Slashdot Mirror
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.
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