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Novell Linux Desktop Released
KingDaveRa writes "Novell have just released Novell Linux Desktop. Its based on SuSE Linux, but is cut down quite a bit to just include essential apps - perfect for a corporate environment. Novell claim to not be going directly after Windows, but rather pushing this as legacy Unix users. The Register has a take on this too."
Yes, it costs money. $59 USD. There IS an evaluation version available for free. From their site:
NOTE: The only limitation of this evaluation software is the duration you will have free access update.novell.com. Should you choose to license Novell Linux Desktop, you will be provided with a new registration code, which you can easily update in your desktop in order to re-enable access to update.novell.com for product patches and updates.
The last version of SuSE had a "personal" edition, which was 1 CD including source. Very cut down. Had OO.org, Firefox + Thunderbird, KDE but no GNOME, very limited dev tools, but adequate for web browsing & basic office work, which is what I assume this is aimed at.
Unfortunately this is iFolder 2.x, the same one that has been available for quite some time.
/really/ cool, is still a ways from being complete. :(
iFolder 3, the p2p one built on mono, the one that looks
I cant believe more distros dont do this. Ubuntu do it quite well. Its a one CD install which is the way it should be, not download 3 or 4 to get a piece here and a piece there. Ubuntu gives you a nicely polished install with enough to satisfy most people and almost everything works out of the box.
Word of warning though Ubuntu may not be the best option for dual boots on Dell Laptops (more correctly it seems to be the debian installer). It nuked my win2000 install on one and refuses to see any partitions on the other and will only accept the whole device.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Celebrate the finer things in life
That's sad now that Novell just got a $536M infusion of cash from MS.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Ximian people have never claimed that KDE was going away. That was the conclusion of others (less well informed).
This offering from Novell however seems to default to GNOME but includes KDE, unlike SuSE which defaults to KDE.
The flash animation shows off GNOME, and their OpenOffice.org-version is GNOMEified, with GNOME-icons and the new GNOME file-selector.
Their main applications are a gnomified OpenOffice.org, Evolution (gnome), and Mozilla Firefox (uses gtk widgets), GAIM (gtk/gnome), Red Carpet and Yast. Yast is the only Qt application given any advertisement. All the rest is GTK+/GNOME or made to look like it is.
SuSe 9.2 (Firefox) has come with slashdot bookmarked as well, I think it's more of a Firefox thing than anything.
I hope Novell is very smart in the way they market it.
Yup, they are -- if not marketing, at least sales.
We're probably going to switch to it at my workplace -- we're certainly going Novell's SLES9 on the servers we ship, as soon as I finish handling the technical headaches involved with getting off of RHEL3. (For the workstations, they're currently a very aging, heavily customized RH9 environment -- no longer supported, so we're moving them over too).
And why? Besides the price point, and the goodies SLES9 comes with that RHEL3 doesn't, there's one huge advantage Novell has:
Their "sales staff" has technical people too, and they're helpful and available. We were feeding money into Red Hat, and getting practically nothing back by way of support. Novell, on the other hand, is giving us all kinds of support (and access to goodies like the NLD beta) -- and we haven't even paid them yet!
I have no doubt that Red Hat would do the same thing for a big enough shop -- but right now we're a small, cash-impacted startup. The level of support they've given us already shows an impressive level of dedication. We're impressed, anyhow.
(The first time they visited us, they brought along one employee who was formerly Ximian, one who was formerly SuSE, and one who was a Noveller all along. I took that as Good Tidings as to their directional change, as well).
I've actually noticed that RPM and ISO releases have been released faster with Novell than when SuSE was operating alone. Development and beta RPMs seem to be posted faster, and ISOs (which were never released under a standalone SuSE) are released for their personal product line.
A lot of people seem to get the Personal edition via ISOs or over-the-counter, then point YaST2 to the FTP site where they can install the remainder of the RPMs.
YaST2 treats FTP sites the same as DVD or CD installations as well, so adding/removing/updating RPMs via FTP uses the exact same interface and means as a local media installation. Very nice.
Plus you can hook YaST2 into unsupported releases and get the latest SuSE-created KDE, Gnome and other packages.
It's also exactly what the average home user needs. The average user doesn't need every server and every compiler known to man, and shouldn't have to decide whether to install stuff they have no knowledge of and aren't likely to ever care about. And it's that much less stuff to worry about securing against the big bad outside world.
When and if these home users DO care, they can always switch to a full-featured disty.
And hopefully this will make it a bit more average-hardware friendly. TCO goes out the window if your existing and otherwise perfectly-good equipment has to be replaced to run it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I tried Xandros Open Circulation on the weekend and this distro is the closest to what a home user would expect from a "windowed" OS.
The install was FLAWLESS. Truly. Network setup a breeze and it even found my Windows shares and an OLD SoundBlaster 16 ISA sound card. I haven't had any problems with it since installing it.
I've tried many of the other distros and they are just not ready for the home or small business market. Its like the Linux community can't bring itself to simplify the environment in case they be compared to oh no... Windows.
Xandros is my new preferred distro and I'll certainly give NLD a try.
I can just imagine the fit Ballmar must be throwing about now in Redmond. I can just see his fat sweating body jiggling down the hall screaming at the top of his lungs while spitting on all those poor, developers, developers, developers.
Redmond's response should be VERY interesting indeed!
Yes, it has KDE. Take a look at the application list that NDL supports. How many of them are QT based and how many of them are GTK based? I'll let you do the math for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
My conclusion: this is a Gnome-centric distribution. Yes, you can run KDE on this distro, but it makes as much sense as running KDE on Red Hat or Gnome on SuSE.
501 Not Implemented
Hmmm, sounds like you just described SLES. Except that SLES contains ReiserFS and can be fully admined from a text terminal. Not really apples to apples comparing RHEL to SuSE Personal
c le s.html
I don't know about RHEL 3.0, but with 2.1 it was necessary to fire up an X session to do a few things. Sure I can set almost anything up manually via the CLI, but when I pay almost $2k for an OS I need some automation.
With SuSE (Novel) the full config utility runs under both X and a VT100. And the prices are much more affordable, not if Novel can help SuSE maintain Oracle certifications.
Here is SuSE's product lifecycle page if you are interested.
http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/lifecy
-rd