's the top-down takeover. Then, there's Mobilis, the $220 laptop from India, and the bottom-up takeover. MSFT will be squeezed from both ends of the market. http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2005/05/41418.p hp

Here's a MSFT hater who smells blood.

Clayton

The SuSE 9.x live CD/DVDs are insanely great, assuming he isn't using an LCD. You can use them with an LCD if you are hardcore, but they are no-brainer easy if you have a regular CRT.

Boots right into the GUI, I highly recommend you give it a look.

Download .iso files from Novell

The review in my sig is from a while back, and I wasn't particularly motivated at the time (maybe drunk.) It's better than I said in here, and my review has the instructions to make it work on a machine with an LCD monitor:

I've never used Knoppix but either you need to try a different distro or your modem came with a disc or a CD in which you can install the driver for it. Some hardware does actually come with drivers for linux while others are already supported by linux. Make sure there arn't any disks that you left in the box and try to use something like Debian http://www.debian.org/ or Suse http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/, Red Hat http://www.redhat.com/, Ubuntu http://www.ubuntulinux.org/, or maybe even a smaller distro like Ark http://www.arklinux.org/.

Knoppix is not the only Linux out there and by no means is it the best nor most popular. Hell I just gave you the better known ones. You could also try BSD. Just go to google and type in "BSD". Try dragonfly, Free, Net, or open BSD. Don't think that because one distro doesn't work that the others won't either. Each distro is very different.

Hope that helps, cause you don't seem to know about to many distro's.

You should have a look at Evolution:

Built-in Microsoft Exchange Support
Users can communicate directly with built-in WebDAV support, eliminating the need to maintain separate IMAP e-mail server access to support Linux and UNIX users.

From within Novell Evolution, users can view, edit and update e-mail, address books, calendars and task folders on the Exchange server.

Using existing global address lists, users can access names, addresses and contact information from the Exchange Global Address List.

Public folder support allows users to share documents and files in existing Exchange public folders. They can also create new public folders for collaboration.

Through the Manage Permissions feature, users can control access to personal and public folders, calendars and task lists.

With the proper authorization, users can open other users' calendars or shared folders.

The Out-of-Office Assistant helps users create custom vacation or notification messages that run on the Exchange server.

Through the Calendar Delegation feature, users can set permissions to allow others to view their calendars. Users can also delegate permission to a colleague (for example, an administrative assistant) to accept and schedule meetings in their calendars.

Direct resource booking reserves resources such as conference rooms or vehicles for your meetings and appointments.

The new mailbox- and folder-size features display Exchange server quota notifications to keep mailbox sizes down.

Taken from http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ev olution.html

As for question 1 & 2 I'm not quite sure, but a colleague uses it, and it looks like he accesses his mail without trouble (And accepts meeting requests, Accesses public folder, etc.).

Don't you mean "hello, Novell? "

What about system requirements:

One of the following:
* SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (IR3 required)
* SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8
* RH Linux 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, or RH Adv Server 2.1

Can this be run on regular Suse 9.X? Anyone tried?

Not true. Novell eDirectory has been proven to scale to at least 1 billion objects in 2000. Administration involved breaking the users into 4 groups of 250,000 each and replicating them between the servers. With Novell's management tools, this is trival.

Right here.

On a some what related note, Novell open sourced YaST, Hula and a bunch of other software after they acquired SUSE. I guess to show that they want to be on the open source bandwagon. It would be interesting to see if they will open source eDirectory to match Red Hat's move. Especially since the licenses are either free or so uber cheap.

This http://www.novell.com/products/edirectory/pricing. html says that the price is $2.00 per monkey.

Where are my 250,000 free licenses?!

I know this story is going to prompt people wanting to know how the Netscape directory server compares with OpenLDAP. I've never used the Netscape one but what I would really love to know is how does it stack up against Novell eDirectory? eDirectory isn't open source but the licenses are damn cheap, the first 250,000 licenses are free. Any LDAP experts care to share their opinions?

Where is SusE/Novell in all this?

Right here:
Novell Drives Linux into Academia with Training and Technology

Here is the first paragraph:
WALTHAM, Mass.--19 May 2005--Novell today launched a new introductory Linux training course designed for academic environments, giving educational institutions a powerful new tool to promote open source training and students a new option for learning Linux. Unique among Linux vendor offerings, Novell's new course maps directly to one of the most widely recognized vendor-neutral certifications in the Linux market, CompTIA®Linux+, newly updated for 2005.Novell also announced it will donate $1.5 million in SUSE LINUX software and training materials to educational institutions to help promote Linux adoption.

From the prices page. But, actually, I'm referring to Linux desktops.

I don't generally think of Linux servers as having arbitrary per-connection limits, although that's probably where the "100 users" comes from. Since the "package" says it comes with Novell Desktop 9, and then makes the "up to" 100 users claim, it may be easy to confuse the two.

Some movement right here.

• Three SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 licenses
• Five Novell GroupWise 6.5 licenses
• Novell Linux Desktop 9
• Novell eDirectory 8.7.3
• Novell ZENworks Linux Management Client
• Support for up to 100 users and 3 servers
• Five free support incidents

All that for under $500.

Yes I do! Xen wouldn't really help you with patch management buy Zenworks for Linux (See link http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/sneakpeek. html )blows anything MS has away!