Novell Headed To Linux Enterprise Desktop In Asia

Bill Kendrick writes "Novell's Asia-Pacific division is working on Linux desktop trials in Hong Kong and Malaysia, with the expectation that Linux's adoption on enterprise desktops will continue to grow. They expect many more companies to start embracing it within the next 12 months." A spokesperson from Novell comments: "I don't see it as a watershed where everybody's running Linux desktops, but you'll start to see the emergence of some examples of companies that have embraced Linux and are going down that path."

Comments

More open source news for various Asian countries

[tcopeland]

...can be found at AsiaOSC.

They've got good info on each country - i.e., here's the page on Malaysia. They also serve as a mirror for Open Office, various BSDs, multiple RedHat releases, and so forth, so they're doing more than just gathering news. No banner ads, either.

Re:Partnering for a domestic content rating?

[Vancorps]

Sorry but you're plain and simply wrong. Run on over to Novell's website and look at their press releases. Novell has been involved in creating the whole chinese infrastucture. Cisco and Novell have been making massive amounts of profits in China in the last few years which is what essentially has been keeping Novell alive, same goes for Cisco for that matter. Remember not long ago Cisco execs reduced their salaries to $1 to same 10,000 jobs at Cisco, they are back to full salary now and Cisco is hiring new people. China is not as nieve as you take it for. They understand that duplication of efforts to achieve the same result is wasteful.

That doesn't mean they won't build their own desktop where there is wiggle room for error. When it comes to servers China will stick with the products that have a reputation such as Netware and Linux and shy away from tarnished companies such as Microsoft and Sco.

Re:Yeah, well...

[PCM2]

Of course you guys are trying to be funny, but it may be significant to note that both Hong Kong and Malaysia are countries where a lot of computing is liable to be done either in English or, at the very least, in a Roman character set.

English is the second official language of Hong Kong.

The official language of Malaysia is Bahasu Malaysia -- not "Chinese" -- and in written form it generally uses Roman characters.

I'd be interested to see what these desktops look like, but I'm betting Asian language support probably wasn't one of Novell's big motivating factors.

Re:It's 2004...

[Welsh Dwarf]

Where have you been these last 2 years?
To refute your posts, I will use examples from Mandrake 9.2 (some say there is a lot better, but it's always worked for my computer illiterate friends).

KDE? weird? I, and none of the above mentioned friends, have any trouble or any quirks. A lot of my friends actually appreciate stuff like the audio cd device that allows you to rip like you'd copy, and if there were a few bugs in 3.1.4, try out 3.2, the formula spell checker is bliss, no slashdotter should be without!!!

Application install/uninstall. hummmm, what's so hard about going to configuration, uninstall-software, and typing in what your program does to find it and remove it? got an rpm? just double click, enter root password and your done. One point I will admit defeat on though is package maintainers refusal to put icons in the menus though, which is a general UI sin in this day and age.

As for the Linux community elitisme, I'll accept that alt.os.linux.slackware is no place to ask how to mount, but OTOH alt.os.linux.mandrake is fine for newbe's, and really helpfull in general. Otherwise there's the mandrake forums.

Just to get the facts streight

David