I attended a different Novell seminar yesterday (geared more toward a CNE audience) and can tell you that all the other Novell Linux Services (eDirectory, DirXML, iFolder, etc.) supposedly can be installed on any Linux OS, so NSS should too. Much of the initial design was geared toward Red Hat, and the documentation I saw even mentions what changes to make (as far as install paths, etc) for Red Hat. Open sourcing it would probably require open sourcing eDirectory (unless it's compatible with any ldap directory) so I doubt that will happen.
They gave out demo CD's of the Novell Services packages at the seminar, but I'm pretty sure the iso's can be downloaded from their website. I plan to try it installing it on a Slackware box this weekend and see how it works. I'm also going to see how badly upgrading the Samba 2.2 they ship with to 3.0 breaks things. (Samba authentication through eDirectory is a feature I'd been hoping for for quite awhile.)
But lets look at the two choices you are offering.
a)As others have already been pointed out, this seems to circumvent the whole reason for running Gentoo. Other than a preference for portage, what would be the point?
b)This is restating my original question without answering it. Yes, it takes longer to emerge an update from source. What I don't see is why this is better than taking 5% as much time to reinstall from scratch. For me, a small incremental performance gain isn't worth that much.
I'd agree that portage is great for resolving dependency issues (or at least it seems that way to me so far). Then again, I've never run into an issue in that regard that I couldn't solve in half an hour or so using pkgtool either.
I'm in the process of installing gentoo for the first time to test it out. Now it's not the newest box (P3-500 with 256MB, internet via T1 through LAN), but the emerge kde that I started Wednesday morning wasn't finished until sometime late last night (i.e., it was done when I came in to work this morning).
I'm not convinced that an upgrade that takes 2 days is better than a reinstall that takes 2 hours, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
Maybe I'm reading the article wrong, but it looks to me like he used VPC to emulate a Soundblaster and let the Windows installs run off that, but required the Linux installs to detect and run using the actual hardware (which could be something more obscure and less well supported in Windows as well).
Installing from RPM's using an integrated package manager like Mandrakes is, in principle, much easier than running a setup.exe in Windows. No prompts for install directory, where to place program group icons, etc. However, the difficult part (perhaps in both cases) is finding the software you want to install.
I tried Mandrake 10 a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to burn some CD's, and trying to find the CD burning packages in the available package lists is a real pain, unless you already know the names of the packages you want. And even this is not foolproof. Verifying that cdrtools, etc., was installed was easy, but if I didn't know to look for that package name, it would have taken quite some time. I wanted to run K3b, but couldn't find the package listed. I spent about an hour downloading the rpm, setting Mandrake's tools (rpmdrake? I forget...) to install from my download path, etc., etc. Not the sort of thing your average end user would be comfortable with.
Only later did I discover that k3b was already installed, but was placed under the System tools/archiving menu (how many people would think of that as the primary use for CD burning?) This sort of thing is the reason I keep going back to Slackware, where I know exactly what's installed and where everything is (because I put it there!) But Slackware isn't really the best option for the average user. (CollegeLinux, based on Slack, might be though.)
Outside of that, the one big thing keeping me from switching my family to linux is that they are all heavy Paint Shop Pro 7 users, mainly for very simple things like cropping and resizing digital photos. My sons are also heavily into creating 2d sprite sheets from video game screenshots, a hobby I don't claim to understand, but which they do with lightning speed in PSP. One look at the learning curve of Photoshop (and GIMP) is enough to turn them from looking at those products again. With digital photography being a big usage area of computers now, I imagine there are a lot of people who use very limited but easy to use photo editing products like this. What are the choice here on Linux?
Back to the issue of ease of use, for technically oriented people and power users, Linux kicks ass over Windows. When I can't do something in Windows, most often it's because it can't be done or doesn't work. In Linux, it's usually because I don't know how. The latter is a problem much more easily resolved.
On the business side, our recent upgrades to MS Office XP left all our secretaries unable to figure out how to do a mail merge. Some of them have 10+ years experience doing mail merges with Office. So retraining costs are not limited to switching to Linux and open source products.
I'm not sure when the change occurred (I'm thinking around Shakespeare's time) but I know in Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) negatives are used for emphasis. For example, "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde" (He never yet no rudeness not said).
This usage has not disappeared entirely. Is anyone confused by the double negative in "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more"?
It's pretty obvious language does "not not never" follow the rules of math. Try applying commutative or associative principles to grammar!
(P.S.- there's a preposition missing from your question.)
"Little do they know, our clients, that it would be through the filter of Devo. Our subliminal messages would be fully intact, and attached on like antioxidants working their way into the system."
Huh?? I haven't seen 6.5, but I've been using GW 6.0 for over 2 years. If I could easily use it as a POP mail client on my Windows boxes at home, I would. It's certainly tons better than OE, and IMO much better than the bloated steaming dungheap that is Outlook. GW is also more stable, scalable, less buggy and virus prone than Exchange. Since it was installed 2 and a half years ago, we've probably spent less than 20 man hours maintaing the Groupwise system of 300+ users (Not including creating and deleting user accounts and the actual install itself). Total downtime has been, I think, less than an hour (and some of that was unnecessary reboots due to incompetence... I won't say whose;)). Why people choose Exchange when GW is available is a mystery to me.
You are right, though, it is their stated plan to integrate it with GroupWise. Right now the only way to access GW from linux is webaccess, which limits some features.
Can we idiot proof the ISP's first? Mine (Cablevision) appears to be forwarding DHCPACK broadcasts from their private network (10.0.16.x, occassionally other 10.0.x.x) to the customer network. I first became aware of these when they showed up in my (crappy) Belkin router logs as DoS attacks.
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They gave out demo CD's of the Novell Services packages at the seminar, but I'm pretty sure the iso's can be downloaded from their website. I plan to try it installing it on a Slackware box this weekend and see how it works. I'm also going to see how badly upgrading the Samba 2.2 they ship with to 3.0 breaks things. (Samba authentication through eDirectory is a feature I'd been hoping for for quite awhile.)
That would be because I haven't presented one.
But lets look at the two choices you are offering.
a)As others have already been pointed out, this seems to circumvent the whole reason for running Gentoo. Other than a preference for portage, what would be the point?
b)This is restating my original question without answering it. Yes, it takes longer to emerge an update from source. What I don't see is why this is better than taking 5% as much time to reinstall from scratch. For me, a small incremental performance gain isn't worth that much.
I'd agree that portage is great for resolving dependency issues (or at least it seems that way to me so far). Then again, I've never run into an issue in that regard that I couldn't solve in half an hour or so using pkgtool either.
I'm not convinced that an upgrade that takes 2 days is better than a reinstall that takes 2 hours, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
Maybe I'm reading the article wrong, but it looks to me like he used VPC to emulate a Soundblaster and let the Windows installs run off that, but required the Linux installs to detect and run using the actual hardware (which could be something more obscure and less well supported in Windows as well).
I tried Mandrake 10 a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to burn some CD's, and trying to find the CD burning packages in the available package lists is a real pain, unless you already know the names of the packages you want. And even this is not foolproof. Verifying that cdrtools, etc., was installed was easy, but if I didn't know to look for that package name, it would have taken quite some time. I wanted to run K3b, but couldn't find the package listed. I spent about an hour downloading the rpm, setting Mandrake's tools (rpmdrake? I forget...) to install from my download path, etc., etc. Not the sort of thing your average end user would be comfortable with.
Only later did I discover that k3b was already installed, but was placed under the System tools/archiving menu (how many people would think of that as the primary use for CD burning?) This sort of thing is the reason I keep going back to Slackware, where I know exactly what's installed and where everything is (because I put it there!) But Slackware isn't really the best option for the average user. (CollegeLinux, based on Slack, might be though.)
Outside of that, the one big thing keeping me from switching my family to linux is that they are all heavy Paint Shop Pro 7 users, mainly for very simple things like cropping and resizing digital photos. My sons are also heavily into creating 2d sprite sheets from video game screenshots, a hobby I don't claim to understand, but which they do with lightning speed in PSP. One look at the learning curve of Photoshop (and GIMP) is enough to turn them from looking at those products again. With digital photography being a big usage area of computers now, I imagine there are a lot of people who use very limited but easy to use photo editing products like this. What are the choice here on Linux?
Back to the issue of ease of use, for technically oriented people and power users, Linux kicks ass over Windows. When I can't do something in Windows, most often it's because it can't be done or doesn't work. In Linux, it's usually because I don't know how. The latter is a problem much more easily resolved.
On the business side, our recent upgrades to MS Office XP left all our secretaries unable to figure out how to do a mail merge. Some of them have 10+ years experience doing mail merges with Office. So retraining costs are not limited to switching to Linux and open source products.
I'm not sure when the change occurred (I'm thinking around Shakespeare's time) but I know in Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) negatives are used for emphasis. For example, "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde" (He never yet no rudeness not said).
This usage has not disappeared entirely. Is anyone confused by the double negative in "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more"?
It's pretty obvious language does "not not never" follow the rules of math. Try applying commutative or associative principles to grammar!
(P.S.- there's a preposition missing from your question.)
"Little do they know, our clients, that it would be through the filter of Devo. Our subliminal messages would be fully intact, and attached on like antioxidants working their way into the system."
Easy... you could sell it here. Plus you'd get 65% of the profit instead of the just barely above 0% most record labels would pay you.
You are right, though, it is their stated plan to integrate it with GroupWise. Right now the only way to access GW from linux is webaccess, which limits some features.
Can we idiot proof the ISP's first? Mine (Cablevision) appears to be forwarding DHCPACK broadcasts from their private network (10.0.16.x, occassionally other 10.0.x.x) to the customer network. I first became aware of these when they showed up in my (crappy) Belkin router logs as DoS attacks.