Slashdot Mirror
Review Of The New Novell Linux Desktop
dave writes "Tom Adelstein has published a thorough review of the new Novell Linux Desktop, complete with plenty of notes and screenshots. An excellent review to read for those following the newest desktop Linux offering."
WTF is Novell linux the new fedora core? and SUSE the enterprise version?
After examining and tinkering with configuration files, run levels, initiation scripts, services, the proc files, the X11 setup and the file tree
Whoa there cowboy! I think you're a victim of knowing too much... how the heck did you let yourself get that far?
I started off changing my tire, but ended up rebuilding the air filter.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I still have a lot of questions, like
why does this distro matter in the least when I cannot even download it (please dont point me to the eval)
are there any improvements over SuSe ? Partioning ? Hardware support ?
good grief. The review ended before it began.
yada yada yeah I know a corporate product and you are paying for support yada yada
not that good of a review is it.
When I look at NDL and FC3 the difference seams small, but there is no doubt that they both (Red Hat and Novell) have spend much time and money on them. So why don't they just work together on one destribution, but offer different services like they do now? Wouldn't that save a lot of money and time?
The reason that Novell bundled OpenOffice.org rather than StarOffice from Sun is that Novell has the highest number of non-Sun funded developers working activity on OpenOffice.org. Micheal Meeks (Ximian) leads a team of Novell people who work on it.
Novell has done a lot of work on making OpenOffice.org a more robust application.
Hey all,
I've downloaded and installed the NLD product (also have seen the SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 product) and it looks to work quite well for a corporate desktop environment. It has all the essential apps for corporate use. Sure, you enthusiasts won't like some of the app choices they made, but it's not an enthusiast distro-it's a corporate cookie cutter distro. And it's a first step in taking back some Windows desktops, offering a similar operating environment so employees can more easily switch (even if Novell doesn't say they are trying to do that).
It's got all the hardware drivers and guts of SUSE 9, which runs great on standard hardware as well was fancier stuff (like my IBM Thinkpad X31 which is also found in corporate environments). I think they hit the bar on that one and it was something lacking in SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 product.
$50/year for updates in a corporate (Even mom and pop) environment is a reasonable amount to charge especially considering your low up-front purchase cost. When you look at Windows XP Pro and MS Office Standard or Pro and other apps like that, the cost is like apples and oranges. OpenOffice and other applications are great if not 'good enough' to put on the corporate desktop. Novell themselves prove that it can be done.
GNOME vs KDE, I won't argue that here. I think GNOME is offered in this distro is a very clean, easy to navigate interface with everything where a Windows user might expect it. It also keeps enough advanced customization options away from the user behind a root password in YAST. The reviewer (of the slashdot article) must have been trying way to hard to get a desktop running--just needed to click GNOME or KDE and it did the rest in typical SUSE fashion.
All in all, I'm happy with their release, as the first Novell-packaged corporate offering. I can see larger installations switching departments of people over and some smaller companies using it too (high functionality, low cost benefits).
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Is this guy reviewing the desktop as a system admin, a user who admins his own, or a desktop user who does NOT have the root password?
He mentions there being 3 package systems available. But is this bad? A system admin might like that he can just use the one he likes best. If the package systems are aware of each other so actions in 1 are reflect in the others then this just is choice for the admin. Admins ain't supposed to get confused by simple choice.
For a user supposed to admin his own machine it might be confusing but the user without root will never even see it.
See how the perspective changes? 3 package systems represent Choice, confusion, don't matter, depending on who you are.
Does anybody in a big business install their own OS? Or setup things like ntp? He complains that novell has not prepopulated the list with working ntp servers. However a big company might not want all their thousands of desktops going outside to get the time. The ntp server might also have a thing or two to say about it. Makes far more sense to setup their own ntp server inside and be able to block of another port on the firewall.
What I totally missed in the review of a desktop aimed at mass business installs is how easily installs are automated. Can I create an install setup wich just creates the same desktop over and over and over? I really don't want to have to configure a thousand ntp clients.
I presume it is there, other linux distros have it, but the reviewer who never made up his mind how he is going to review the product totally ignores this.
This seems like one of the many home desktop reviews out there. This is not a home desktop. I think NLD is meant to be installed unattended with all the defaults set. After wich a user will use the installed applications and every bit of configuration will be done by the support staff.
What matters here the following things.
Questions on KDE vs Gnome don't matter at all. The powers that be will decice the install and the user will just have to live with it. Just as millions still have to live with NT4.
Next time split the review into a setup/admin part and an end-user part because that is how this desktop is supposed to be used.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I tried to download the NLD (or is it NDL?) first with Firefox 1.0 and it stalled and errored out at around 9% - same result with Mozilla 1.73. I even went back to IE and tried it again without success. Then I tried each browser again with the other mirror sight with the same bad results. That was yesterday. Today when I tried after about two minutes the download manager said it was done and closed. I would have loved to demo this to our management but I could not because I can't download the demo.
zenray