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Novell Software Linux

Review Of The New Novell Linux Desktop 34

Posted by timothy from the well-illustrated dept.
dave writes "Tom Adelstein has published a thorough review of the new Novell Linux Desktop, complete with plenty of notes and screenshots. An excellent review to read for those following the newest desktop Linux offering."
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Review Of The New Novell Linux Desktop More

Review Of The New Novell Linux Desktop

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  • Whoa there cowboy! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @09:29PM (#10825955) Homepage Journal
    After examining and tinkering with configuration files, run levels, initiation scripts, services, the proc files, the X11 setup and the file tree

    Whoa there cowboy! I think you're a victim of knowing too much... how the heck did you let yourself get that far?

    I started off changing my tire, but ended up rebuilding the air filter.
    • <stupid_joke>
      I think you mean initialization scripts. Initiation scripts sounds like some rules for some type of formally documented hazing procedure.
      <stupid_joke>

    • I started off changing my tire, but ended up rebuilding the air filter.

      I know that's supposed to be a joke, but the geek in me is trying to figure out how to rebuild an air filter.

      Its like saying "I started off upgrading my RAM, but in the end I changed the CPU in my power supply."

      While it may be technically possible to take an air filter apart, and replace some components (as it is technically possible to call some part of a power suppy the central processing unit, and change that) it doesn't mak

  • after reading such a thorough review... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kayen_telva ( 676872 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @09:30PM (#10825964)
    I still have a lot of questions, like
    why does this distro matter in the least when I cannot even download it (please dont point me to the eval)
    are there any improvements over SuSe ? Partioning ? Hardware support ?
    good grief. The review ended before it began.

    yada yada yeah I know a corporate product and you are paying for support yada yada

    • Re:after reading such a thorough review... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by maskedbishounen ( 772174 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @09:41PM (#10826042)
      Improvements? Try brand name.

      You know how PHBs are, don't you?

      "SuWhaat?! No, we're not putting that on our servers. We're better than that; no up-start, no-name company products for us. We'll use, uhh, Novell!"

      And there you go. That's, more or less, it.

    • Re:after reading such a thorough review... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gleng ( 537516 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @10:32PM (#10826361)
      I tried out SuSE 9.2, and its implementation of Gnome 2.6 is almost identical to the Novell Desktop. Complete with red N in the top corner.

      I think the Novell Linux Desktop is basically a cut down version of SuSE 9.2 which will appeal greatly to PHBs.
      • Hmm, not true. NDL is based on SLES packages (the rpm versions should be the same with an SLES CD set) but selected in a different way. It should not have more functionality built-in. Similarly, it will have the same cycle-of-life, will be supported for something like 5 years, any version of Pro will never last that long, 9.1 didn't last long before 9.2 came out and we all installed it like lemmings on the run.

    • Re:after reading such a thorough review... (Score:5, Informative)

      by invisik ( 227250 ) * on Monday November 15, 2004 @11:41PM (#10826742) Homepage
      Hey,

      Visit the Novell home page to get to the download area. You clearly didn't look.

      It looks pretty similar to SUSE Pro 9, minus some of the packages. I have installed the demo and it looks pretty good. True, I'm a big Novell'er from way back, but it looks like a solid corporate distro. It has everything your daily worker would need right out of the box. GNOME is just fine for that type of worker, they aren't getting paid for 'pretty', just to work.

      Sure there's some room for improvement, more specialized installations, package selection on installation.

      But overall it's light and fully functional for your corporate desktop. That is the environment it is meant for, not for the hobbiest or server areas. If you want to tweak or customize with different packages to get 'out of the box' then this distro isn't for you and wasn't meant for you. I hope people get that concept about any of the corporate desktop distros.

      And for $50/year for updates, that seems pretty decent to me!

      -m
      • "$50/year for updates, that seems pretty decent to me!"

        If they want me to pay for something that is free, then I at least want them to give me the updates for free. Unless that $50 covers updates AND support. In which case they should change it so the updates are free and support costs $50/yr.

      • and you clearly did not read my post when i said dont point me to the eval
        • Here is what you said:

          why does this distro matter in the least when I cannot even download it (please dont point me to the eval)

          Your comment seems to go against itself. You say you can't download it, and even ask not to be pointed to a place to download it, even though it's available for download and 30-day trial.

          Is it because it's a corporate distribution and not a 100% free money distribution that you think it doesn't matter?

          -m
  • When I look at NDL and FC3 the difference seams small, but there is no doubt that they both (Red Hat and Novell) have spend much time and money on them. So why don't they just work together on one destribution, but offer different services like they do now? Wouldn't that save a lot of money and time?
    • Because then they would have wasted all that money buying SuSE, wouldn't they?
    • Hmm let's see. Maybe because they are separate companies and they want their company to make a profit. Why would they work together?

      Did you ever hear of UnitedLinux? They never really succeeded.
      • Actually you can argue that they did. United Linux was essentially Suse SLES8 + a custom selection list. Vendor-based application selections were limited almost to none. As a result, SuSE managed to make SLES an industry standard (just like RHEL). Oracle supports four modern distributions from two company. Guess which ones. They also support some ancient distributions from two companies. Guess what? They are SuSE SLES 7,8,9 and RedHat RHEL 2 and 3. Gentoo is not in their list, neither is FreeBSD.
    • When I look at NDL and FC3 the difference seams small

      The target markets are very different. You'd be better off comparing NDS and Redhat Enterprise Desktop.

      NDL is a stable product, and is intended for home users and office environments where people need the software to remain mostly the same for a long period of time.

      Fedora Core is intended for people who want cutting edge features. They release a new version every quarter or so, breaking compatability with previous releases... support quickly dwindles
      • It can be argued that Novell/SuSE FTP version is akin to Fedora Core. There is no comparable distribution from Redhat which matches SuSE Pro, that was what used to be Redhat's boxed offers but they no longer exist. Redhat only sells to the corporate market, makes sense, I don't know anyone who ordered SuSE Pro 9.2 either (thanks to torrents).
        • I don't know anyone who ordered SuSE Pro 9.2 either (thanks to torrents).

          Thanks to torrents, I was able to check it out a little more thoroughly than with the live version. So I went ahead and purchased the full version. Mainly to get the installation support and also the nice manuals. Also to get the DVD as I haven't got around yet to purchasing a DVD burner of my own.

        • I don't know anyone who ordered SuSE Pro 9.2 either (thanks to torrents)

          But will you be able to use normal update channels?

          I can get Redhat Enterprise via torrent or just plain FTP, but if I'm not going to be able to "up2date" or "yum" it, then I have no use for it.
          • Is there anyone who yum's it from the tiny official repository rather than from the highly stable and secure, not to mention drastically larger 3rd party sources?
          • Don't know, didn't try but I can't see why not.

            As for RHEL, I installed Centos 3 instead and was very happy with it. I strongly recommend it if you are into RHEL and don't want to pay the price tag. Mine was installed on a two-way Dell box for some testing/development. Suse 8 was supposed to be on the supported OS list but wouldn't recognise the SCSI card. I didn't care enough to fix it, had the CDs on my desk and 15 minutes after I had Centos running, an other 15 min, my Oracle 9i running on it. Worked lik

  • openoffice.org support (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oo_waratah ( 699830 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @11:24PM (#10826645)
    The reason that Novell bundled OpenOffice.org rather than StarOffice from Sun is that Novell has the highest number of non-Sun funded developers working activity on OpenOffice.org. Micheal Meeks (Ximian) leads a team of Novell people who work on it.

    Novell has done a lot of work on making OpenOffice.org a more robust application.
    • Ximian's OOo is very nice to look at, quite an improvement over unmodified OOo. IMHO, being open source, OOo core crowd should adopt these changes. Now, if they can improve this startup time problem they have... And I though Word 6 used to take a long time to load...
      • OOo 1.9 (alpha not recommended... yet) has huge load time improvements.

        The Ximian updates did not play well with other platforms. This is now addressed and the changes are in the 1.9 release.

        I find it incredible the speed that the OpenSource movement updates this and makes things work better faster.

  • Darn good corporate desktop distro (Score:4, Insightful)

    by invisik ( 227250 ) * on Monday November 15, 2004 @11:53PM (#10826815) Homepage
    Hey all,

    I've downloaded and installed the NLD product (also have seen the SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 product) and it looks to work quite well for a corporate desktop environment. It has all the essential apps for corporate use. Sure, you enthusiasts won't like some of the app choices they made, but it's not an enthusiast distro-it's a corporate cookie cutter distro. And it's a first step in taking back some Windows desktops, offering a similar operating environment so employees can more easily switch (even if Novell doesn't say they are trying to do that).

    It's got all the hardware drivers and guts of SUSE 9, which runs great on standard hardware as well was fancier stuff (like my IBM Thinkpad X31 which is also found in corporate environments). I think they hit the bar on that one and it was something lacking in SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 product.

    $50/year for updates in a corporate (Even mom and pop) environment is a reasonable amount to charge especially considering your low up-front purchase cost. When you look at Windows XP Pro and MS Office Standard or Pro and other apps like that, the cost is like apples and oranges. OpenOffice and other applications are great if not 'good enough' to put on the corporate desktop. Novell themselves prove that it can be done.

    GNOME vs KDE, I won't argue that here. I think GNOME is offered in this distro is a very clean, easy to navigate interface with everything where a Windows user might expect it. It also keeps enough advanced customization options away from the user behind a root password in YAST. The reviewer (of the slashdot article) must have been trying way to hard to get a desktop running--just needed to click GNOME or KDE and it did the rest in typical SUSE fashion.

    All in all, I'm happy with their release, as the first Novell-packaged corporate offering. I can see larger installations switching departments of people over and some smaller companies using it too (high functionality, low cost benefits).

    -m

  • Review is kinda confusing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @06:53AM (#10828367) Journal
    The reviewer seems unable to make up his mind as to wich type of customer he is. Every review of a product needs to be made from the viewpoint of a type of customer. So if I review a car I can review it as family and look at space for kids and ease with wich the driver can turn around and beat the bawling kids. I can look at it as a sales person were I care little about the size of the backseat but a hanger for my suit jacket is very important.

    Is this guy reviewing the desktop as a system admin, a user who admins his own, or a desktop user who does NOT have the root password?

    He mentions there being 3 package systems available. But is this bad? A system admin might like that he can just use the one he likes best. If the package systems are aware of each other so actions in 1 are reflect in the others then this just is choice for the admin. Admins ain't supposed to get confused by simple choice.

    For a user supposed to admin his own machine it might be confusing but the user without root will never even see it.

    See how the perspective changes? 3 package systems represent Choice, confusion, don't matter, depending on who you are.

    Does anybody in a big business install their own OS? Or setup things like ntp? He complains that novell has not prepopulated the list with working ntp servers. However a big company might not want all their thousands of desktops going outside to get the time. The ntp server might also have a thing or two to say about it. Makes far more sense to setup their own ntp server inside and be able to block of another port on the firewall.

    What I totally missed in the review of a desktop aimed at mass business installs is how easily installs are automated. Can I create an install setup wich just creates the same desktop over and over and over? I really don't want to have to configure a thousand ntp clients.

    I presume it is there, other linux distros have it, but the reviewer who never made up his mind how he is going to review the product totally ignores this.

    This seems like one of the many home desktop reviews out there. This is not a home desktop. I think NLD is meant to be installed unattended with all the defaults set. After wich a user will use the installed applications and every bit of configuration will be done by the support staff.

    What matters here the following things.

    • Can every needed option be pre-configured so that during a rollout you don't need support to log into a thousands of machines to set the web proxie in firefox?
    • Can it integrate with the existing sytems? File shares, databases, file formats.
    • Can it be remotely administrated. If I call the helpdesk and they can just login and do their stuff while I am working (should be possible with linux) then that is a lot better then windows. (were you need reboots and can't have admin and user at the same time).
    • Can the user be kept from doing harm to the system?
    • Is it reliable?
    • Is the desktop clear enough for people to do their job. Most people use only a tiny handfull of applications, you would be suprised how many people get by with just their office suit. Can the desktop be setup to just work for them?
    • Is in an attempt to make the desktop user friendly not the mistake being made of making the system hard to admin? The 3 package managers might be confusing to a user but an admin should find it refreshing to be able to use his favorite.

    Questions on KDE vs Gnome don't matter at all. The powers that be will decice the install and the user will just have to live with it. Just as millions still have to live with NT4.

    Next time split the review into a setup/admin part and an end-user part because that is how this desktop is supposed to be used.

  • I tried to download the NLD (or is it NDL?) first with Firefox 1.0 and it stalled and errored out at around 9% - same result with Mozilla 1.73. I even went back to IE and tried it again without success. Then I tried each browser again with the other mirror sight with the same bad results. That was yesterday. Today when I tried after about two minutes the download manager said it was done and closed. I would have loved to demo this to our management but I could not because I can't download the demo.

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