Novell to Make Linux Robust and Reliable

An anonymous coward writes: "It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more "robust, reliable and scaleable" according to this Computer Weekly article. We have a lot more problems to use and keep running our NetWare 5 and 6 servers at our University than we've ever had with any of our Linux servers. I can't wait for Novell to help us out here."

Comments

Re:Novell had a lot of things going for it

[I_redwolf]

...and believe it or not, that "fine tuning" is a little more complex than "picking which set of packages to install" and "how we market it". Novell is, in fact, the perfect example of the power of a ground-up, purpose-built server platform. Linux's weakness is that it has NO equivalent; your precious Debian has no core, ground-up focus on being a server distro and ONLY a server distro.

Are you aware that you're talking out of your ass? I'm not a debian user, I've used it before and simply can attest that it's a server capable distro. They are in a constant state of testing, infact so much so that people trying to use it for desktop purposes feel the pinch of having to get all of their packages from an unstable branch. Also if i'm not mistaken, feel free to correct me but didn't Novell run ontop of dos? I mean, dos isn't really a desktop operating system to begin with.

the "immature" Linux OS? ... Yes!

[Skapare]

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

Re:Overstated but could be beneficial to Linux

[drinkypoo]

I think that if you look at the 2.5 kernel from a OS theory standpoint, you see the most mature OS available. The scheduling improvements alone are really quite amazing, and IMO will catapult Linux far ahead of the competition.

I think if you look at the 2.5 kernel from any standpoint, it's still just a kernel, and not an operating system. Linux does not an operating system make, though one additional binary with it could make it an operating system if you had all the necessary libraries, or compiled them in. (It's tempting to replace init with emacs just to prove it would be useful, but I'm not going to learn to live within emacs for a joke.)

The other major operating systems (Solaris, AIX, Windows NT, Novell even, you know the drill) are far more polished. They've already gone through their growing pains. Linux (as an OS, not a kernel) grows uncontrollably and more or less randomly due to the number of organizations and individuals working on the various Linux distributions. As such, there's always some "crucial" part of the OS that's unstable. Of course you could go with debian, which focuses on stability, but then you have to make do with yesterday's features.

The linux kernel is an amazing piece of work and really impresses the hell out of me, but no linux distribution is polished enough to be a no-brainer when you have to decide what OS to use for something that can be done on just about any of them. I'd say it lacks maturity.