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Seriously, check out Red Hat. I havent used Sun's product extensively, but I have used Novell's a good deal and I can honest to god tell you that Red Hat is the better choice. Read this post for someone else's view on it. If price is a concern, you'll hear alot of FUD about Red Hat being more pricey. The truth is its not, and the proof is in the pudding. You'll notice that both companies offerings are very similar in cost per year and that in some cases one company will slightly beat out the other, but in other cases roles reverse. After using the management utilities Red Hat offers as compared to Novell, I could never see myself going back to Novell regardless of cost, the price savings is just a nice side effect:)
Regards,
Steve

P.S. In case you don't know Red Hat's prices.

You haven't seen iManager, have you? No, figures.

Err... Red Hat has had this for something like over 5 or 6 years. Need to install something on 60,000 desktops? No problem, just click go. Need it customized per user, per their profile or groups that they belong to, also not a problem. This and many other reasons are why enterprises almost always go with Red Hat, especially after you take in to consideration the support and licensing costs of other distros, i.e. Novell (The same level of support will typically cost you just as much, but in some cases can be up to 5 times as great).For those who think I'm trolling, please see Novell's pricelist for the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 costs per year.
Regards,
Steve

http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserve r/beta.html
Open Enterprise Server is now shipping. An evaluation version will be available from the product web site on March 15, 2005. You may choose to download the public beta at this time or return when the evaluation is available.

The Java Enterprise system is available for download in its entirety as a CD Image (ISO) or Compressed Archive

ZENworks 7 Linux Management can trace its roots back to Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise.

What we* have done with this project is extended the really strong RPM delivery and dependancy resolution (messaged as software and patch management for Linux) and added much of the traditional ZENworks functionality.

What ZENworks 7 Linux Management aims to do is really change the story for managing Linux in the Enterprise; we're not targetting the hacker community here really (take a look at projects like OpenCarpet).

Novell will be including OS deployment via imaging as well policy-enabled AutoYaST and Kickstart (yes - it's cross distro!)

There will also be inventory and asset management, remote control and support, strong auditing and logging and the ZENworks one-to-many policy management.

Novell BrainShare is next week - we will be showcasing this and have live demo systems. There is also a 'Sneak Peek' online [registration required].

Personally I'm really excited that this will change the perceptions of Linux in the Enterprise - it certainly helps with customer migrations from Windows to Linux.

It's taken a large, distributed, cross discipline team to get this far - I'll ruin my Karma by thanking them all publicly.

* the Novell ZENworks business unit - which includes the Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise engineering and QA team.

Go on - mod me down for not being objective ;)

ZENworks 7 Linux Management can trace its roots back to Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise.

What we* have done with this project is extended the really strong RPM delivery and dependancy resolution (messaged as software and patch management for Linux) and added much of the traditional ZENworks functionality.

What ZENworks 7 Linux Management aims to do is really change the story for managing Linux in the Enterprise; we're not targetting the hacker community here really (take a look at projects like OpenCarpet).

Novell will be including OS deployment via imaging as well policy-enabled AutoYaST and Kickstart (yes - it's cross distro!)

There will also be inventory and asset management, remote control and support, strong auditing and logging and the ZENworks one-to-many policy management.

Novell BrainShare is next week - we will be showcasing this and have live demo systems. There is also a 'Sneak Peek' online [registration required].

Personally I'm really excited that this will change the perceptions of Linux in the Enterprise - it certainly helps with customer migrations from Windows to Linux.

It's taken a large, distributed, cross discipline team to get this far - I'll ruin my Karma by thanking them all publicly.

* the Novell ZENworks business unit - which includes the Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise engineering and QA team.

Go on - mod me down for not being objective ;)

ZENworks 7 Linux Management can trace its roots back to Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise.

What we* have done with this project is extended the really strong RPM delivery and dependancy resolution (messaged as software and patch management for Linux) and added much of the traditional ZENworks functionality.

What ZENworks 7 Linux Management aims to do is really change the story for managing Linux in the Enterprise; we're not targetting the hacker community here really (take a look at projects like OpenCarpet).

Novell will be including OS deployment via imaging as well policy-enabled AutoYaST and Kickstart (yes - it's cross distro!)

There will also be inventory and asset management, remote control and support, strong auditing and logging and the ZENworks one-to-many policy management.

Novell BrainShare is next week - we will be showcasing this and have live demo systems. There is also a 'Sneak Peek' online [registration required].

Personally I'm really excited that this will change the perceptions of Linux in the Enterprise - it certainly helps with customer migrations from Windows to Linux.

It's taken a large, distributed, cross discipline team to get this far - I'll ruin my Karma by thanking them all publicly.

* the Novell ZENworks business unit - which includes the Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise engineering and QA team.

Go on - mod me down for not being objective ;)

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

... here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Is there such a thing as Suse Personal anymore? I thought they did away with it and now all you can get is a Live CD (a la Knoppix I presume) if you want to see what SUSE is all about. SUSE's website doesn't mention a Personal Edition for 9.2 which has been released for many months now.

Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen...

Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"

Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen...

Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"

Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen...

Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"

Oops I forgot the url: http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

...Right.

Nobody actually financially benefits from open source.

I'm sorry, I guess I didn't quite catch what you meant. Run that by me again?

I bought SuSE 9.1 Pro, paid my 100 euros, and two weeks after that SuSE 9.2 came out.

That's of course bad luck, but not really SuSE fault. The usually announce the release of new versions one month in advance (like the probably will do today or the next days for their 9.3 release in April). And with a bit of research one can find out that SuSE releases twice a year, approx. April and October. But the possibility that someone accidentially buys a product shortly before the release of a new version is a problem which is not restricted to SuSE.

The SuSE ftp and yast provided support for my old 9.1 (e.g. KDE, thunderbird, firefox) packages, but didn't upgrade them to the latest, 9.2 releases.

No, of course not (at least not automatically). They only update packages for YOU to fix bugs and security issues. That makes sense to me. AFAIK, you can point Yast to the FTP version of 9.2 and make a distro update.

Apart from that, there are plenty of other ways to install new software on a SuSE installation, among them apt-get. This includes packages provided by SuSE employes for older versions, for example new KDE versions (including the KDE 3.4 beta versions).

Copying from friends is always an option, for every OS, but it defies the entire commercial OS price argument doesn't it :)

Sure. :) But contrary to certain other OSes, it is absolutely legal to copy SuSE Linux (and always has been). You only don't get official support by SuSE and no printed books...

last I checked only Home version was available for ISO download

The DVD is here.

this is hardly an option when you're on 64k ISDN.

Sure. But again this is then true for every Linux distribution, whether commercial or non-commercial.

To be honest, the thing I found most annoying about SuSE was the 'technical support' that I specifically paid for by buying my Pro package. After an out of the box installation, firefox kept crashing whenever I was opening it. The tech support reply was alogn the lines that they don't offer support for 3rd party applications, only for their product.

On the one hand, I can understand that they don't feel the obligation to support every single of the thousands of packages they provide with their distro. I see many of them provided as convinience. I'm a bit surprised, though, that they don't want to help with Firefox issues, since that, in my opinion, is one of the 'core' programs. In any case they have released (Yast-upgradable) updates for Firefox in 9,1 (and probably have also before that date). But I have no experience with SuSE support, so I can't judge whether they are worth their money.

Bye bye SuSE.

Well, that's the good thing about choice. :)

and I'm sure .NET 2.0 and future versions will fix many issues that exist with the current version.

Right. Just like every other Windows product fixed all the problems of the previous version. You need to see this. You have a problem, but there is a solution.

And to be clear, you need to remember that these statistics generally only count as far as recorded *sales* (or subscriptions) of desktop versions of Linux (http://novell.com/, http://mandrake.com/ et al). As Linux is a freely available OS, this needs to be taken into account.

Have you looked at SUSE's OpenExchange?

They have an online demo.

Have you looked at SUSE's OpenExchange?

They have an online demo.

Actually, they're here.

The concept of LiveDVD has already been done: Suse LiveDVD This is probably not the first.

from TFA: "Cox revealed that although Linus is good at developing code, he does not enjoy some of the other jobs that go along with software development such as bug fixing and beta testing."

Note that Linus and Microsoft are both being accused of the same thing.... some purists are arguing that they don't focus enough on the bug fixing. The reality is, that no matter what focus you will NEVER have a bug free system. All software makes such feature/stability tradeoffs perhaps the most important challenge of any software project is balancing the tradeoffs of perfectionism vs. time-to-market of bleeding edge features that is best for their market. Other operating systems that do focus excessively on security for their "core" offering tend to fall behind in features (like the old mainframe software banks use, etc). Sure such software has its place; but it's not the mainstream market.

Note that for the security consious customer, though, Red Hat and SuSE both have higher-security releases of their own (like the Common Criteria vesrions like this one; and releases like Debian Stable that also focus on security and bug fixes only. By people who don't understand that those releases are targeting a different market, those branches are often criticised for being filled with obsolete software.

It doesn't have to be Linus's job to handle the most conservative customer's needs.

so a free product's revenue is up 35%. That's good news.

Umm... dude... Not all Linux is free.

Yes, I realize these are all "Enterprise" or "Proffesional" versions. But they are the ones designed for running high demand servers.

Ever heard of Active Directory? Or seen MS's educational pricing? Both of those are much more compelling than you might think.

If you want off the shelf, then Novell's NDS or eDirectory is the way to go.

If you have some system administration background or really want Free Software, then Kerberos or Kerberos + LDAP is the way to go. It's not the bear people make it out to be.

For file sharing there's Samba or OpenAFS

Have you looked at things like Open-Xchange or if you don't mind paying.

They aren't perfect, and collaboration is not great in standalone clients, but if your users don't mind using a web browser for email, it works great.

Is it just me or do you think they are going to be the big Linux desktop of the future? I mean Redhat does have the name that everyone knows as linux. However Novell has slowly been buying all the cool linux desktop stuff. They bought Xandros and Suse and those are two huge players in the Linux Desktop market.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Zamples, Inc. Go gently on our servers, they probably won't survive being slashdotted!

See XForms working on Explorer

Having said that, I will note that this evaluation was to an actual protection profile (the CAPP), so the evaluation means something, unlike some other evaluations that I could mention.

Has NDS seriously changed since I last used it 5 years ago...?

Yes and no.

DS 8 has a new database backend, compared to DS 7. (NetWare 4 used DS 6, NetWare 5 can use either DS 7 or 8, and NetWare 6+ uses DS 8).

DS 8 allows for DS Repairs to happen 'live', where DS 7 repairs would lock the databases. DS 8 also changed the replication linking a little, to relax the connector links that were not crucial to authentication.

These changes are not that big. They make directory services work better, but "what DS does" is not significantly different.

The big changes are the extensions - the types of objects that can be managed.

ZENworks is big: workstations are imported into the tree. This provides 1) inventory, 2) desktop remote-control, 3) application deployment, 4) patch management and 5) disk imaging. ZENworks for Servers replicates the application objects (and patches) from server to server, and can throttle distribution bandwidth to not swamp a thin WAN pipe - all controlled via NDS.

SecureLogin creates single-sign-on methods which are distributed via NDS. BorderManager rules are distributed via NDS, and the log files report by logged in user name. GroupWise can use NDS Groups as email distribution lists. NMAS (Novell Modular Authentication Services) can tweak password requirements six ways to Sunday, and distribute those rules via NDS.

The other Novell products all use DS in some way.

Lastly, Novell has created a synchronizing product that used to be called DirXML, now Nsure Identity Manager. With it, NDS can be the source or recipient of any number of external databases. The obvious one is to synchronize passwords and group memberships with Active Directory - but connectors to a whole bunch of applications can be purchased.

You mention automounting, SMB, etc. I didn't understand if you meant having a Linux server allow Windows clients to authenticate and mount against Linux. If you did, there's a handy piece of software that allows Windows clients to authenticate directly to LDAP. Amusing name, but nice product...pGina.. It also features plugins that allow for roaming profiles, etc.

I've been testing it on RHEL ES 3 for a couple of weeks now and so far no complaints. Never thought I would say this but....... thanks Novell!

Excellent documentation too.

I've been testing it on RHEL ES 3 for a couple of weeks now and so far no complaints. Never thought I would say this but....... thanks Novell!

Excellent documentation too.

Open Enterprise Server has a public beta right now. It runs on SUSE or Netware. The whole reason Novell bought SUSE was to answer questions just like this post.

Of course the poster probably meant "open source directory services". Sorry, eDir is a pay-at-the-door shop.

TW

Why on earth wasn't Evolution mentioned? Surely this has to be Outlook/Exchange's main rival...

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

That sounds like an Exchange Server replacement. It doesn't sound like a free Exchange Server replacement.

So, doesn't this now start to sound more like a free Exchange Server replacement? No, I'd say this is like a Exchange Server replacement...

SuSE has in its favor [?] the confusion to be made with System Update Service for Windows.

Adding to the confusion, SuSE is in some camps a reasonable way to update Windows:)

Easy - if you are able to read between the lines

http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/ne ws/news_det ail2526.htm
Notice how a former Novell _product_ is abandoned. Netline is left alone

Netline Internet Service announced today that Novell will sell and provide training, maintenance and support for Netline's market-leading OPEN-XCHANGE Server

Also your statement about marketing OpenExchange by Novell is ridiculous since there is no OX marketing by Novell. Is there any Open-Xchange mentioned in:
http://www.novell.de/presse/releases/2005/
how many occurences in:
http://www.novell.com/de-de/news/press/archive_200 4.html
Nada, zero. OX press releases are only put out by Netline, *never* by Novell.

Further an Evolution connector for SLOX was announced in something like 2002 and _never_ ever came to existance!

Its generous by Novell to play nice with former SuSE partners, but it shouldn't affect your vision on reality.
SLOX is dead, long live Groupwise!

I hate to disappoint you, but Linux 2.6 used in RedHat 4 enterprise distributions hardly makes it a major milestone in the Linux server arena. Enterprise Linux distributions with Linux 2.6 kernel is not exactly a ground breaking thing. SUSE LINUX Enterprise 9 featuring Linux 2.6 was released many months ago. Also the 2.4 kernel used in the 3 series of RedHat enterprise distributions isn't quite vanilla 2.4. It contains already many, many features backported from Linux 2.6.

Novell has already said they would protect any open source project that they are involved with from patent claims using their patent portfolio:

http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/

"Consistent with this belief, Novell will use its patent portfolio to protect itself against claims made against the Linux kernel or open source programs included in Novell's offerings, as dictated by the actions of others."

Notice that part about "...or open source programs included in Novell's offerings..." Mono falls into this category.

(such as Active Directory to Open LDAP,

Exchange Server to Sendmail

and NTFS to Samba)

Not sure if it exactly holds up to you standards, but...

Evolution with the Ximian-Connector has pretty good support for Exchange servers

I don't know how many CDs SuSE comes on, but it's probably more than 4.

SUSE LINUX 9.2 Pro comes on 5 CD's and then there is a LOT of software that is not included and no source codes. The rest is on the DVD. The list is here

It's up on Novell's site here; they're doing a big migration push right now.