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Brainshare Reports: NLD 10, Novell's Linux Switch
An anonymous reader submits "Computer World has an article about Novell Linux Desktop 10, which was just announced at Brainshare, that it plans to compete directly with Windows. One of the biggest things about NLD 10 is that it will have the desktop search engine Beagle as a feature." Also from Brainshare, Joe Barr writes on NewsForge about the significance of Novell's ongoing (multi-year) transition to Linux for all of its 6,000 desktops. Consultants and software sellers of all stripes won't soon run out of TCO arguments for the products they want to push, but Novell claims to have saved $900,000 last year in Microsoft license fees alone.
NLD is descended from SuSE, which is up to version 9
I think since its basicaly Suse , they are jumping on the suse numbering .Since the last version of SuSe was 9.2 then NLD 10 is a logical follow up .
This also keeps the numbering in good sted with a few of the other distros
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Yeah, I've seen that happen. I use OS X by preference for most tasks, and I think they strike a good middle ground. They put most native programs in /Applications. In a shared environment users can install programs to ~/Applications. The BSD subsystem applications are stored in /usr/bin and the other historically expected locations. Newbies look in /Applications and find everything. CLI gurus find everything where they expect too.
Watching a Mac user run Windows or Linux is painful. They try to move or delete programs and just can't understand why it doesn't work.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I haven't used beagle, but here's the general case for large-scale meta-data searching:
If I'm looking for information on, say, the E-Zuper project I working on at work. This allows me to turn up everything that refers to it, whether its an email, a document, a bookmark -- anything. And note that two of those things only exist within certain applications -- the email and the bookmark aren't physical files. They are conceptual objects.
Likewise, you could say, "look at everything I did yesterday", and turn up emails, website visits, documents, etc.
Or you could say, "show me everything by Stan Sterner" and the same thing would happen.
For those of us whose data repositories are diverse and not always file-based, it would be a great blessing. Not to mention that meta-searching is useful even just with normal documents.
If you can assign arbitrary meta attributes, you can bypass the limitations of a traditional directory structure. For example, I can search and find documents that I'm supposed to have completed by tomorrow, if I include an attribute such as "date-needed" on those files. This will pull from every folder (which are likely arranged by project, not date). I could also add priority tags, and search by priority.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Always install using the distrbution's preferred method of installtion and you'll be fine. With rpm's its very easy to set up menu's etc... In fact, I can't remember the last time a program with a gui wasn't added to my start menu in fedora (without any user interaction).In fedora just use yum and everything is taken care of. Regardless, its not hard to have a program pop up in a menu, netbeans, java, eclipse (iirc), Enemy Territory, are all programs off the top of my head that have always installed flawlessly and added shortcuts despite using custom installers. Don't blame something on the software when in reality its your ignorance. Regardless, just because you're familiar with window's file structure and not linux's doesn't mean it is worse, it just means you don't understand it. I'd be lost as hell in window's file system. In *nix I know where all my binaries are, where all my system binaries are, and where all my conf files are without any problems. Any custom settings per user, I know right where they are too.
Regards,
Steve
I use it at my laptop right now at work and its nice and easy enough for most people in my opinion. Combine Novell Linux Destop with Novell Open Enterprise and you have a managed enviroment. Heck, combine it with NX Server and you have a full fledged secure terminal server ready to put onto the net ready for outside access. Cant wait for version 10 since it probably will have most of the lessons learned from Novells migration in it.
Actually im doing just that now as a project at work.
Life is good!
HTTP/1.1 400
Clearly you are not playing the Microsoft game, if you are visiting computers to install software. If you have yourself a net installed managed network, backed by an Active Directory you can just as easily install an application on 1, 10, 100 or a 1000 computers. You need to know what you are doing, but it does work and it is an absolute godsend in managing Windows desktops. Everyone is properly patched and up to date, all with the latest virus definitions and all without leaving your office.
Though personally I would prefer if all my users migrated to Linux.
I'm curious what versions of which distributions, do you recall?
Hell, other than the various flavors of Linux, I don't know of a modern OS that doesn't handle new applications correctly.
None of the major operating systems "handle" new applications by adding menu entries. The installer that you use does that. The Firefox and Thunderbird installers from mozilla.org don't, and it is something they should add, you're right. But the official packages for firefox and thunderbird from all the major distributions I've tried (Fedora 1-3, Ubuntu Warty, Suse 9.1) do add menu entries.
It's nothing specific to the tool being used to do the installation, the user doing the installation, the OS the application is being installed on, or the actual application. The responsibility lies solely with whoever packaged the installation media that you are using.
By the way. Joe Barr reported yesterday that SuSE 9.3 Professional will also include Beagle. Not that you can't download Beagle anyway.
The SUSE (remember that Novell has renamed the distro for no apparent reason) 9.3 flyers distributed at the CeBIT say so, as well. There's a list of new features, among them Linux 2.6.11, KDE 3.4, GNOME 2.10, XEN, Beagle, iPod support, "perfected" bluetooth support, PostgreSQL 8.0... and a strategy game called "Invasion". The last time I've seen a game presented as a great new feature was in that scary Windows ad with Steve Ballmer that's floating around the 'Net...
By the way, according to the dude at the Novell booth, they're going to turn SUSE into a cutting edge distro - when I asked if they wanted to compete with Fedora, he answered that Fedora should first try to catch up. Maybe SUSE will become interesting to those users who like to always have the newest stuff. OTOH Fedora feels a lot cleaner then SuSE 9.0 did - less distro-specificness.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I am at BrainShare, and in fact, the week before BrainShare started, was part of a Novell Users International (NUI) group that visited the Novell campus and spoke with Dan Morrison, IT Director of Novell's Global Network Operations Center (GNOC).
Novell has almost entirely dumped M$ Office in favor of OpenOffice. There are still some users, mostly in Sales, Finance and Marketing, who continue to use the M$ products,
Their two main problems have been with laptop support for Linux, and with people who have insanely complex documents or spreadsheets (for timesheets, as an example) that have been difficult to migrate. One lesson learned is to avoid TrueType fonts.
They started with 200 employees dual-booting SUSE/W2K, and by the end of 2005 they plan to have 80% of their workforce, worldwide, totally migrated to Linux (no dual-boot).
Worldwide their front-line tech staff numbers about 100. Novell's total headcount exceeds 6800 people (including temps/interns/contractors).
Other lessons learned include splitting M$O files into 3 groups: Easy to Convert, Not Easy to Convert, and Very Hard To Convert. Start with the easy ones.
As time has gone on, biggest roadblock has become app availability. OpenOffice is great, but AutoCAD isn't on Linux yet, for example (at least that was the example Dan gave). Novell has NOT set a corporate standard of Gnome vs. KDE - users are free to choose what they want (no census data on how many choose which). However, Novell has adopted the OO file formats as their corporate standard.
As for cost, Dan stated their cost has been about $200/user for the migration. Its been taking 20min to 1 hour to imgrate personal settings from Windoze to SUSE.
trying to be like these people:
Novell Public Service Announcement
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
You apparently don't understand how Applications are handled in OS X. You're not 'wantonly deleting executables,' you're moving and deleting the entire application. The Application you see (an .app) is really just a container.
.apps, you'll find that they're just a directory that the GUI in OS X treats like a single file. Inside is the entire directory tree for the program and all its files, but the user (as you've clearly demonstrated) doesn't have to know this, because there's no need for them to know about it.
If you drop out to the CLI and take a look at
To me, it's a great example of transparency done right. You've just been engrained with the idea that files are scattered everywhere and need to be purged, as you put it. That's not the case at all. It's not a matter of dumbing down so much as abstracting things that don't really serve the user any better spelled out. *THAT'S* why it's 'Applications' and not '/Applications.'