Novell and Intel Team Up For Moblin On Netbooks 29
ruphus13 writes "The Mobile and Netbook space already has several Open Source OS providers. Android has been making its way into netbooks, and Moblin, LiMo and Ubuntu are also alternatives for OSes on netbooks and mobile handhelds. Now, Novell has also joined the fray, but rather than porting openSuSE, they have teamed up with Intel to get OEMs to use Moblin for their mobile devices. From the article: 'With the other tools and benefits that Moblin offers OEMs and developers, it's really a rather smart approach that could potentially yield a better netbook experience (for developers and consumers), maximize development resources, and produce quality software in minimal time. I don't think Novell is eschewing SUSE, but in its current form, it's not as suited for netbooks as it is systems like the HP ProBooks. Paired with Moblin's netbook-centric bent and coming from a desktop/server market (rather than a true mobile device background), bringing a SUSE/Moblin system to netbooks has as much potential (if not more) for success as an Android adaptation does.'"
Re:What's up with SUSE? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nevermind my earlier comment - Infoworld article states:
Novell began assigning its Linux developers to work on Moblin several months ago
So basically, we will be seeing some SUSE-ization of Moblin. Which is good, because IIRC Moblin has pretty immature/shallow userspace so far.
Re:Great a notebook with a broken package manager (Score:2, Insightful)
Although opensuse is a very nice distro it still suffers from package manager issues (in 11.1) they should change to apt and they would have a rocking distro...
apt blah blah. rpm sucks. dependency hell....blah blah.
rpm based distros today have pretty good package managers which have nothing to envy apt.
openSUSE has a neat package manager since 11.0. Issues were in 10.1 times, 3 years ago. Today you have a neat zypper, YaST using the same engine, PackageKit integration, etc.
Are you kidding? Of course it's bad news for SuSE (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time Novell gets involved with UNIX, it spells doom for the latter. I worked for Novell when it purchased USL and UNIX. We lamented the faith that inevitably had to befall UNIX because we knew how UNIX-averse and arrogant the upper echelons were. There were people back then in charge of Novell who actually believed they would build competitive Internet run on IPX - I swear I am not joking.
I don't believe much has changed. To a lot of those MBA types all those technologies are just meangless abbreviations and acronyms, and as long as they can rearrange letters on the table and get something that looks catchy to some marketing drone, they think they've got a winner.