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Novell produces one of the most popular linux distros out there. Is it really surprising to anyone they contribute a lot of changes? Sure they've made a pact with the "devil" but there is no indication they are getting out of linux anytime soon.

Well, Red Hat has security updates for 7 years...

From http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ :

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 2.1): Including Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS General Availability: May 17, 2002 Full Support (including hardware updates): May 17, 2002 -- Nov 30, 2004 Deployment Support: Dec 1, 2004 -- May 31, 2005 Maintenance Support: June 1, 2005 -- May 31, 2009

As for Novell (SUSE), from here: http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/

Novell will provide a minimum of five years General Support for platform and operating system products, including its revisions, starting with the date of a product's general availability. When General Support ends, Novell will offer extended support for a minimum of two years

Abd want to know what is written on the ID card in Belgium?
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/EID-belgium
This also shows what you could do with it, like signing your email.

It has also links to the offical site where there are more examples of use (French and Dutch)

I live in Belgium and I have been asked my ID once by police when they were looking for somebody who looked like me. Checked my card and I was on my way. Otherwise they would have taken me to the police station and I would have to otherwise proove who I was. What if I would have been the person they were looking for?

The reason I know they were looking for somebody was because two days later I saw them stop a guy who had the same sort of clothes and the same build and hairstyle I had, checked his papers and where on their way.

I can't touch base with this. Novell's death watch has been on so long it reminds me of 'imminent death of net predicated' Metcalfe-style comments. Novell's 2007 fourth quarter results (Note: PDF) reported a net income of $245 million, around $10 million more than the same quarter the year before.

No juggernaut, but Yahoo Finance reports a market cap of $USD 2.19 billion.

Gone are the giddyup days when Novell owned the NOS market, but Novell keeps on cranking out software products for a remarkably loyal user base. When you contrast Novell's braindead marketing with Microsoft's predatory marketing machine, it's amazing Novell is even alive, let alone a stable, profit-generating company.

e-Directory is a mature, scalable and stable enterprise directory product. The ZEN family of products is pretty cool. They've almost finished up removing e-Directory dependencies from their apps line in favour of full-feature LDAP interfaces, and they still sell enough Groupwise licenses - but I'll give you than one, because there is no excuse for that.

Netware is dead, but they know it, and they've got two solutions for replacement (OES2 and SLES), but their apps line isn't even tied to those solutions. So they've got a bit of coming and going there.

I think Novell hasn't done badly, given Microsoft's outright attempts to fsck them (most recently screwing their desktop management product line via Vista). *Plus*, they've held the line on SCO, even if they didn't know what they were doing at the time and it was all an accident, which is all quite possible.

Their great blemish in this community is the deal with the MS devil, and I can't find anything good about that, although, as other posters have noted, the bean-counters probably have a different view on that, to wit the cash.

Our view of Novell on /. - which I share in spirit and some of the details - doesn't mean they're going away anytime soon. My 2 cents worth, anyway ...YMMV.

I hope you remembered to fire phasers for maximum effect!
http://www.novell.com/documentation/linux_client/login/index.html?page=/documentation/linux_client/login/data/h5782c3z.html

See SUSE Linux POS which is sold by Novell and IBM (iPOS). http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpointofservice/

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/14645.html

Not only just Linux builds, it is actually a supported commercial solution. :-)

PAM USB auth.. Then you can take the smallest USB flashdrive you can find. Then build it into something fluffy and big.

the programs that should work out of the box on Linux with wine is quicken, quickbooks, peachtree, and photoshop

I used to work for Novell. Now, I know they're an open source company, owning a linux distro and all, but I worked for several years on the eDirectory team. The database used by eDirectory was minded by a couple of my friends. Eventually, eDirectory moved off into the dark corners of the company, and the FLAIM database was still being maintained by these two fellas. They asked, and were granted permission to open source FLAIM. It's a great tool, and we had a lot of great response to this move. I myself used to work on the foundation layer for eDirectory - an abstraction and portability layer that we called SAL. I asked, and SAL is now open source. You can find both of these projects on the Novell forge site at http://developer.novell.com./

Novell is a pretty forward thinking company, and has a vested interested in open source and the open source world. Your company might be different, but as many have commented so far, it can't hurt to ask. Just present your argument in a rational manner - and it wouldn't hurt if you could present some benefit to the company for making your project open source. If they say no, well, they have that right. Don't get angry with them, but don't feel ashamed for asking either.

>As it stands, when someone sends me a .docx, I need MS Word to read it

That is absolutely false. I have been opening "docx" files under Linux and OpenOffice for a long time.
Oh, and by the way, now you can also open/convert .pptx and .xlsx

http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=GuM6LMM9SR4
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/01/openxml-translator-odf-converter-11.html

Why does Vista STILL require defragging. We hear that Linux doesn't NEED defragging because it smartly places files. Why can't microsoft eliminate this part of the market. If they aren't, just for the sake of cottage defragging companies, then aren't such companies vampires and saws and such?

http://cbbrowne.com/info/defrag.html

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-newbie/58320-disk-defragmentation.html

This one challenges Novell's reply:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/15032.html

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

(Oh, BTW, just heard now 17:05 local PST, Yahoo! is scheduled to layoff numerous employees, but it's about 19hour old:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/technology/22yahoo.html?bl&ex=1201150800&en=0019b93b4bb1c219&ei=5087

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Business/Downsizing_and_Layoffs/

)

1. Where's the link to a current press release from Lenovo or from Novell/SuSE? The article doesn't share any links, and when I looked on both companies' sites all I could find were old press releases.

2. Why SuSE? Did Lenovo somehow broker an unbeatable deal on support contracts, or... ?

While googling for more news on the current development, I found an old Lenovo blog entry from September of 2007 asking "What Linux distribution would you most like to see supported on a ThinkPad?". Now I'm sure that every kind of online poll has some amount of ballot-stuffing, but out of the 64572 responses, 37% chose Ubuntu, 17% chose Mandrivia, and (much farther down the list) a mere 5% chose SuSE, SLED, or OpenSuSE. SLED got only 312 votes, giving it less than 0.5% of the votes.

As unscientific as the poll was, the author of the blog admitted in the lead-up to the poll that he figured that he needed to try out Ubuntu and that he was pretty sure what linux distribution was going to be chosen. So with all this user interest in Ubuntu, why did Lenovo go the Novell/SuSE route?

Oh well -- as long as the Thinkpad hardware is fully supported by some modern Linux distro, I figure that Ubuntu should have no problems supporting it.

They switched their store systems over... http://www.novell.com/success/burlington.html
I bet this is their desktops in back offices and such.
perhaps this will be 'inspiring' to them to finish the job.

I thought they went to Linux....

http://www.novell.com/success/burlington.html

I guess maybe they should have gone all the way, so to speak...

I disagree.

You can disagree all you want. It doen't make that disagreement sound or valid.

Yes, of course. Unfortunately for you, that goes both ways.

Seems that everybody forgets that months ago Microsoft latest strategy against OSS was to cut "interoperability" and "patent protection" deals with every Linux distribution it could (a move that allowed them both to throw FUD and -potentially- profit on OSS at the same time).

Well, it isn't that everyone forgets, the fanaticism died down and they were able to look at the details of the deals to find that what was being said about them wasn't true. Only the truely foolish and the fanatics continue to spout ideas like you are.

Sorry, but bashing and name calling won't get you nowhere, and judging by the level of your "argumentation" I'm pretty sure you're the one acting as a fanatic. Perhaps it would be best if you just shed some light on the details you're talking about which supposedly disprove my view.

It was the release of the GPLv3 (which among other things, closed that possibility) what made them back out; something which was accomplished without needing any actual project to change their license (the mere threat that it could happen was enough).

Well, it was more or less Novell that backed them out. But something more interesting is that Linspire, xandros or whatever it is called now and a few other companies made a deal with Microsoft knowing full well about the GPLv3 and what it said. Or are your forgeting about those?

No, Microsoft was actually the only one to back out from the deal: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/07-05statement.mspx (Novell response: http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=365)
Microsoft-Xandros: june 4, 2007 http://www.xandros.com/news/press_releases/xandros_microsoft_collaborate.html
Microsoft-LGE: june 6, 2007 http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/jun07/06-06MSLGEPR.mspx
Microsoft-Linspire: june 13, 2007 http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9642338710.html
GPLv3 release: june 29, 2007 http://www.fsf.org/news/gplv3_launched
But I'm sure they had studied the license extensively (even though the GPLv3 was released weeks after the last deal...)

I'd say that alone justify it's existence and is prove enough that there is a point to GPLv3.

I would say your either ignorant of how it didn't accomplish that or you are attempting to pump up the GPLv3 hoping that people are dumb enough to believe you. Either way, what I wouldn't say is that you are correct in your interpretation.

Ooops, you caught me there. I guess there's no point in keeping it secret any longer: I'm a GPLv3 zealot payed by RMS himself to post on Slashdot as part of the worldwide FSF conspiracy to take over the world.... (you know, your username almost honours you...)
Back to reality, I stand by my original point: even is the GPLv3 were impractical in most cases, it has already had a significant positive impact on OSS by putting an end to that. I'm afraid that to prove your point you'll have to do a bit more than posing a false dichotomy where I must either be completely ignorant or have some obscure agenda.

Just because it's not perfect it doesn't mean that it's not better than it's predecessor (and it certainly doesn't mean it's worst). That

The Moonlight FAQ says:

Moonlight will be available as a single download from Novell which will include the browser plugin plus the Silverlight graphics engine and the Mono runtime. The codecs necessary to host Silverlight content on Linux will be available from Microsoft. The Moonlight installer will make obtaining the MSFT codecs a seamless step in the process.

My interpretation of this is that Microsoft will be supplying the codecs, but the "support" will take the form of helping Novell to integrate them. Novell will be providing the end-user support resources since the codecs will be distributed as part of Moonlight itself. The codecs are going to be an additional binary blob distributed alongside Novell's release of the otherwise open source Moonlight.

A further point, which sadly I cannot find a reference for right now, is that the codecs were to be licenced only for use as part of Moonlight. This suggests that they are unlikely to be distributed as, say, gstreamer codecs. More likely is that they will have some proprietary API that Mono can call. I would assume, though, that it won't be long before someone writes a legally-shady wrapper that exposes a GStreamer (or other) interface for the codecs in much the same way as currently several DirectShow codecs from Windows are used in Linux builds of Xine right now.

When version 2, or 3, or w/e, of Silverlight comes out will they be releasing the Linux version too? Or do I have to wait for some nice Open Source chaps to figure out how it works then implement it themselves? When a new version of HTML comes out, from MY understanding, whoever makes the browser just releases a new version of the browser that supports the new HTML code... not dependent on a company providing the spec.

Here you can see that Mono developers are directly in contact with their Microsoft counterparts to ask them questions about what they're doing and what they should do: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=MONO81685

You seem to be ignorant of the fact that the specs for both Silverlight and Flash specs are available. Microsoft doesn't release a Linux version of Silverlight, the Mono project does. It's GPL and open source, and the Mono project is getting direct help from Microsoft developers, and Microsoft has signed a patent covenant protecting Novell and the code they contribute to Mono from patent claims.

When a new version of the HTML spec comes out, it takes YEARS for browsers to get even close to full support for the new spec. It isn't dependent on a company providing the spec, it's dependent on companies making the browsers to actually support the spec. You show me one mainstream browser with full Strict HTML 4.01 and full CSS3 support. It doesn't exist. I just don't understand how you place HTML so far above everything when it comes to standardizing the web, when HTML standards come out twice as fast as browsers implement them, and no browser has complete implementations of the most current versions of those specs.

I think you need to look to your favorite standard and get a real view of what's going on there before you use it to set the bar for other web standards and languages.

I will add, if it does not work with Firefox/Linux, not interested.

For those interested in Linux/Silverlight info, the Linux version is called "Moonlight" and is being developed by Novell with Microsoft's help.

I will add, if it does not work with Firefox/Linux, not interested.

For those interested in Linux/Silverlight info, the Linux version is called "Moonlight" and is being developed by Novell with Microsoft's help.

Actually, I have a partial answer to this question. As a sysadmin for a Novell GroupWise email system, I can tell you that the actually message data for duplicate incoming messages (such as spam that is sent to many people at the same time) are only stored on disk once. Some sort of "pointer" is used to reference the messages to the individual users mailboxe's. Check out the docs if you are interested.

That said with about 1400 users (spread across multiple postoffices), we have probably about 400gb of email data. We are able to keep it low, by having a 120 day retention policy. After that point, email can be archived locally, otherwise its deleted. Independant of that, and to comply with regulations and disaster recovery scenarios, email data is backed up and replicated offsite using disk-to-disk backup (eVault in case anyone is interested).

As for Microsoft Exchange, I have not the slightest clue how data is stored.

No. You, sir, are full of crap. When you look at what's actually used and widely recognized in the world of Linux (especially for desktops), you'll plainly see that there are several "mainstream" distros that garner the lion's share of attention and represent the vast majority of the installed base:

In no particular order:

(1) Red Hat Linux

(2) Fedora Linux (community bleeding-edge source for Red Hat)

(2) Mandriva Linux (used to be Mandrake)

(3) Ubuntu Linux (plus variants, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc)

(4) SUSE Linux (owned by Novell these days)

(5) Gentoo Linux

Yes, we also have Debian, Slackware and many others that don't necessarily have huge commercial ties, but they're also the base for many commercial distros. You might be using Linux From Scratch, or one of several dozen other random distros with has an installed base of 100 users, but if that's the case you're pretty far from the average desktop or server Linux user.

My Apache logs tell the story pretty well. As Captial One might say, what's in your logfiles?

You're doing it wrong. The 8710w is a Novell certified machine.

The second O. It's "Office Open XML", though they also just say "Open XML". Putting the adjective after the noun feels so forced that it's embarrassingly sleazy; it's obviously intended to be confused with the deprecated OpenOffice.org XML format, which was often simply called "OpenOffice XML".

It's already confusing enough...

• Office Open XML (MS-OOXML) text files have extension .docx and replace legacy blob files with extension .doc, all developed by Microsoft. MS-OOXML is natively supported in Office 2007, and MS offers plugins that add support to all versions back to Office 2000. It's supported by a couple of third-party applications such as NeoOffice and the "Novell Edition" of OpenOffice.org.
• OpenDocument text files have extension .odt, and are based on the "OpenOffice.org XML" format developed by the OpenOffice.org project, based in turn on the StarOffice file format. Sun Microsystems is pretty much running this show. OpenOffice.org is considered a reference implementation for the OpenDocument format (aka ODF, aka OASIS OpenDocument.) Other products that support ODF include KOffice, AbiWord, IBM's new beta of Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and, using any one of four different plugin projects, Microsoft Office.

That is so painfully wrong.

Paper calendars work great for scheduling with the rest of your family, because you all pass through the kitchen. But that does not scale to large enterprises, you know, like with more than 50 people. It does not scale to distributed organizations, where you don't share a kitchen. It does not connect appointment scheduling to nag 'bots that remind you to attend the meeting.

But I think this is the core reason why open source calendaring sucks: it is a problem that most open source community people don't have, and only really is a problem in large organizations.

Sadly, this has lead to open source completely failing to take over the mail server market. Linux & *BSD, Postfix, and Qmail all make great mail servers, and are used by many ISPs, but they are largely unused in enterprises, precisely because of the lack of calendaring. As a result, corporate mail servers are invariable Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Novell Groupwise.

Hula was an attempt to address this, but either due to Novell not doing it right or the community just not caring, it did not work out so well :-(

I would really like to see the open source community get this right. If we don't, then the mail server market will continue to be dominated by proprietary products.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux
http://www.novell.com/company/affiliations/

http://www.novell.com/news/press/microsoft-and-novell-celebrate-year-of-interoperability-expand-collaboration-agreement/

Do you use SUSE? If so, when the shoe doesn't fit, you don't have to force it. But everytime someone downloads RedHat (for example), someone in India has to skip a meal... And that's why Tux is so fat, BTW.

In their last annual report, page 20, linked from http://www.novell.com/company/ir/annrpts.html, they state, "...NetWare and OES combined license and maintenance revenue of our business declined by $49.4 million or 18% in fiscal 2006, excluding the impact of favorable foreign exchange rates."

This implies that the business had been worth $274.4M. I doubt that this is all of the Netware revenue stream, as there's probably some additional consulting, etc., involved, but it's probably most of it. So what the Microsoft deal did was more or less replace the losses in this area. But who thinks that their Netware revenue will do anything but decline in future? I don't know where these products are on the life-cycle graph, but 18% in a year sounds pretty extreme.

They do other things, such as directory, and various security offerings. Some of these are relatively new products, and such things as laying off the AppArmor team make me a bit nervous. I was never an AppArmor fan, as path-based security leaves a lot to be desired. But at least part of their overall security strategy seems to be in something of a state of flux.

I wasn't able to find any information specific to business from their eDirectory product. I suspect, though, that you were incorrect in saying, "...most of that revenue is still from NetWare and directory products." eDirectory (and related) revenue would have to be between one and two hundred million.

They also mention that they grew their Linux business by 26%. This is pre-deal, so that's encouraging.

The next couple of quarters will be interesting, and I'll probably listen to their next couple of conference calls, though I won't be buying any stock. They were one of the companies that ripped off their own shareholders by improperly dating stock options. So I have another reason to regard their management team (and board), as ethically-challenged.

What I'm curious about is:
a) How their Linux business is growing, as compared to their other products.
b) What percentage of that Linux business is dependent on Microsoft.
c) How many of those 70,000 coupons are being used (some percentage will generate recurring and less MS-dependent revenue).

None of this is *evidence* that Novell is a source of future submarine patents, future attempted FUD, etc. But given that I already don't trust them, and suspect that they're becoming increasingly dependent upon Microsoft, I'll be watching their numbers, and forming my own conclusions.

Here are the last four quarters of Novell revenue, as per SEC filings, in Ugly Slashdot Table Format:

Q4 2006 Q1 2007 Q2 2007 Q3 2007
10/31/06 01/31/07 04/30/07 07/31/07
244,905 224,596 463,752 243,135 (in thousands)

Notice the Q2 '07 pop. This must have been when Microsoft paid up. But that income wasn't recognized as the usual license, maintenance, subscription, etc. fees that show up in the quarterly reports as "Total net revenue." Those numbers (in thousands) for the past few quarters are:

Q1/06 242,294
Q2/06 193,086
Q3/06 236,271
Q4/06 244,905
Q1/07 244,905
Q2/07 197,433
Q3/07 243,135

In short, they're doing pretty much as they were doing before the Microsoft deal. Including losses from operations, quarter after quarter. All of this is indicative of why NOVL is a $7 stock. Their management team simply isn't up to it.

All of this is in Novell's quarterly reports at: http://www.novell.com/company/ir/qresults/

Also, when this story broke back in February,"...Microsoft will annually purchase as part of a resale arrangement approximately 70,000 coupons, with a mix of priority and standard support, for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server maintenance subscriptions." See "Microsoft and Novell: Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse" at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/index.php?p=2369

So once a year Novell can get a revenue pop, but it looks as if they've been unable to translate this into service agreements that *aren't* through Microsoft. Certainly not to the point of remotely compensating for the damage they've done to themselves in the community. If they can't succeed in that, (and we don't know what percentage of those 70K coupons are actually being used) then Microsoft has a potentially large amount of control over Novell's bottom line.

Given Novell's lack of growth, I imagine some investors are unhappy anyway. Novell are about a $1.2B/yr company. If MS were to threaten to take their revenue down 20-30% when this agreement expires in 2012, which they could do simply by allowing the agreement to lapse, I wonder just what they might force Novell to go along with?

MS has a history of treating 'partners' the way we'd treat a Kleenex, and of some very unethical business practices. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a couple of ways this could end in tears. If it's only Novell doing the weeping, I could care less. They knew the history of partnering with Microsoft when they did the deal. But I don't trust Microsoft at all, and now I don't trust Novell, either, due to them having done the deal to begin with, and now as a possible hostage.

Raleigh, NC - GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) this afternoon announced one of their loyal members was responsible for planting the "backdoor" inside the popular opensores operating system, Lunix (Stocks, Websites).

In a shocking announcement this afternoon, GNAA representative goat-see revealed that the mistery hacker who penetrated high-security defenses of the Lunix "source code" repository and injected viral gay nigger seed deep inside the kernel was indeed a full-time GNAA member.

"This is serious," goat-see began. This is a first event of such magnitude since GNAA opened its doors to new members in 1996. Until now, we were gathering new members by announcing our group information on a popular troll website, slashdot.org, but this is a whole new era. By injecting our holy gay nigger seed right into the Lunix kernel, we will be able to immediately collect thousands of members. "Make the most of the next six weeks," he added. "We will grow in numbers more than you can possibly imagine".

Insertion of the GNAA backdoor came right between the consideration of Novell to buy out the entire Lunix Kernel programming team, and will most likely positively affect the decision. By adding all the gay niggers working for Novell with the gay niggers developing Lunix kernel source, GNAA will be all-powerful and will begin plotting our next plans to add "backdoors" into the next favorite operating system, BeOS.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and

That is one advantage the For Profit Companies have, Management can get good developers to work on Code they don't think is 7337 or fun or interesting but needed to get the job done.

For whatever you want to fault it, doesn't OOXML have at least a couple of rough non-MS implementations (Novell, Corel, Thinkfree)?

Looks like a troll, smells like a troll, probably *is* a troll.

At the risk of feeding you:

Two examples of exploit lists from different times:
http://www.novell.com/linux/security/advisories/2007_51_kernel.html
http://lwn.net/Articles/118952/

To say that Linux has no security exploits is just plain stupid and naive.

From the distrowatch link parent cites ... "Turbolinux 7 Server also supports the Large File Support (LFS) standard for working with applications that manage or handle up to four terabytes of data "

All the modern distros can have maximum file sizes larger than that ... old chart .... And then you have these totally insane file size limits ... Petabyte and exabite file sizes ....

Turbo linux? They lost their cachet around the time that PC makers stopped putting turbo buttons on computers.

Well, it appears that Novell has just recently updated their Technology Assurance Program (indemnification), and the most interesting part - Microsoft will extend their patent covenant to GPLv3.

NetWare server uptime screenshots:

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/241.html

Or Novell:
http://download.novell.com/SummaryFree.jsp?buildid=ESrjfdE4U58~

When I used Netware in VMware I just created a virtual machine in VMware and then went through the normal installation process for Netware(I don't remember any caveats, but it's probably been a year or two since I installed them.) I doubt that you could find a pre-made Netware VM, since you can't distribute Netware for free. Novell has some information on installing Netware as a VM under OES 2 here. I think there are sections for both VMware and Xen. It looks like their documentation is walking you through installing OS from an ISO - not using a pre-packaged VM. Hope that helps.

Are you talking about this?

http://download.novell.com/SummaryFree.jsp?buildid=ESrjfdE4U58~

Inside the .rpm there is a stand-alone converter which, disgusting windows-like switches aside, appears to work.


% ./OdfConverter
Error when parsing command line: Input is missing
Usage: OdfConverterTest.exe /I PathOrFilename [/O PathOrFilename] [/BATCH-ODT] [/BATCH-DOCX] [/V] [/OPEN] [/XSLT Path] [/NOPACKAGING] [/SKIP name] [/REPORT Filename] [/LEVEL Level]

etc...

I think this is unrelated to 2.3, but I was excited to see yesterday that Novell now has an OOXML Translator for OO.o. I was going to have to buy Office 2007 for my fiance soon because she needs to open .docx files that are emailed to her regularly. Now I don't have to bother.

Whatever you say about Novell, I appreciate their work.

Novell's eDirectory does that.

If you're working in the big end of town, it scales a lot better than AD as well.

Hovsepian lies.

It's NOT what they SAY that counts, it's what they DO.

And what Novell does is to continue to PAY MICROSOFT A ROYALTY for each copy of SLES that it sells. Ballmer called that payment the "IP Bridge":
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/press-conference_transcript.html
And you'll see, as well, an economic commitment from Novell to Microsoft that involves a running royalty, a percentage of revenue on open source software shipped under the agreement. .... and we're going to make clear that IP, the patent bridge, the IP bridge is an important thing.

That royalty payment says that NOVELL "BELIEVES" that Linux contains MS IP, even though there has been no proof of such a claim.

Why did Novell do this? Hovsepain claims he couldn't sell SUSE against Windows, which is probably a true statement about his sales ability, but I believe he had $308M other reasons, and a hope that Microsoft's legal pressure on other distros would force FOSS users to move to SLES and pay for it.

Stop trolling, and educate yourself.

http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq.html

"Under the patent agreement, both companies will make up-front payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each others patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft's product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products."

Novell is paying for being liable for using Microsoft patents, and will also make running royalty payments. If no one violated these patents, then why pay for protection?

It sets a legal precedent that apparently you weren't aware of. Google can help you out with that. So stop the personal attacks and shouting, and please read up on the issue.

Please remember that Novell offers much more than just the basic Linux stuff.
It offers a Novell client for windows, eDirectory, ZENworks, iFolder, iPrint, Groupwise etc, etc.
These are products targeted at managing Windows (and linux) workstations and servers but through a Linux server.
Novell products integrate seamlessly with Windows and they even (implicitly) solve many of the typical windows problems for you.

SLES on itself, however, does not offer a Windows advantage when compared to other distro's. It is the commercial closed source software that Novell offers that makes the advantage.

RedHat does not offer such services for Windows.
(Please note that I am just a Novell Open Workgroup Suite customer. http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/ )

You are aware that SCO was claiming that IBM stole code from UNIX and put it into Linux? That was the entire basis of their lawsuit.

However, Novell said "Hey, we own UNIX." (paraphrased) A judge agreed. SCO's lawsuit evaporates.

Furthermore, Novell has been fighting SCO on this since 2003.

Novell also purchased SUSE Linux in 2003 and turned it into OpenSUSE, which it also uses as the base for its commercial Linux products.

Novell has also made significant contributions to XGL, Compiz, and OpenOffice to name a few projects.

Despite the constant FUD since the Novell/Microsoft deal, Novell's business model now revolves around FOSS software, so any attempt to kill it would be cutting their own throat.

I was curious too. Apparently after Novell chose to stop active (paid, full-time) development on it some people started a fork.