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Putting Novell's SuSE Purchase In Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "
The editors over at NewsForge.com have combined their efforts to put today's big news about Novell's purchase of SUSE in perspective: what the news means in business terms and to the Linux community, today and in the future. A good read that includes quotes from industry insiders, IRC inhabitants, and NewsForge.com readers."
Another reader writes "This is a good analysis piece about how Linux has become Novell's lifeline, especially since NetWare's been dying...and post-Ximian."
All they need is to revoke SCO's UNIX license and all of Linux companies become Novell's property automatically.
I would say that linux in general is growing and so are Red hat & Suse. MS knows there is this threat happening and its good to see some competition :)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
They acted like it was no big deal, but...
(from article) "Yes, it was admitted there might be some marketing opportunities caused by Red Hat's recent "end of life" declaration for some of its products."
My guess is that this has more to do with the decision to buy than they are admitting to.
Is anybody else worried that this might turn into another Corel?
If Novell's got problems keeping up in terms of IT relevence as it is with its own core product, it could be really nasty if some of that starts to rub off on Suse and Ximian.
I don't mean to troll. I just liked it better when all these things were separated. I'd rather unification through proper standards (eg: LSB compliance) than through pocketbooks.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
About a year ago I was discussing with my friends this very scenario. It was a great decision on Novell's part, probably IMHO the only thing that could allow them to rebound back to the forefront. If they use Linux (open source) as their desktop rather than relying on Microsoft to be fair players they will be able to make a better product for the desktop.
I remember when people thought of networking they thought of Novell. I took a Win2k class not to long ago and the only people that knew about Netware was myself, one more person, and the instructor. Hopefully that will change with e-directory on the back end and Linux on the desktop. Although any company isn't 100% idealistic, Novell is far more open standard minded than Microsoft will ever be.
What happened to the standard "Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN" disclaimer that normally appears at the end of items that reference Newsforge articles?
- If Novell bought Ximian just for Mono, they should open source the Exchange Connector.
- If Novell intends to still support KDE on SuSE, they should say so quickly.
- Novell should DEFINITELY keep the desktop distro free. This will be key in infiltration and getting techies involved and informed.
- Novell should rebrand everything "LinuxWare" in following their NetWare line.
- NDS on Linux should be a huge priority. A successful, non-piecemeal central authentication system for Linux would be fantastic (yes, I know about PAM + LDAP, etc)
- A Novell client for Linux (even for 5.x and 6.x) should get official support TODAY.
- They should learn from the past, and invest in the desktop. That's where they'll sell this to potential customers, as and end to end solution.
Can anyone explain to me how Novell make money? The last time I saw a Netware deployment was 1999 IIRC. I guess I am answering my own question, in as much as they just bought a Linux distro (and good luck making money with THAT! ;) ), but in the press release they mention that they are a billion dollar company; what are the shareholders valueing here?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
What happened to BSD?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
or Novell's market share in Europe would go down the shitter. literally.
I don't see how Red Hat dropping its consumer product would make MS feel *more* threatened than it was before. Frankly, I think that's bad news for Linux. And Novell has a pretty horrible history with companies it buys, so I'm not sure this bodes well for SuSe. All in all, a pretty depressing week for Linux, IMHO. :(
Novell
The company that is responsible for much of Microsofts power. None too many can remember the early nineties when Microsoft Office was not the lock-in it is today. In those days, WordPerfect was THE wordprocessor.
Along comes Novell, replaces the marketing staff, and flushes that leadership down the toilet.
This is the same company that flushed their unquestionable dominance in the server market, too.
Too be honest, I am more concerned with Novell being an anchor to drag SuSE to the bottom with them.
I question the future of Linux with SuSE's aquisition, Red Hat's abandonment of the home user (reallistically), and the shaky ground of Mandrake.
Where does United Linux fit into all of this now?
Well it is great that Novell has embraced linux big time but whether it is late or not is yet to be seen. Recent SCO drama does not seem to have affected Novell's plans, which is good since it shows positive signs that they are not too concerned about SCO lawsuits. One thing Novell should do is to make sure that they continue devlopment on Mono. Why? because this may encourage more developers to work on it which means more application for Unix/Linux. Remember that Windows is not the reason people still use it but it is because of the application which run on it .It also makes the life of the developer easy since maintaining two versions of source code is huge headache.
First I panic that SCO, a mormon-owned company might own the IP rights to part of Linux. Now another mormon-owned company buys the 2nd-largest Linux company. So, i refuse to fund a cult by buy their products. Who knows, the get more members, the might give away free temple recommends with the boxed set.
Well, there is that fedora thing... What RH is doing makes sense from a profit perspective. Eh, I dont care that much because I run Gentoo anyway ;) also, linux is getting better and in my opinion it IS ready for the desktop. Especially in a corporate environment.
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
This is viewed as a negative impact on KDE and the tone of the article suggests that Gnome will become the defacto standard for Novell/Suse.. this makes a lot of sense, not only because Novell owns Ximian but because.. as the article states, they want to give a 'single target to ISV's'.
Since RedHat is already Gnome centered..this target is and will be GTK+, which allows for third party linking without them having to pay licensing fees.. this is where the choice of QT finally comes and bites KDE... sad but true, a little ironic though... that KDE loses out because it is not friendly enough to corporate types vis-a-vis QT while Gnome will win(at least it looks like it will) because it is.
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They should also resurrect SuSE's previous efforts in supporting the Power architecture, which more and more appears to be what will be competing with AMD64 (or vice versa.)
And not only should they keep the desktop distro free, they should create a Live Distro on CD and print up a few hundred million of them and make sure that everybody and their cat has a copy, a la AOL.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Can you really call this dropping?
It claims to be a "...community-supported open source project...a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."
Seems that the support has changed, but Red Hat was always just one support source among many, anyway.
I'm surprised they don't market Cygwin more. Granted, they want you to buy GNU Pro, but a Cygwin for Dummies style book would likely be a way to spread the word.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That roxored.
The Corp IT public doesn't trust you all that much, and you've already got a lot of explaining to do.
... die. They let their flagship directory services get overly complex and .. die. They bought several other companies that they also kind of let .. die. So Novell is respected, but not trusted. What Novell product would you roll out today? I can't think of one.
Novell is regarded by Corporate IT as a pretty confused (although formerly mighty) company. But definitely regarded as one who let their flagship server platform kind of
Now two years ago a sudden interest in becoming part of the Linux movement, "enabling" people.
I am sorry to see that SuSE did not try for the American market on their own - I think they could have made it - they have great engineering and commitment - everyone knows their support of KDE but does everyone here know that between 1995-1997 they supported XFree creation of video drivers with lots of time and money - when this process was in its infancy - I'm talking about the days here when you had to have one of 5 or 6 specific cards to run X decently?
I am guessing that SuSE thinks Novell can help them into the American market because of their contacts and longevity. I think SuSE could have done better - I don't get it - they are already working with IBM on s390 platform!!
Technically (well, OK, from a marketing perspective more than anything), the only platforms NDS ever ran on were NetWare, Windows, and Solaris.
eDirectory is the current directory product; Linux support was added around the release of eDirectory 8.5 if memory serves.
There's also (at least) DirXML, NetMail, and soon the NetWare Services for Linux (currently in open beta).
And then there's the whole training thing - the Certified Linux Engineer program has been in the works for some time (heck, it was announced at BrainShare 2003 in April).
I think it's safe to say that Novell is "betting the farm" on its Linux future. All the signs are there - so if they don't do a good job pulling it all together, the company won't survive this. I seriously doubt this will be another WordPerfect-type acquisition.
There are still a lot of Novell users out there, especially among certain groups (education, government, healthcare, law offices). I recently attended a CNA class, and all of the attendees fell into one of those catagories.
Novell actually has some pretty cool products out there, such as iFolder (syncs data between computers and a server), NetStorage (lets you access network drives from any computer with a web browser), and iPrint (lets users install their own printers via a web browser). They might not have a lot of new users, but they have a lot of old users who have no plans on changing - and they are coming out with some products that are actually pretty good.
Plus it's nice that our GroupWise email system resists most of those fun Outlook-based viruses.
I have blog like everyone else
Suse was positioned to take Redhats spot and Redhat is making critical errors, suddenly the tide is turning in favor of Suse, Novell purchases Suse, IBM backs Suse, and Redhat becomes #2.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I wonder if this is just the beginning of corporate owned and backed linux distros. Perhaps all major companies will soon want to have their own official linux distro. Novel Gets SuSE, Microsoft Gets SCO(um), Apple has to be all Apple-ish and get a Unix distro, and to top it all off, THE linux company, Redhat, shoots self in foot, outsources healing of foot to opensource community...
Strange and interesting days for the OS industry.
If it's not on Slashdot, it doesn't count!
DEAD OPERATING SYSTEM SKETCH Cast:
Mr. Praline: John Cleese
Shop Owner: Michael Palin
A customer enters an operating system shop.
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint. (The owner does not respond.)
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Owner: We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this operating system what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, Netware...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Owner: No, no, it's uh,...it's resting.
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead operating system when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner: No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable OS, Netware, idn'it, ay? Beautiful kernel!
Mr. Praline: The kernel don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner: Nononono, no, no! It's resting!
Mr. Praline: All right then, if it's restin', I'll wake it up! (bashes at the keyboard) 'Ello, Mister Netware! I've got a lovely fresh Zenworks update for you if you show...
(owner hits the keys)
Owner: There, it spewed some NDPS messages!
Mr. Praline: No, it didn't, that was you hitting the keys!
Owner: I never!!
Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!
Owner: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Praline: (yelling and typing into the console repeatedly) 'ELLO CONSOLE PROMPT!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! Time to replicate the NDS Tree!
(Rips out hard drive from computer case and thumps it on the counter. Shoves it back inside the case and reboots the system - blank screen.)
Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a dead operating system.
Owner: No, no.....No, it's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Owner: Yeah! You stunned it, just as it was finishing an I/O task! Netware stuns easily, major.
Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That operating system is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of responsiveness was due to it bein' in the process of reconfiguring itself after removing the previous owner's NDS tree.
Owner: Well, it's...it's, ah...probably pining for some dilettante dabbling.
Mr. Praline: PININ' for some DILETTANTE DABBLING?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that? Look, why did it fall flat on its back the moment I started the GUI?
Owner: Netware prefers swapping everything out to the hard drive! Remarkable file server, id'nit, squire? Lovely kernel!
Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining the system when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been printing any text at all to the screen was because of all the USELESS IPX MIGRATION ERRORS.
(pause)
Owner: Well, o'course it was spitting out those warnings! If I hadn't added IPX support, your Windows Gateway Service for Netware wouldn't be able to connect. It wouldn't be much use as a file server then, would it?
Mr. Praline: "Server"?!? Mate, this OS wouldn't "serve" if you put four million volts through it! It's bleedin' demised!
Owner: No no! It's pining!
Mr. Praline: It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This OS is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! The numbers continue to decline for Netware but Novell may
Just a thought, but now that Novell is offically in the game as a linux Vendor, won't people be scrambling over themselves for their certification products.
<p>
I know I considered getting Novell certified a few years ago, even tho I knew netware was dying, I sorta figured it was the best option available which would build on my Linux skills. Now Novell has an investmment in building Linux certification, I think this will be a major money pull for the company. It also benefit's the community as finally we get somthing which already is recognised (yes i know RHC and LCP) but novell is already embeeded in the heads of many an IT manager and is sought after.
<p>
Just a thought.
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
Dammit, I totally screwed up that post by using the wrong sort of braces. Just ignore it... Sorry, it's far too late :)
Slashdot requires me to wait another 90 seconds to post this article. It only took me 30 seconds to write the damn thing..
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
No more excuses bitch. Remember, when you're done say, "Oh, what a lovely tea party!"
I think this is leading to something big. Something big and blue...
-Now-
IBM invests $50mil in Novel.
Novel (Ximian Gnome) buys SUSE (KDE).
-2 years from now-
Novel unifies Gnome and KDE into one monster windows-eating desktop machine.
Meanwhile Redhat and Novel(SUSE) continue to make gains in the server market.
-5 years from now-
IBM buys Redhat and Novell.
Unifies them both into the ultimate Linux Distribution.
MS finally releases Longhorn but is blown out of the water by IBM's Redhat/SUSE linux distro.
IBM finally get's their revenge on Microsoft.
That's just my thoughts...
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This seems like a good plan for Novell being it is sink or swim time. Plus by having Ximian in terms of desktop. They can have Linux from server to desktop side. Being that Novell already announce that Netware 7 would have the Linux kernal. So 'Novell' will be Linux as Mac OS X ir BSD. . .
Plus the one thing lacking in corporate boardrooms is support. Novell is already in 80% of Fortune 500. So it makes it more 'legitimate' so to speak for management.
I don't know that you're so far off, but 5 years? I don't see this unfolding in 5 years. I see that as a 10 year drama minimum. IBM buying Red Hat and Novell alone could take a year to go through. Then the rebranding, refining, and marketing...yeah, that's a long term soap opera.
I hate to say it, but unless Novell does amazing things quickly, Longhorn will be a big winner.
But Blackcomb is another story.
You have got to get educated. Sounds like you were educated by the Microsoft bandwagon groupies. Get your company to fly you out to Novell's Brainshare next spring and see what you don't understand. What would I roll out today! netmail iFolder singlesignon iPrint eDirectory and I could go on! You have no idea. I have dealt with MS from DOS to Server 2003. eDirectory blows that thing called Active Directory away. iPlanet doesn't even compare. Talk about flexibility Novell was building its XML strategy long before Microsoft even knew what it was! Novell has had it's rough times, but isn't as flakey as you think. If I were a new executive taking over a company that needed to get all of a great variety of systems to talk together, Novell's solutions would be my answer. Give Novell a chance you will be super suprised!
So were does JoNaS fit into this picture?
Stop whining about Novell's purchase of WordPerfect! They bought WP to strip Groupwise out of it and then sold it because they weren't interested in the rest of the suite. It happens all of the time in every industry, so get over it!
I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name,"
There has been speculation all over the internet that Novell bought Ximian for "X." I was just addressing that. Ximian has a host of goods that ought not be lost.
Most of us are happy. Believe it or not, there are still plenty of us who feel that Novell ha[d|s] the best NOS out there, and enriching their arsenal with the awesome UI expertise and reverse engineering experience in Ximian and the power of SUSE will lead to amazing things.
One of the nicest things about the NetWare file system was the built-in undelete functionality. When a file was deleted, it wasn't overwritten immediately, and you could use SALVAGE to get it back.
If you had a lot of spare disk space, you could still SALVAGE files weeks or months later.
All I want for Xmas is for the Novell filesystem guys to sit down with Linus or Reiser or somebody and shoehorn this into Linux.
Yes RedHat has really dropped Free Linux.
Fedora is not just a change of name, it comes with no company-backed guarantees whatsoever (just community support), it's just a showcase and a beta distribution to get the enterprise packages tested in the community. Before the free RH had a small, but sufficient guarantee of support. Fedora doesn't even have the name.
For tech-savvy individuals it does not matter too much although they might fear the constant upgrade treadmill and the potential unstability, but these guys are a minority. For the real tech-savvy individual there is no shortage of choice and Fedora is just one of them anyway.
For not-super-rich corporations and institutions such as colleges, it is a disaster. They cannot afford the unfriendly per-seat licensing scheme of the RH enterprise products (even the cheaper ones), they loathe the EULA (it makes them auditable), and they've just lost the PHB-friendly support from RH.
Note this: it does not matter that Fedora provides updates of the highest quality. The PHBs will see this as an amateurish effort at best, easily hijacked at worst and will simply forbid this to run in their enterprise. Note that you cannot buy a small number of RHEL licenses and install it everywhere, the licensing agreement forbids it.
In other words this is the end of RedHat everywhere. People will be better off running stable Debian or *BSD because they have a track record of reliability whereas Fedora has nothing.
Soon the Enterprise solutions will follow them in the dump because no one will bother learning RH anymore. Current RHCEs are pissed off and will be angry at RH for devaluating their effort.
There is a high degree of probability that RH is throwing the baby with the bathwater and will be finding itself in the same league as the proprietary Unix vendors such as BSDI and SCO.
Myself I plan to evaluate Fedora when it come out, at home, but I won't touch my work RH9 installations until shortly before EOL. Then I'll probably move to something else, SUSE being a strong candidate, unless I am proved wrong with Fedora.
Fedora has a *very* short time to prove itself worthy.
Please, won't some OS return to me the fascination that I once had with linux? Please? I am seriously about to cry. I remember that first RH distro so well, the install, reading everything I could find, fighting with it, cursing it, making peace and finally loving it. Now they are all the same, corporate ball of wax. I yearn for my years of wonder and excitement, but have no clue where I will find it now. I miss my little linux.
It's even better than what Nat says ;)
:) Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that I can guarantee it'll be perfect going forward- but so far all the signs are very positive for that.
- for the first time ever, we've been able to open up our Ximian Desktop development process. You can get basically every patch we write on desktop built and applied to GNOME 2.4/2.5 via the xd-unstable channel.
- if you poke through gnome CVS, we've got skeletal code for a groupwise connector there. Again, something the old novell would never have done- release not only free code, but basically defacto API docs by way of code as well.
- up until the suse purchase this morning, we actually had a link to gnome.org on the front page of novell.com. Look around for a link to gnome.org on sun's site- it's not on the front page, and it's not in the Java Desktop main page, either.
So, like I said... it's even better than Nat says it is.
IAAL,BIANLY
Red Hat made public its end of life plans at the end of last year. Slashdot's big hoopla the other day was a leeetle delayed. See the original announcement. Anyone paying even a slight bit of attention shouldn't have been surprised -- there was even relatively-widespread analysis in the geek press.
Novell could be half a year behind and still have time for "months of negotiations". And it's a big company, so it's not suprising for something like this to take that long.
Slackware
This is a natural counter movement to the deeply flawed and virus-infested Microsoft monoculture. Free association, not forced assimilation, is what cooperative and self-reliant people desire. And in the end, our operating systems, and the computers they run on, are community-building tools par excellence.
So we're all just building a better neighborhood, and trying to help all our relatives "leave the plantation" as it were. It's a big job and it won't be finished in our lifetimes.
There's a fundamental bit of truth expressed by all the Star Wars and Star Trek imagery used so often here. Liberty and freedom of choice in all good things are precious, worth working and fighting for. Hard and long.
Netware is a great & stable network operating system but difficult for developers compared to Windows. So Novell can hook into the Open Source community and get access to the largest base of developers
With Novell's global support & partners they can provide a very nice alternative.
A eDirectory enabled distributed network of Netware X servers (SUSE) with Desktop X workstations (Ximian) all kept up to date with ZenWorks X (Red Carpet) would be a nice solution for a lot of companies.
ps I'm trademarking those product names! ;-)
Cheers
VikingBrad
They will be better off running Apple's reliable OS X on the desktop, on elegant, competitively priced hardware, and cooperating quite nicely with corporate Linux, thank you.
Now that's a provacative statement, and leads to the question of whether the demise of RH will lead to a general yawning at
Back on topic, SuSE has YaST, right? No experience with that beast (for development purposes, `./configure && make && make install` seems to fit the bill, anyway... ),
but one wonders if deeper pockets like Novell might actually develop a widely acceptable configuration tool...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It would be interesting to see how many linked stories (to newforge or any other OSDN site, thinkgeek anyone?) have the disclaimer. And how many don't. If there's a need to put it on some, shouldn't they put it on all of them? If not, why add unnecessary text?
Fedora has a *very* short time to prove itself worthy.
Why do we need more than one community project to produce a general-purpose distro? It's a waste of our limited resources at this stage of the game. As you already mentioned, Debian is a more solid distribution. It also has by far the largest and most mature community and a high degree of professionalism. If the Fedora people (and others) joined forces, we could more quickly smooth out the couple rough edges of Debian and make it THE distribution of choice for the mainstream.
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.
Hardly elegant or competively priced, unless you dont mind plunkering down $2K-3K everytime you want the latest hardware (unless you dont mind the glorified monitors Apple is pushing)
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Argh, brainfart... I meant to say "LinuxWare". Doh. *slaps self*
I worked with Novell. As long as you just wanted file and print services they were ok. If you wanted to run an application, it was a complete waste of time. As soon as NT 4.0 was in SP2 there was no point in wasting time with Novell. SUSE is toast. So is Novell. Linux? Bye Bye.
Agree wholeheartedly with the comment you made about reliability as I have first hand experience of that sort of uptime in a past life.
;)
The thing that let Novell down was the quality of third party software running as part of Netware "NLM" Netware loadable modules.
Interbase 4.0 (or was it 3.0) could reliably ABEND (terminate with extreme prejudice for all you youngsters) just by sending "prepare" twice on the same query using Delphi 1. Took me 4 tries before I realised that was the cause... We did get our development server within a week though
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Happy days...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
They should they should they should...
You people are really ridiculous!
That guy at Princeton is right!
You're a bunch of really annoying jackasses!
Mr. Messman, Novell's boss, is completely financially motivated. His longlasting background in Oil made him, in the eyes of a 14% stakeholder in Cambridge Technology Partners (CATP) an excellent new CEO for the company. Cambridge now longer exists but is now part of Novell. My big beef with mr. Messman is that his management style of Cambridge was similar to the management style of a large oil company. Which is to say: Strict cost control on a heavily asset based company. But assets are not the same as technology, inventions and this kind of IP related business does not compare with the OS services that SuSe provides.
My question is: "What makes a beancounter from the oil industry a good fit for an international IT services company?" especially if you take into account his trackrecord with Cambridge Technology Partners?
maybe the American lunar expedition did not leave Hollywood at all.
"It will take at least 60 days to figure out how the merger will work," said Messman. Is it a self-fullfilling prophesy waiting to happen or something silly noticed by a guy with too much time on his hands while Gentoo compiles? You decide.
(Not intended as a troll, I am posting to clarify why Novell has remained untouched by the younger masses that havent been smitten down by the touch of their anti-piracy department. Any use of language is expressed to express the full extent of the situations.)
If Novell didnt fuck over some of the younger folk over and over with their licensing scheme, some of us would have actually tried Netware and the like. I dont mind being able to turn on a server, and not have to reboot due to software errors. Then again, they're the kind that'll steal a kid's hardware cluster and give it to a public school just because they wanted revenge granted via the court system.
It's a pity that they did great work, given that they do well for storage and directory applications, but it's a bad idea to use their licensing system to bastardize an otherwise decent linux based product line, and screw another generation over.
I'm sure some of you will cry "they were only protecting their assets", but they arent making any friends when they flaunt that donation over other than the kind that you get for forking the cash for Business Software Alliance membership, with benefit of freely deceiving courts into reducing individuals to smoldering ashes.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think MS is the real winner from those 'decissions'.
1 RH is not going to promote his desktop line.
2 Suse is going to try to use Mono as the underlying glue for the desktop.
3 MS gains access to Linux desktops.
4 EEE
Bad new for linux sirs, bad news.
Sigs ?? Mods ?? Karmas ??
What's in a sig?
For some time I half-jokingly referred to Netware as Novell Notware or Novell Crashware.
Our 4.x servers used to go down a lot. VREPAIR, VREPAIR, VREPAIR,... Two days uptime is what we got, if we were lucky.
The issues never were really resolved. We just had to live with them. The patches that were released by Novell and that we installed over the course of a full year gradually reduced the frequency of the crashes to once a week. Shifting our load from the Novell servers to other platforms probably helped as well.
Now the Novell servers are still there but hardly get any use. And they still crash occasionally.
YMMV.
My experience learning Netware was made much easier as it was similar to the DECnet systemss that I had been using for the previous few years while at uni.
... eventually get to work and know all about MS products, and so they recommend MS solutions - the managers having not heard about Novell much either and also seeing MS everywhere accept these recommendations.
Sure it was complex getting the hang of installing printer queues for the first time, but soon they became second nature. Everything followed logically.
I loved the fact that there were not applications running on the server - they don't need to, it's there to serve data, not run MSOffice.
I found the fact that it was basically hardware independant as long as you kept the same network cards. Drop the netcard and the harddrive into a faster box, and turn it on - how simple could it get. (of course this was netware 3.12)
We've still got a netware 3.12 server at my work. It hosts a database for an application that we stopped using regularly a few years ago, gets backed up occasionally as the data on it doesn't change. We never got around to moving the database to our newer faster NT servers, as novell was much more responsive at returning data. Our old Novell 3.12 P2-233, could server data faster than our P3-800 NT Servers - and it didn't corrupt the 50 user access mdb either.
My thoughs on why Novell seems to have fallen out of mainstream use is that the new IT staffers have grown up hearing about Microsoft in the news all the time. They see that MS have market dominance as that is all they hear - go off and study MS software
And then the systems are all running MS software - people soon forget just how stable a novell system was.
Our novell box goes down when the power is out and the runtime on the ups is all but gone.
"Soon the Enterprise solutions will follow them in the dump because no one will bother learning RH anymore."
I totally disagree with this (troll???). If you've got Debian or Slackware at home, it's not going to be too much of a jump to configure a RH box is it??? I work with lots of blue chips, fortune 500s and public sector organisations, and a few hundred for a server support contract is not going to worry any of them... But not having to spend 50k on a new Solaris or HP-UX box is a mighty big carrot to dangle in front of any IT manager - especially if he knows his enterprise software vendors are backing and promoting a cheaper alternative platform (as for example Oracle are backing RH and to a lesser extent SUSE right now).
I'm not pleased that my RH9 installs aren't going to be supported any more, but I'm happy to move to something else knowing that RedHat are pushing Linux into the heart of the enterprise. A low cost and low risk alternative to Microsoft, fighting them where Sun never could. If Novell can get their act together with SUSE, then they'll have something to fight Microsoft with too. And that can't be a bad thing...
fyi. there were 5 Marx Brothers :
Chico, Zeppo, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo.
Gummo and Groucho performed on stage together but Gummo became the manager of the other four when their careers took them to Broadway and the movies.
http://www.marx-brothers.org/
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is great, I'm Irish, and I basically feel obliged to support Euro O.S.' where possible but I don't like SuSE and.... ..now I don't feel obliged to anymore..
because now their American, and they are C0RP0RAT3, booooo....
Think I'll just use Red Hat or Mandrake from now on!!!
I haven't seen this posted here yet, but it was posted in the earlier article announcing the acquisition. Upon completing the acquisition of SuSE, Novell will own not only Ximian's mono exchange connector but SuSE's open exchange server. It allows Novell to say, "You can use our drop-in exhange server without changing your clients." or, "You can use our exchange client without changing your server." The ultimate goal can be open standard on both ends, but customers are less afraid of change when it's incremental.
Apple have come up with some innovative products, but their market share remains tiny. Sadly, though, many buyers have been mislead by the marketing and eye-candy, and desperately try to justify their overpriced purchases to themselves on forums around the Net. Let's see what they really mean...
"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
"Despite the fact that Linux is just code and can't WANT to be anything, I truly believe that it'd love to be a single-vendor, single-platform, sluggish half-proprietary OS with dwindling market share. Linux would love to throw away its impressively growing corporate takeup for that."
"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
"It's no hassle to use a plethora of keyboard combos to make up for the patronising one-button mouse. Despite the fact that my hands have FIVE fingers, and multiple-buttons make Web browsing so much more pleasant, I prefer my computer to be treat me like a special-needs child."
"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done. It feels like KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, and I can't change to a light and fast WM, but those drop-shadows must make me work so quickly!"
"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
"OpenDarwin.org and its community of about 27 is surely not just a token gesture by Apple. Pretty much nobody uses pure Darwin, and all the crucial components of the system are closed and require me to spend money just to get major OS updates, but they're really helping the community somehow."
"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
"My iBook was made by in Taiwan by AlphaTop and has design and build quality flaws (needing foam sheets jammed in to stop the common problem of the keyboard scratching the screen). But it's silvery and cost far more than an x86 laptop of better spec, so it must be much higher quality!"
"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
"Although there's truth in PPC being more elegant than x86, it's crushing that the top-of-the-range 1.5 GHz chip is slaughtered by the equivalent 3 GHz Pentium 4. However, Steve Jobs showed some vague Photoshop filter benchmarks at the last MacWorld, so being a leprotard, I'm convinced."
- First, they got GroupWise when they aquired WordPerfect. When they later sold WordPerfect, they kept GroupWise and its now evolved into version 6
- When UnixWarewas aquired and later sold, they kept some of the developers. Some of these guys then developed Novell Internet Messaging System. This was a scalable, cross-platform system adhering religously to standards only - unheard of within Novell. It has since been renamed to NetMail, version 3.5 is just around the corner. It'll run on NetWare, Linux, and Windows.
- BTW at one point NetMail was going to be the Exchange killer, and they had almost completely reverse-engineered some of the Exchange protocols
- Then Ximian was aquired, and Evolution and the Exchange Connector were put more in focus. No doubt there are lots of plans for a Evolution connector for GroupWise as well.
- Meanwhile, plans to port GroupWise to Linux were announced earlier this year at Novell's BrainShare conference.
- Now, they're aquiring SuSE which has been touting OpenExchange Server (now at v4.5) as a lower cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
- Oh yeah, and they have GroupWise Messenger, a secure instant messaging system with almost no interesting feature (aka "business-oriented")
What should they bet on?- GroupWise has a full-text search, simple document management, a great web interface, cool viewer technology. It's also nicely integrated with Novell's LDAP server eDirectory for easy management.
- NetMail has high performance, scalability (ie. 100.000 users per server).
- Evolution obviously has a great email client
- OpenExchange Server is a full-featured, low-priced Exchange competitor, and obviously in strong competition with GroupWise.
Either ditch OpenExchange Server and continue with porting GroupWise server to Linux, or they'll stop porting GroupWise. Whatever, but make it clear to customers what their recommended options are! Their messaging strategy is badly in need of a makeover.Internal problems:
Novell's developers - from Novell, Ximian, SuSE - are now all over the place - geographically at least. It not only has to get them all working together (not against each other). Famously, for a long time their GroupWise and NetMail product groups didnt even talk to each other. Culture clashes could be waiting: it's one thing to integrate Ximian, a cool company with easy-going people, but now they are bringing in Zhe Germans. They can be as head-strong about doing things their way as the product managers of Utah.. It but first needs to figure out what it's product set is going to be.
And it's marketing strategy? It certainly lags their merger and aquisitions and their product strategy by at least six months.
But its nice to see Novell has some guts. Maybe they even have the guts to go aggressively after the desktop market. They'll certainly need something to replace the huge revenue income that NetWare represented, and SuSE Linux servers arent going to do it alone..
Good luck, Novell.
You gotta get one of those. Or maybe a penguin with a red N on the chest?
The office I'm at now had Novell when I started here 3 years ago. It was my first time touching Netware but after realizing what era the interface was developed in I felt right at home. (FYI it tends to look a bit Lynx like in "graphical" mode and apps are launched with LOAD so the CLI feels a bit like Commodore)
We had an HP netserver P2-400 providing mail & calaboration (groupwise), AutoCAD license server and file/NDS server. With the exception of a freaky problem when someone used the webmail interface connector from another office crashing our groupwise, uptimes were typically 3-6 months with the majority of downtime being building power or installing service packs.
Network searches were lightning fast, even searching for text within a document. The office was ~30 engineers & designers with pretty much all files stored and used over the network; 10-20MB files were the norm. The server handled that plus mail functions without a single hiccup, not like the dedicated Exchange servers I'd seen running on similar hardware with similar usage.
Oh and did I mention we had gigs and gigs of mail on the server? Groupwise's databases were an incredibly efficient storage system and while I always feared a database corruption it never happened.
This was all Netware 4 and Groupwise 5.5 so we were out of date and it still ran better than NT 4/Exchange or even some 2k/Exchange servers I'd seen.
We never rolled out Zenworks because of a head-office snafu where our new corporate masters got whined & dined by M$ resulting in a complete switchover to Windows/Exchange. Sigh.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
On the other hand, if it meant people could more easily be weened off the Outlook dependency make it cheaper. Things are always so much more complex than they first seam!
If it makes a profit of course they shouldn't open source it. They should carry on making the profit that ultimately subsidises the things that most of us might find useful like Mono.
I got deep into NetWare before the market got taken over by microsofties. The development of NLM (NetWare Loadable Modules) aka: server deamons, was no more difficult than developing with C/C++ on Linux. The Watcom compiler was not the prettiest thing but it made FAST CODE! Load up an NLM that run BTrieve data reports right off the server and see a 2 hour report go down to 2 minutes!
I also got deep into NDS management and security. I was the NDS expert in Risk Management Services at a (very) large bank. I could make NDS do things that we just shouldn't talk about. There just wasn't anything (nor is there yet) as secure as a well oiled, well designed NDS tree.
Whenever we switched something from NDS to Windows NT/2000/whatever, It took 3 times the hardware to handle 1/2 (at best) the load. It also took 3 times the personnel to handle the same number of servers (up to a 9 times increase in personnel). Most people don't understand the implications of trying to use a PDC/BDC for anything other than PDC/BDC management! Even the new stuff stinks. NetWare would run a huge NDS partition, load up a huge (if pooly written) BTrieve application and still handle 1,000 users' worth of file and print sharing without a hicup.
Does anyone remember the corporate enterprise licenses where you could just keep installing the same 1,000 user license on the same server to bump it up 1,000 MORE at a time. Well, try running a stable, fast, and working 1,000 user environment on 1 M$ server. It just won't work. I managed 1,500 user NetWare environments on old hardware.
Sure, the learning curve was steep. It's not as steep as Linux. It's no where near as steep as that of a stable Windows server. No newbys, I'm not talking about the simple gui install stuff that makes everyone think that Microsoft is easy. I'm talking about actually making a Windows environment stable in a large and complex corporate environment. Everything is hidden in the registry. One false tweek and the whole damned server has to be rebuilt. With NetWare (much like Linux/Unix) one false tweek means you have to boot up without loading NLMs and undo the tweek, then reboot... "viola Ethel a working server."
I sent Novell an email about 2 1/2 years ago suggesting a solid leap into Linux+NDS+NSS+ZenWorks+MARKETING!!! It looks like they took my advice (or someone else's) and ran with it. I just hope that they actually learn to market this thing. If so, M$ is toast. The technical advantage of NetWare 4.11 (or was that InterNetWare) was for more advanced than anything that M$ currently has. No, again newbys, I'm not talking about bells and whistles. I'm talking about the ability to successfully deploy an enterprisewide managed solution that can control, not only the servers, but the entire enterprise, down to workstation software management and printer management FROM ONE CONSOLE! SUCCESSFULLY!!!
Boy, was that a rant or what?!
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
When you say difficult you do the word injustice.
A platform that a dereferencing a null pointer requires a reboot before you can reload your code and if you do it twice may require a walk down the hall to your test system to hit the magic plug isn't "difficult." It's learning to swim by being tossed in the rapids. I still think those it's a better way to learn to program than on these mamby-pamby clean up your mistakes operating systems.
When a bug makes you get out of your chair, you learn not to make them! ;)
> If it makes a profit of course they shouldn't open source it.
Not so sure. If it doesn't make a lot of money, imagine the good faith Novell wins from the community by open sourcing something as potentially important and useful as Connector. Novell is a software company that has, in the past, produced proprietary products. GPL stuff is new to them. It would sure be nice to see them set the tone with a "gift" like that.
God I hope someone mods you down.
Who told Novell what to do? It is now wrong to speculate on what you'd do if you were them? Are you somehow confused by the word "should?"
If you don't want to read this stuff, get the fuck off Slashdot. As customers, we have a right to tell companies what we want. And if they're smart, they'll listen. No one goes to a grocery story and tells customers what to buy, but you bet your goddamned ass customers tell the grocery store what to carry. And you can bet that those with a vested interest in a car dealership, like the owners, decide what to sell.
For the record, I - the original author of the comment - maintained a NetWare 5.1 tree that had over 60 servers for a branch of the US Navy. So I think I'm entitled to a express my opinion about what Novell should do. Of course, they don't have to listen, but then, I don't have to recommend we keep Novell products either.
Now go troll somewhere else please.
I found it amusing, in an oriental sort of way.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
But here goes...
:)
First off, congrats to Nat and Miguel and all the Ximian folks. I love XD2 and Evolution and the OOo redistro they've put together. SuSE gave me what I wanted when I first booted into linux with YaST and all that good stuff. KDE was pretty. Ximian, though, with Red Carpet and all their great software, gave me what I needed to stay put. In fact, they gave me reason to never go back to Windows on my primary machine, and I guarantee you I've used Windows as long as any other 21-year-old nerd out there
This really looks like a great deal all around--SuSE can keep KDE for all their bretheren, but with XD2 available defacto, with (presumably) better tweaks for SuSE... It's great news, as far as I can tell.
My gut feeling is that SuSE, Ximian, and Novell are all going to shake shit up here really soon!
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Part of that's Oracle, though -- it frequently takes me about 6 hours or so to get an install done right (and my company's Oracle DBA takes even longer).
Re:Where's the big red N topic icon?
.com
Just like Sun was the dot in
Novell is going to be the N in Linux.
Novell now has some solid pieces in place:
My guess is a consulting firm or two are up next to handle support and enhancements.
Novell will then have every piece in place it needs to pimp-slap Microsoft from the small business market: reputation, technology, and experience.
I'm also expecting to see some partnerships between Novell, IBM, and Sun to ensure that Mainframe, Power, and SPARC processors get tier 1 status alongside AMD64, x86, and Itanium.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No RPMs, just hours and days of your CPU pegging out on cc processes.
... like most distros do. Or you can "emerge" a lean clean rockin machine.
... Victor Borge
Despite the long setup, it is really easy to install new packages. They've really got a slick system going.
You can generate a bloated system with crap you'll never use
I hope Gentoo is around for years.
--
A smile is the shortest distance between two people
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
.. as do both my wives and our 17 web-footed children.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sorry no I'n not trolling, I'm serious.
For example Fedora 1.0 was released yesterday. If it had been a RedHat release (10?), everybody would be falling over themselves to review it, comment on it, dissect its features, etc. Do a search on Google for
"fedora core 1.0 review" and look for yourself: nothing (as of the time of writing). My Australian mirror still doesn't have the distribution!
Instead people are getting the message that RedHat has gotten proprietary and if you want to run it you have to fork $180 per seat per year. No thank you.
Fedora looks good on paper, but fewer people are bothering. I'm pretty sure Fedora will be far less popular than RedHat ever was.
If you are a sysadmin and have a Debian or Slackware box at home why would you recommend RHEL to your PHB? It's not very different but why bother with the small irritating differences, the "inferior" package system and the marketing crap? Get Debian with a support contract, you already know how it works and it might be cheaper.
Note: I've been running RH since version 3, and at first I thought that this move might hold some promise, but thanks to the few confusing messages from RH and the PR disaster (run Windows at home, says RH CEO!), I'm now less sure that this move will be positive.
I am an old-hat Novell engineer. But one with experience in deploying new Novell environments: I have implemented a Netware 6 cluster with ZenWorks3.2 for an education site. I am now implementing a ZENworks 4 deployment environment in a Microsoft only server environment.
I have had lots of experience with Novell and the thing that kept me believing in their products was that troubleshooting was always effective. You could dive into the problem, find some errors or inconsistancies and fix the settings for those. Then it would work again. Now that I am deploying on W2k I am finding that the troubleshooting is much more complex. The events in the logging are less helpfull and give little insight or meaning and basically you are relying on the MS knowledgebase to already have the answer and find that. In my opinion with Novell one has more ability to find the solution on your own.
The thing that hurt Novell the most was this forced mariage with M$ for at least the client part of the solution. Although with Zenworks they offer the best tool to manage these. They couldn't keep up with developing tools to make an Application Server, so they started relying on Apache, Tomcat and other open source offerings to keep up. To me this push to integrate the product Ximian and then the desktop of SuSE is a late but needed step to break the marriage with M$. As I am a OSS fan in private I loudly cheer this. I cannot wait to deploy a eDirectory based linux server at home, fully intergrated into but the filesharing and the desktop version. To me, this is the best of all worlds.
Hans
Btw: First post!
There seems to be a lot of agreement about the good technical abilities and intentions of Novell, so the future could be a good one.
It really comes down to the people in management though. Have those earlier managerial types that were more interested in playing legal games than in technology moved on? Or are they still there and destined to wake up and start shovelling shit again at some point?
Maybe the old managers weren't to blame at all. Sometimes a really bad egg in the legal department gains ascendancy and taints everything that teccies and management worked hard to achieve. We'll probably never know.
Be that as it may, let's hope that it all works out this time. A good partnership between Novell and the Linux community could be a great thing. All it needs really is recognition that it is a partnership, and that you don't piss on your partner, ever.
"Dropping"? Well, it is "branching". Hard to convince a business to try a "Fedora community-based thing" because that is different now from the monolithic distribution. A few -- just as some small businesses and 3rd world offices might run OpenOffice instead of StarOffice.
In reality, it isn't much of a change. RedHat never was excited about taking on Microsoft at the desktop. But Fedora proves there's no free lunch. Nice that they are keeping a RedHat-derived option open for techies and it keeps their hand in it if the desktop does take off. At the same time, it isn't very pretty that by talking trash about linux on the desktop, they are trashing all the other companies that are working on that goal _now_.
When I started wondering whether I could offer a PostgreSQL DB product running on Cygwin, reality put a scare into me. "Well, we'll just install a few hundred meg of unix-emulation onto your boot partition and the DB server will run in that. Oh, and it'll use some ports so work that into your security." Yeah, Windows sysadmins will line up for that.
No, Cygwin ranges somewhere between "interesting" and a cool tool for unix people who have to deal with Windows boxes. I suppose they could hurt MKS some, but would it be worth it in the end?
Tomomma is the default hostname you get on SuSE (if you don't know SuSE's connection with Novell, go read some more posts) when you boot its LiveCD "rescue" system.
For quite a few years I kept a CD(#1) of Debian and a CD of SuSE in my "toolbox" whenever people asked me to troubleshoot their boxes, install windows etc.
Debian uses cfdisk which was a very handy partitioner, and I could easily boot to it. And SuSE has YoMomma login (or was it YoMama?) which came in handy when I had to do something on harddrive and couldn't get the machine to boot - it had all the tools I'd need and was easy to use.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
On Thursday I went to the Novell/linux seminar. IBM and VMWare reps were also present (and had plenty to say; IBM is doing some interesting things with inexpensive blade servers that will run any OS at the drop of an image, and VMWare Server is getting quite to drool for).
Anyway, it sounds like they've got their act together as to where they want to take this, and a fairly clear vision of a combined and/or interactive Netware and SuSE/Ximian desktop presence, with some roadmap as to what long-term support they'll be offering (mainly of concern to businesses). As to whether they can market it out of their usual paper bag remains to be seen.
Novell confirmed that what's already opensource will stay that way, tho did say their proprietary stuff will stay closed; however, they didn't make a religion of it (and I know -- because I asked at the previous seminar -- that there is some push inside Novell to opensource Netware 3.x, so it may eventually befall that their other old unsupported products' source becomes available, particularly with the Ximian and SuSE influences on board).
http://www.novell.com/linux/ --basic info
http://www.novell.com/training/ -- somewhere thereabouts are free downloadable coursewares for their new Netware/linux certifications. (Beware of generally old-browser-hostile site.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It was a pretty good meet, although the realtors definitely had better food...
Sneaked next door for lunch, didja? :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If the company becomes NoSE, then they should rename it COLD Linux --- "It runs no matter what you don."
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
This could be interesting, Novell's main software seems to have been the server side. Now with the purchases it has made it can make stab at the corp desktop market. And it has solid server products for its upcoming netware range.
I think its going to get interesting esp with M$ price/license changes.