Novell to Help Port Applications to Linux

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that: "Novell announced the program at its European BrainShare 2004 tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain." "Under the initiative, leading software and hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Scali Inc. will work with Novell help their software partners deploy their platforms and solutions on SUSE Linux, according to Novell Inc."

Comments

Good news for Suse...

[tcopeland]

...and to help more people get a crack at running Suse, if you've got some spare bandwidth, fire up a BitTorrent client and head over to The Linux Mirror Project and help mirror the Suse torrent.

The tracker shows lots of leechers for that distro... if you can, hop in and help out!

Re:Who could use some help

[rainman_bc]

You mean like Crossover Office?

Re:Divide and conquer

[drinkypoo]

1. All the BSDs are not entirely different, and commonly share code back and forth amongst them.
2. There's plenty of extra bullshit, but it's in ports where it belongs.
3. BSD is obscure when it comes to the desktop, but then so is Linux.
4. Solaris does not have its roots in BSD exactly:
   
   1. Solaris is SunOS plus Openwindows.
      
   2. Openwindows has traditionally meant Sun's X11 plus the openlook environment - which AFAIK still comes with the system.
5. Solaris 1.x contains SunOS 4.x, which is based on BSD.
6. Solaris 2.x contains SunOS 5.x, which is based on System V. If you choose to install the proper packages you get a bunch of BSD binaries in /usr/ucb or something like that.

SunOS4 and SunOS5 are totally different and mostly separate operating systems.

Re:color me n00b

[jedidiah]

Oracle RDBMS 10g installs and runs just fine under Debian Sarge despite Oracle only really wanting it to run on Suse and RHEL.

Linux "fragmentation" is mostly hype.

Re:Let's stop breaking Linux up.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yes.

People who develop for Windows are going to look at Linux and say, "but if we want to reach everyone we have to deal with RedHat, SUSE, Foo, and DoubleFoo."

Mostly it tends to be the Foo and DoubleFoo distros that break compatibility. This is for two main reasons.

"Boutique" Linux distros are developed are often developed by fanatics who simply don't care if "Application X" works on their distro, because obviously, "Application X" is crap, and possibly not licensed according to their politics. These distros are not for the "mainstream" and will probably fade away quickly.

Other "Boutique" distros have some very specific uses in mind, such as those that require ultra-stability or ultra-security. I was going to say like dedicated web servers, but I think the *BSDs have that sewn up. With these very narrow focuses, wide compatibility is rarely an issue.

I know people are going to flame me for writing this, but in The Enterprise, the only real Linux players right now are Novell/SuSE and RedHat. A lot of this has to do with vender support, which distros such as Gentoo/Debian/Slackware and so on do not have.

Re:Let's stop breaking Linux up.

[mrchaotica]

You're just as likely to run into that problem on any distro.

No, you're not -- it's a package management issue, and different distros have different package management. I've never run into "library hell" with Gentoo, because there's a single repository, and so everything it tested to work together. I presume Debian and BSD would work equally well. God help you if you're using Red Hat or something, though.

Re:Who could use some help

[phaetonic]

Yeah its right . It's also Open Source! Go Novell!