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Ahhh, consultants. Obviously they don't get Linux. And would never, ever recommend Linux on the Desktop.

Disclaimer: is my employer, but this is personal opinion.

Today, if you want a freely available desktop-oriented Linux distribution, you have to hunt far and wide. If you looked a week ago, you would have Fedora Core 2, which suffers from this major bug, Mandrake 10 Community - which is a pain to update. Knoppix is good but it's not really meant for installation though it can be done. A quick look on SuSe's downloads page shows that they do offer it free (minus commercial components), but it's either in LiveCD format or has to be installed via FTP.

So, unfortunately today, we don't have the luxury we used to of being able to simply grab the 3 iso's for RedHat and installing them onto our system. Sure we could use Debian, or Gentoo, or even go out on a limb and try FreeBSD - but none of these are desktop-oriented, though you can achieve a nice desktop system if you work at it.

I think that's what he's talking about. :)

it was paper launched a while ago but still a few days from being able to buy (not pre-order) - May 5th for UK.

I've just been reading some detals and found this nice jab at Intel:

"For example, a computer with an AMD Athlon 64 processor with 1.8 GHz is faster than a 32-bit computer with a Pentium(tm) 4 processor with 3.2 GHz."

"you're only allowed to install a certain version of Windows 2000, with servicepacks up to a certain number, and one hotfix. No other servicepacks or hotfixes are allowed"

And it's the same with SuSE. If you look at the SuSE press release you will see that the certidication is limited to "SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 with Service Pack 3". Next service pack arrives it will need recertified.

Also there's no way of knowing (that I can see) what extra software was installed. Sendmail? Apache? Or are we just talking a basic kernel and networking?

Probably too late to get read by anyone, but here goes anyways.

It is no coincidence they bought Suse and not another distro and here is why.

First they bought Ximian. What is Ximian good at? Right, Evolution, the Outlook clone.
Then they buy Suse. What are they good at? Server software? Yes that too ... but more importantly OpenExchange, the Exchange clone.

If I was in the position of the Novell executives, I would do the same thing.
The reason why most businesses use Microsoft products is because executives like the Outlook Calendar and they "need" Word/Excell.

Novell now has everything inhouse to provide a viable alternative to Microsoft. Suse Servers with OpenExchange, Suse workstations with Evolution and OpenOffice. They will also port their Novell management tools so Active Directory can be replaced.
Another good thing for Novell is that OpenExchange is compatible with Outlook, and Evolution with Exchange. This way they can guarantee an easy migration.

This will be a good thing for a more rapid Linux adoption, but this is not a good thing for free software (free as beer and Free as speech). I'm not sure, but I believe OpenExchange is not Free. You have to pay for the software, but I can't seem to find a license to check if the software is Free.
The Management tools will be proprietary. So they have an edge over other distributions. Let's just hope they keep Evolution Free. They own the majority of the IP of Evolution now so they are able to change the license for the parts written by Ximian.

Good for Novell, good for faster Linux adoption by companies. Bad for Free Software and Microsoft.

Candyban

Have you considered Suse Open Exchange?

I'd keep all of the exchange zealots happy, and is significantly cheaper than exchange.

(I don't work for Suse)

Alex

They discussed and tested the following

1. SuSE OpenExchange Server 4
2. Samsung Connect
3. Stalker CommuniGate
4. Easygate Workgroup
5. Bynari Insight Server

The April archive is online and link is here. There are a number of PDF files with the article details in them.

SuSE offer support to those in the UK (and elsewhere) that want it. It is just more FUD that you do not get support with Linux, it is just an option to save your cash and not buy it if you do not want it.

In addition to the german and general engliush info, there's UK specific info here.

Wind back to August 1998 - I tried originally installed Red Hat on an old Axil (that's a Sun clone, in this case of a SparcStation 20). It was an absolute nightmare as there weren't any easily-obtainable bootable CDs, and we ended up netbooting it. The thing panicked repeatedly, and as for compiling kernels we might as well have compiled using pencil and paper for all the good it did.

Now come to the present day. I use the Slackware SPARC port, which in my view is absolutely excellent.

Here's the rundown on what was good (and bad) from each distribution I tried:

• Red Hat: Admittedly not tried it recently, but seemed to suffer from quite a few problems including kernels not compiling. Last tried 2.2.0, I think it was RH6. Install was reasonably trouble-free once we got it netbooting, and installation using the console port was fine.
• SuSE: Ruediger will kill me for this, but I had no ends of problems with it. The console port is not supported very well for installs, so you have to connect a monitor up to it - which for most people won't be accessible. That said, it seemed to work fine once installed and screwed down. Installed via CD, taken from SuSE's website.
• Debian: Mostly my unfamiliarity with Debian let me down here, but I've got a nameserver box running it quite happily now. It's a SS20 with 32M RAM and it ticks along fine, coping quite adequately with huge zonefiles. Installed via CD taken from a local Debian mirror.
• Slackware: A newcomer, but I'm a Slackware whore anyway so I was pretty good with it. Disadvantage is that the ISO just installs the bare essentials, so you have to download the rest of slackware-current and install it later. Big problem in that it didn't detect the basic network card on a SS5, SS10 or SS20 for an NFS install, but seemed to work OK on an Ultra5.

Linux on a Sparc copes wonderfully with lots of database transactions and loads of I/O, certainly better than an Intel box will. In my day job we've had really good success running MySQL on a Sparc, but we're now porting to Oracle on Solaris (but only really cos they haven't released it for Sparc Linux!).