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.

Comments

Saving money

[Spodlink05]

They only took out two Microsoft licenses?

Version Ten

[SA Stevens]

Novell Linux Desktop 10?

When did the nine previous versions come out?

Re:Version Ten

[CameronGary]

NLD is descended from SuSE, which is up to version 9

Re:Version Ten

[FidelCatsro]

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

Re:Version Ten

[SA Stevens]

The SuSe versioning is the 'logical' answer.

Your second answer, which has to do with marketing, is probably the main reason.

This is no different than Windows NT 'magically' starting at version 3.1 I suppose.

Singing the 404 blooz

[AtariAmarok]

Already 404? Sometimes, even though the OS is Linux, the server is still kleenex.

Exit strategy

[YodaToo]

Now if all of you just rush to buy shares of Novell, I can finally sell mine. Thanks in advance.

Alone?

[Otter]

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.

Y'see, the point of "total" is that you're not looking at individual costs "alone"...

Re:Alone?

[man_of_mr_e]

I think what is meant is that you can say you saved $900,000 last year alone on MS licenses, but what did you pay in new costs to make up for it?

Now, Novell is in a unique situation. Since they own SuSE they don't have to pay SuSE license fees, so i'm sure that saves them a chunk of change, and they don't have to purchase service contracts because they're their own service facility.

Re:Alone?

[jericho4.0]

The OP is pointing out that _any_ switch to linux would save you MS license fees, that's a given. The question is; Does the increased cost of training, support, and administration swallow that savings?

IMHO, it's pretty clear that TCO is lower with a partial or total switch to linux. There are exeptions, like small businesses without IT resources, but by and large, IT costs go down.

Re:Alone?

[Daniel Phillips]

I think what is meant is that you can say you saved $900,000 last year alone on MS licenses, but what did you pay in new costs to make up for it?

Right, and also what other costs might you save?

daily malware cleaning
lower hardware cost
license auditing costs
downtime costs


Not to mention, having access to thousands of free applications, many that are best of breed.

Re:Alone?

[NatteringNabob]

The Total will end up being a lot more than $900,000 per year. Microsoft TCO studies notwithstanding, anybody that has actually tried to keep both a Windows Network and a Linux/Unix network up and running will tell you that the Unix boxes are a lot less effort. Just being able to NFS mount applications from a handful of application servers instead of installing on every single machine is a godsend, as is the total lack of real, live Linux viruses. Again, MS FUD notwithstanding, theoretical viruses are much easier for a system administrator to deal with than actual ones.

Re:Alone?

[duderdice]

Looking at it from a business investment point of view, let's find the return on investment. Say it takes a cool $7.2 million to make this transition (6,000 employees spending 40 hours training/learning/downtime @ $30/hr = $7.2 million). Shaving $900K per year pays you back in 8 years ($900K * 8 = $7.2 mil), because those licensing costs they saved are recurring. Using the 'rule of 72' from investing, if we make our money back in 8 years, we're getting roughly 9% return on an investement. That's probably close to the ROI cut off of most businesses, and when you factor in the competitive advantages of

1. not supporting a competitor
2. eating your own dog food and learning from it
3. being on the leading edge of change in the tech industry

sounds like Novell has made a pretty good move. Of course this business case is shot if the costs of transition go thru the roof, but if you do it intelligently (i.e. stepwise, like it sounds they are doing), its easily managed and should be a success. I wish they were hiring, though, because they seem like one of the few companies with a head on its shoulders about how to deal with opportunity and change in this brave new world of Free software. Of course, if my numbers don't convince you, just use common sense - most of the rest of the world is embracing GNU/Linux pretty strongly and if we don't .... well, let's just say "You can pry my Longhorn DVDs from my cold, jobless fingers!"

Re:Alone?

[jabuzz]

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.

Re:Alone?

[misleb]

They might be their own service facility, but they still have to pay someone to do the work, just like anyone else.

-matthew

Re:Alone?

[iamwahoo2]

Name 376,000 apps that are best of breed for Windows.

Beagle, Winfs, Spotlight??

[Adam Avangelist]

Can anyone explain to me this hype of meta-data searching. I for one do not understand the benefits of it one bit. When I saw the Microsoft demonstration video of WinFS it did not seem revolutionary or impressive. I don't understand why we would need beagle either. And if beagle every does take off will it run on other Linux distributions.

Personally I just store my files in My Documents folder and directory on Windows Xp and Linux respectfully; I have no need for a fancy search and when I do, find and Window's Find are adequate.

Re:Beagle, Winfs, Spotlight??

[crazyvas]

Not everyone might be as organized as you are. Many people like to throw their files all in one folder, and spend time figuring out what they want. Meta-data searching will hopefully reduce the time to retrive. The major problem with Windows Find is that results are not indexed and cached. An analogy would be a user typing a word into google, and google *initiating* a web crawl to go through thousands and thousans of servers to find the word. That is simply inefficient if you search frequently. A utility as simple as "locate" or "slocate" has solved this problem under Unix for ages. After installing Google deskstop, I have used it several times, though I should add that I've used it much less than I thought I would.

Re:Beagle, Winfs, Spotlight??

[johnnyb]

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.

Re:Beagle, Winfs, Spotlight??

[MarkGriz]

Likewise, you could say, "look at everything I did yesterday", and turn up emails, website visits, documents, etc.

How about an example Slashdotters can relate to...

"Delete all website history and cache between 10:30 and 11:30 pm last night"

Changed their mind.

[FreeLinux]

that it plans to compete directly with Windows.

The funny thing about this was that in the past and at last year's Brainshare, Novell had stated that they had no intention of competing directly against Windows. They even insinuated that attempting such competition was madness.

By the way. Joe Barr reported yesterday that SuSE 9.3 Professional will also include Beagle. Not that you can't download Beagle anyway.

Re:Changed their mind.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The funny thing about this was that in the past and at last year's Brainshare, Novell had stated that they had no intention of competing directly against Windows. They even insinuated that attempting such competition was madness.

That was probably Messman talking sensibly before. Now, as you can see:

Currently, Linux on the desktop has been adopted primarily by technology groups and the public sector. "The next release of [Novell] Linux Desktop will be ready to compete with Windows," Friedman said.

...this time it's Nat Friedman, a person not exactly known for being tactful. Witness how he single-handedly alienated half a dozen well-established projects last month when he declared Hula to be a category-killer and that there was nothing else in that space. (The developers of Horde, eGroupware, Citadel, and a few other projects just kind of stared gapjawed at their screens, wondering whether the entire previous decade had been mere figments of their imaginations.) This is essentially the same thing: the Ximian people (Nat and Miguel) have a habit of alienating people. It may very well be that they are among the few who did not learn from the lesson of Mark Andreesen: don't moon the giant. The giant will become cross and will squash you like a bug.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Friedman found himself in Jack Messman's office getting verbally bitch-slapped for making that comment in public.

Beagle an Odd Name?

[Daredevil73]

Any one else think naming your premium feature the same as the worst virus for Windows perhaps not a great marketing move?

Ouch!

[Danuvius]

One of the biggest things about NLD 10 is that it will have the desktop search engine Beagle as a feature.

Microsoft does not stand a chance!!

Re:A Bad Idea.

[jav1231]

Yeah, like they know to go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Office\Word\ now and find winword.exe? Why don't they just go find it in the menu like they do with Windows? Oh, because your whole point would be moot.

Novell is doing great work with Evolution...

[tcopeland]

...the lists are active (and questions actually get answered authoritatively), the IRC channel is lively, and the development is in the open. They've even got the logs of the team meetings on line.

PLUG: I'm working on a Ruby wrapper for Evolution. Good times!

Re:fp?

[OECD]

and already the site is 404

Not to me, but I use lynx and seem to have less problems with overloaded servers.

Anyway, from TFA: Also planned for the release, due out next year, is F-Spot, a personal photo management application.

What are they going to call the next version? ;-)

Re:A Bad Idea.

[Uptown Joe]

I don't agree. I'm a Sys Admin, but I only use Windows and some Netware. I have almost no experience on Linux. The NLD was east to install, It was loaded with apps and it found all my hardware. You also have a choice of Gnome or KDE (I prefer the Gnome)during the install.

The included Citrix Client just worked out of the box.

I can see NLD being a real challenger for Uncle Bill.

There is an eval of 9 on the Novell site, try it out.

Wow, it's going to have Beagle!

[glrotate]

I guess no more argument as to which distro is best.

Re:A Bad Idea.

[Blob Pet]

except that a regular user isn't going to have permission to move oowriter. It's perfectly acceptable, though, if the user decides to make a link in ~/programs/oowriter/oowriter.

love NLD9

[linuxbeta]

I love Novell Linux Desktop 9

osdir screenshots

Re:A Bad Idea.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

If anyone can do it, Novell can. But can they?

[jht]

Novell has the resources and expertise to make Linux a truly viable desktop OS for Joe Corporate User. That all said, I'm not sure they will be able to out-market Microsoft enough to make a dent - even with their new management that's come in over the last couple of years, Novell remains the prototypical company that would open up a sushi bar, and advertise it with a sign saying:

"Cold Raw Dead Fish for Sale!"

(and I'm a Novell Partner- i like Novell!)

I've seen their new Open Enterprise Server (the SuSE/NetWare fusion) and it's tremendously impressive - I spent time in a class on it last week. The current NLD (based on SuSE 9.0) is a good solid desktop, which I run on one of my Dell boxes. Somebody out there is going to make Linux into a truly viable desktop player, and it'll probably be Novell in spite of their poor marketing skills.

I just hope that NLD doesn't turn out to be the "only" shot at a widespread penetration of the corporate desktop for Linux in general. Linux is doing just fine on the back end, but on the desktop right now the only real "alternative" is Apple - we need a good Linux-based Third Option to really start nibbling away at Windows.

comparing Novell transition to IBM's

[pyros]

It will be interesting to see what obstacles Novell encounters compared to IBM. The last thing I heard about IBM's transistion was that they are rewriting all their internal web applications to no longer require Internet Explorer.

Search Dog

[Inkieminstrel]

Great, another annoying dog asking me what I want to search for.

Novell may get us something we need: drivers.

[jotaeleemeese]

Up to date, latest and greatest ones.

I don't care if they are bnaries, the important think would be that any Linux user could get hold of one.

With Novell, RH, Sun and IBM pushing for commercial Linux desktops we may get this more often thatn we currently do now.

Re:Novell may get us something we need: drivers.

[labratuk]

I don't care if they are bnaries, the important think would be that any Linux user could get hold of one.

Unless they're running on something 'unsupported' like ppc or sparc. Or are running an 'unsupported' version of gcc or glibc. Or are trying to run the hardware three years after the vendor last bothered updating the driver so that it won't work on a modern kernel.

Reasons for desktop search:

[mrchaotica]

• I want my documents to be in two places at once (without messing with symlinks)
• I want my documents to automatically organize themselves using metadata
• I want my OS to tell me about information related to whatever I'm doing now

Great news for Lucene and Lucene.Net

[otisg]

This is great news for Lucene, which is what's at the core of Beagle. More specifically, it is the port of Lucene (Java) to C# and .Net, which can be found at http://www.dotlucene.net/.

Re:Dr Mendele agrees with you

[dhakbar]

Commas are your weak point, not mine.

Novell rocks

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

and I just heard from a guy working for Blackberry that they're working on making the Blackberry Enterprise Server work on Novell Groupwise Linux boxes. Oh happy day, when I can dump Exchange :)
Thanks for talking the talk and walking the walk, Novell. IBM, when are you going to switch the corporate desktops?

Re:A Bad Idea.

[LnxAddct]

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

Time is money

[truthsearch]

At any company time is money. It's impossible to switch a corporate desktop with no cost whatsoever. Even a competent SuSE person is going to spend at least a little time installing and setting up a desktop. Time spent on that is time not spend on other corporate work. Even 5 minutes per desktop is a lot when multiplied by 6,000. Hence it costs in terms of man-hours (i.e. productivity not used towards making the company money). And it directly costs money if that person's time is billable to a customer.

Re:Time is money

[superpulpsicle]

But it's not about money. This is Novell here. They have adopted great technology in the past and failed to compete with it.

They had IPX early, which should destroy the first generation of TCP/IP, and it never panned out. Novell Netware was better than many server OS at the time, and it never panned out. You see the pattern here. Novell problem was never about money. They don't know how to deal their cards.

Re:A Bad Idea.

[AusG4]

How about having your applications all in /Applications and not have any useless "Start Menu" clone with symlinks to real programs... like on OS X?

Oh, because that would make -sense- ...

NLD is nice.

[miffo.swe]

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!

In the news

[ratboot]

Novell claims to have saved $900,000 last year in Microsoft license fees [because they installed Novell Linux Desktop]

Also :

Microsoft claims to have saved $900,000 last year in Microsoft license fees [because they installed Microsoft Windows]

Re:A Bad Idea.

[pyros]

And, FYI, I tried to use both Firefox/Thunderbird's installers, and the package management system that came with the various distributions. No dice

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.

Not only Beagle in 9.3.

[Jesus_666]

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.

Novell Client for Linux?

[Jim Hall]

I wonder if this means Novell is any closer to releasing a Novell Netware Client for Linux? In our shop, lots of people use Fedora Core 1,2,3 - but everyone needs to have access to files on the Novell Netware LAN. Scripts that use NCPFS get us there, but it's kind of a hack (i.e. you need to change the script if we change the server, ...)

Releasing a full Novell Netware Client for Linux has been a planned thing for some time. Maybe NLD 10 will finally get us there?

How is windows different?

[bluGill]

Everytime I get a new machine at work I need to spend a little time setting it up. Doesn't matter if it is FreeBSD, Linux, or Ms Windows, I have to spend some time making it work like I like it.

Companies replace computers often. Generally every 2-3 years, though some go much longer. Companies upgrade Windows often, mixing Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP on the desktop is more pain than it is worth, so they standardize on one (or two), and every once in a while migrate everyone to the new one as the old OS looses support for new machines. Once again time is taken setting up those machines.

Re:Yeah, I am rushing....

[bonkeroo buzzeye]

He couldn't be bothered to link it; you couldn't be bothered to paste it. You're even. Apathy, apathy, everywhere and not a Jolt to drink. ;)

Re:deb vs. rpm

[rpdillon]

Windows in no way prevents pebkac. You're talking about an OS that has, until recently, had no notion of a user without administrator priviledges. Microsoft has yet to to produce a version of Windows that does not set a user as an administrator by default. Windows is pebkac heaven. And Microsoft has no excuse; *nix has had the notion of unpriviledged users since the 70's.

Next...package management. Most (but not all) mainstream programs already exist in good package management respositories. Debian has their own, Gentoo has their own, even Red Hat and SuSe have their own. This doesn't require the vendor of the product to do anything. The Mozilla foundation doesn't produce .deb, .ebuild and .rpm packages, and yet I can install Firefox and Thunderbird with no problem on all the above operating systems.

Oh, and to answer your question, apt-get works on both Fedora-based and Debian-based distros. Oh, and on Debian, I can use alien to install RPMs. Not that it matters, since they're different operating systems. This is like complaining that Windows and Mac OS X don't use the same installer. You pick an OS, you pick an installer.

So...I'm not really sure what you're saying. There IS one well known method for installation for each Linux operating system, and the makers of the OS use it, and (most times) provide packages through that system, whether it be portage, apt-get, yum, yast, up2date, or whatever.

You are errant in treating "GNU/Linux" as a single operating system. It isn't. SuSe is a single OS, Red Hat is a single OS, Debian is a single OS, Gentoo is a single OS. And they each have a way to install Firefox and Thunderbird that "just works", and is in fact quite superior to anything Windows offers, or ever has offered.

Maybe they are ...

[NullProg]

trying to be like these people:

Novell Public Service Announcement

Enjoy,

Re:A Bad Idea.

[Slack3r78]

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.

If you drop out to the CLI and take a look at .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.

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.'