Novell is giving away 10 GB of DVDs and CDs. Some of the included software are SuSE 9.1 Pro, SuSE Standard Server 8.0 and Novell GroupWise.
Free 10 GB Novell Resource Kit: Get SuSE Linux for Free
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I would like to try out SUSE 9.1 pro since I am still having issues writing J2EE apps in Eclipse seems like the whole desktop freezes up on Fedora core2 anyone having the same issue . The issues seems to be thread related. It runs fine redhat 9.0.
wow hopefully I’ll be able to get linux for free! I never tried it before
Yes, same problem here with Fedora.
I also had problems with SuSE 9.1 though. It refused to install Japanese, which is something I need. The installer couldn’t find any files on either the CD or DVD whenever I tried to install Japanese (which is something that has worked fine in SuSE for several releases). You probably won’t have that requirement, however, so it may work fine for you.
But is it for free for everyone while stocks last?
I did my order hours ago, will they ship it to Australia? It doesn’t say.
Does the SUSE Pro DVD include the ATI binary drivers? Are they automatically installed?
This is the first time I would ever use SUSE since I have always used Redhat.
…but is this free???
Just got registered.
Thanks for the heads up.
Maybe they are just putting together a huge mailing system, I dont know, but I live in Argentina and I would love to receive this package for FREE, if its really FREE. Anyway, I’d just completed their registration form… Can’t wait to try out this package. SuSE Personal (DOWNLOAD EDITION) has some bugs and lots of limitations, but I’m looking forward to try the Pro version, meanwhile I’ll just keep SLACKIN’. Cheers from the south.
I read about the “give away” a few weeks back. . .
About a week after I registerd for the package they sent me an email telling me that my package was shipped.
I just got it a few days ago and I love it.
Heads up, the only bootable DVD in the set (of 3 DVDs) is the SuSE 9.1 Pro disc. The others only contain information and iso files so you can burn them to CDs and then install.
It also comes with SuSE 8.2 Pro. . . which is neat, but I don’t have a use for it.
i got registered about 3 -4 weeks ago and yesterday i get the 3-DVD set. So, this really happens.
i am from romania, so this is also valid for Argentina …
p.s. waiting impatiently for the C.M. 2006 in Germany
Was it free or did you have to pay a subscription or for mail delivery?
Now they’ll probably never offer it again thanks to your damn publicity for free loaders.
These kits are meant for companies not home desktop users.
Note the area of the site? Customer Communities. I’d say that that applies wouldn’t you?
ok ok so we won’t tell slashdot…I got an email and they’ll ship soon. Maybe they’ll win a convert?
I got mine a few days ago. The DVDs say “LICENCED FOR EVALUATION ONLY. Transfer Prohibited.”
Of course, no support is provided (it says so on the DVD too).
I’m not sure it applies, I guess home users can bring them at work. Which is what I actually plan to do. I already have a few linux boxes there, and they compare well with other unixes we use. And, after all, I’m /DAMN/ curious about their Linux Services and the Novel Groupwise ISOs… 😉
I got mine a few days ago. The DVDs say “LICENCED FOR EVALUATION ONLY. Transfer Prohibited.”
Sounds like SCO when they were a nice company (hard to believe, but they were at one stage back when a big beared guy ran it), you used to pay $60 and you could receive their whole software portfolio, the only downside, you didn’t receive support and you couldn’t use it in a commercial environment, which was very good value if one were a student and wanted to learn UnixWare/OpenServer etc.
I am getting it…
It says “With over 10GB of fully-functional software, this tool will help you test and evaluate Linux products from Novell in your home test lab.”
home test lab being the keywords.
Also under question 7 you can choose “Student”.
So I said to myself why not?
ordered mine a few days ago. have been playing with the personal version and im *really* impressed. linux has come so far in the past few years
Distrowatch reported this in the 14th June 2004 edition of Distrowatch Weekly.
So telling us about it nearly a month later hardly qualifies as news.
Oredered the pack! I’m a student, and as someone already said, “student” was an option. So…
Mal-formed reply from origin server. Please try your request again.
502 Bad Gateway
Im a sucker for free. I ordered it and I dont even like suse..he he
What a jerk huh..lol
I ordered the kit 10 days ago. I received it 2 days ago. It took 4 days for the package to travel from the US to Europe! Despite what the website says the pack includes SUSE Linux ENTERPRISE (!!!) server 8 (iso files), Suse 8.2 (iso), Bootable DVD with SUSE 9.1 Pro and a bunch of other Novell Goodies! IT’S 3 DVDs PEOPLE!!! But wait.. I just visited the page and they say the offer is over.
Well, this offer is over. I just odered it about 5 min ago, and got it…I directed a friend to the page via IM, and he JUST got kicked out after filling it in
Good luck to all who made it!
i’m lucky man , i’ve ordered it just 2 hours ago
I’ve made an order, how do I know if they will send me?? I didn’t see anywhere on the page that the offer is over.
Great, now you get a bunch of freeloaders who will not be using this for enterprise evaluation purposes….
Thanks for nothing.
I’d think that in the coming weeks, at least one SuSE Pro and one SLES review will be posted on osnews… 😉
Well, in each case, I hope that I recieve the thing! SuSE has some of my money already, have bought 7.3 Professional before I switched to NetBSD.
their stock is out, and no more free suse dvd…..
i wanted it, as with slow connections i can’t download easily…
till next time…
It doesn’t come with the ATI drivers, but you can download the customized drivers from SuSE’s website.
I will actually be evaluating this for business purposes as well as pleasure. I would like to see firsthand how SuSe Enterprise measures up. I’d love to run a Linux email and PDC server here at work. We might be able to save a chunk of change rather than going with Exchange 2003. I don’t have a problem configuring a server via commandline, but the head admin is a windows guy.
novell rocks.
…I really could have used this evaluation kit to convince the higher ups to migrate from our current NetWare infrastructure to SUSE instead of the planned Microsoft migration. Unfortunately, I find out a month too late to get a copy (no more available). I shouldn’t have to go hunting around for stuff like this. Novell should be actively seeding the stuff to us. Honestly, it’s days like this when I really wonder why I am supporter of this company.
I havent looked into this an awful lot, but It would seem suse cant do xfs or jfs from a default install. Of course this may just be fix by loading another kernel at start up, modprobe xfs didnt work out either.
On a more serious note, it’s installer craps out at different point’s in the install if i dont install the defalut desktop.
Maybe that just me, it’s a niffty distro.
Will
p.s. in an idiotic moment of impatience on the 3rd retry I managed to delete my entire data patition, lost my work etc, luckly I had back up of the newest stuff heh pitty about the rest.
These kits are not for companies only. I’ve been in contact with Novell about these kits for well over a month, as a LUG president. They were contacting Linux User Groups directly offering this deal to the members. There is no cost (they cover everything including shipping atleast in the US). I’ve received my kit which as posted previously contains three DVD’s only one of which is bootable (and has SUSE Pro 9.1). The other DVD’s just contain ISO images of the other disks in CD-ROM format. These are evaluations kits, no support for any of the software, but a great way to try out almost everything Novell has right now.
-Cheers
Based on what I seen of the posts here it appears the Linux community are the ones who benefited from this offer not companies. Quite frankly, Novell is in serious danger of loosing the global license revenue that they get from the company that I work for. Had they offered this kit to us in the first place (I just found out about the offer this morning after the offer had expired), it may have influenced the higher ups to rethinbk our migration plans.
Really a nice deal. I believe they’ve made a great pubblicity to SuSE as a home & business distro. I’ve already bought suse 9.1 prof but i ordered the kit to give a try at the other stuff and possibly to make a present to a friend.
novell discontinued it.
possibly too much orders….
cheers,
Frank
if you work for a company that wants to try out some software, open the yellow pages and call your local novell rep, and have them get it for you.
if you dont have a local rep, call novell directly.
an end to a free program doesnt leave you to die on desert island.
You mean the same rep that failed to mention this offer when I asked for something like it?
I read every help file I could find on what the “Evaluation Only” license meant, but I could not find this info on any of the disks. In this day of haggling over licenses, I was surprised to see this handled so lightly. Anybody got a pointer to details on the license?
“Great, now you get a bunch of freeloaders…”
Doesn’t that discribe the majority of the Linux user base? …Everything *MUST* be free… I bet if they had charged $1 for shipping it wouldn’t be sold out already.
I found out about this couple weeks ago. They arrived today, and much to my shagrin they are 3 DVD’s
DVD1: Suse Linux Enterprise Sever 8, Nterprise Linux Services 1.0, Groupwise 6.5.1, Red Carpet Enterprise Server 2.02, Console One, Linux resources
DVD2: Suse Pro 8.1(???), Ximian Desktop2
DVD3: Suse Pro 9.1(why have 8.1 if you have 9.1 also?)
Now i have to wait for my boss to get in so we can mount them on his DVD player.
I’m a student network assistant at a University, i already run Fedora Core2(personal workstation) and we run Redhat 9( for Dns, ftp, samba and other misc servers that we don’t want our IT dept to run) with Novell’s servers
From the link in the article, you get:
Novell Customer Communities
Linux Technical Resource Kit
order form
We appreciate your interest in the Linux Technical Resource Kit, offered by the Novell Customer Communities.
At this time we are not accepting any more orders. If you are interested in receiving notice of other forthcoming Linux opportunities from Novell similar to this Linux Technical Resource Kit, please e-mail us your contact information, and we will communicate with you as soon as another offer is available.
Suse is much better now then the first encarnations. I dowloaded the 9.1 personal ISO and really like it. It is running on one of my game servers now. Truth is i would not pay for it. It does not do anything more for me then any other free Linux distro does. It would have nice to be able to get a kit though just to see what the enterprise version looks like and what it offers. Seems like i was a day late and a dollar short.
,,”Great, now you get a bunch of freeloaders…”
Doesn’t that discribe the majority of the Linux user base? …Everything *MUST* be free… I bet if they had charged $1 for shipping it wouldn’t be sold out already.”
Do all those freeloaders also get the three part IA32 programming manual from Intel? No, even though it is completely free including shipping.
I think it are three factors that combined have lead to this:
– It was free
– It was advertised on OSNews.com
– The order page had a notice of limited.
That last point might even have been the most important: everyone wants to secure his kit because they are hinted that tomorrow might be too late.
I would just love to know how many they shipped, and how many copies will be burned from these (I have no idea what the terms and conditions are, but those may not stop people…)
I know this—ain’t no copies left at this point, and I’ve seen corp employees complaining about that here. I’d suggest calling Novell to find out if it’s OK to get copies from other people, and if not, when they are going to make up a new batch.
Me, I’m interested more in the likes of Planet CCRMA, DiMuDi, and other music-composition distro’s…my bosses want nothing to do with anything but Windows.
“Great, now you get a bunch of freeloaders…”
Doesn’t that discribe the majority of the Linux user base? …Everything *MUST* be free… I bet if they had charged $1 for shipping it wouldn’t be sold out already
Hardly. Rather, I find that a lot of Linux users I know have no problem paying for software. It’s just that when you have pay-for software, and free software that does what you need it to do, why buy the pay-for software?
Why would I want to pay for an HTTP server if Apache does what I need it to do?
I have no problem buying software if it’s better, or if it has features I want, or heck, even paying for support for a free product! I’ve actually done it, buying the Zend Studio for programming. While their are free editors out there, I find that Zend is worth the money with the added features they provide.
At least for the people I know, it’s not just the price of a product that sells it. It’s a combination of price, quality, and features.
Mine arrived on Tuesday.
3 dvds. Fast shipping too!
I went to the site to sign up and they are no longer accepting orders. Just my luck.
Until you explain to me why it is that the “free” land that used to be available to a whole continent full of people is now bought and paid for by their blood and disease.
…and why all those “freeloading” senior citizens have to choose between drugs and food….
People who complain about “freeloaders” seem to generally resent the fact that they have to work for a living.
What about the “freeloader” who used lots of “free” resources to create GWBASIC, and then started yammering about all those “freeloaders” trying to “share” “his” program?”
Novell took advantage of a very large “commons” and is distributing a lot of Free and Open-Source software. They had a limited number of copies they wanted to print and ship. You didn’t get yours. Don’t blame that on other people; just go out (like a lot of the rest of us do,) and either build your own Linux, or pick up Debian or Mandrake or something.
“…I really could have used this evaluation kit to convince the higher ups to migrate from our current NetWare infrastructure to SUSE instead of the planned Microsoft migration. Unfortunately, I find out a month too late to get a copy (no more available). I shouldn’t have to go hunting around for stuff like this. Novell should be actively seeding the stuff to us. Honestly, it’s days like this when I really wonder why I am supporter of this company.”
I bet if you called them up, told them your situation, and asked for a copy, they’d find you one.
I got mine in the mail the other day, this is kinda old news, but sweet none the less
But I’d rather know that these isos was available for free on the ‘net somewhere and have the option to pay Novell like $50 for this collection on DVD/CD. That would go a long way to earning my recommendation in those important business decision meetings and stuff cuz I would have had experience working with and understanding the capabilities of this software.
As it is right now to know the state of the art of Novell I have to purchase it or do some research and hope I’m not reading an embellished article, like a lot of those Windows vs. Linux comparisons.
Sorry to look a gift horse in the mouth and all that..
Man there are a lot of comments. I don’t know why people need to complain about people getting the software. It’s free first of all, so what difference does it make if people want to take advantage of a free thing? Also it does not specify saying “For Business Use Only” or anything specific at all. In fact the order form had Student right on it, so what’s wrong with this?
I am just curious though for those of you who got them about how long did it take for you to get them? I think I ordered mine about 1 week ago, so I’m obviously going to wait longer but I’m just wondering.
Someone should put these on Bittorent sites!
If you want a torrent of this (or just about anything for that matter) try http://www.suprnova.org/ (and no that’s not a typo) It has the DVD image of 9.1 Pro and a bit larger DVD image of 9.0 Pro. I hope this post doesn’t come too close to warez and the like, otherwise please feel free to mod me into oblivion.
I have WebSphere, DB2 etc. on a 2 disc DVD set from IBM on my desk – they mailed it out to me in an offer a while back.
I haven’t had the time to look at most of it, but this is no different from what Microsoft do with their MSDN program.
They ship you boxes full of CDs/DVDs in the hope you will install as many of them as you can, inadvertently come to rely on them in your production systems and then be forced to license the products.
Developers are particularly susceptible to this approach, as many of them seem to not realise that what they got for free, everyone else has to pay for.
When one of our developers starts talking about ‘oh we’ll just need another box running SQL Server’ he doesnt think about the NZ$5000 for the hardware, the NZ$40,000 to license the software, the second box needed for the test platform (another NZ$45,000) and the DR box needed to recover it in case of a major problem (NZ$5000).
The developer just blew NZ$100,000, and has no idea because SQL Server Enterprise Edition is in the MSDN kit and he can just put it on another machine no problem.
Of course we don’t let our developers do stupid things like this, and do exercise control over IT spending, but this is the kind of scenario MS, Novell, and IBM all love.
When you can incur NZ$85,000 in software costs and hardly realise it because the DVD was ‘free’ – thats ROI for Novell.
“Doesn’t that discribe the majority of the Linux user base? …Everything *MUST* be free… I bet if they had charged $1 for shipping it wouldn’t be sold out already.”
Well, i’ve seen one mention of a person who ordered this set while he doesn’t like SUSE. This could mean he wants to try it out and see if he likes it, but all the people who order this while they’re not even gonna use it are filling slots for people who have more serious purposes for this (home user or not). I find that sad.
A solution to this is to raise the bar by asking the a small fee for the DVD set + S&H. Not necessarily to get profit, or to play quite, but merely to raise the # of serious demands. A person is not likely to pay something which the person doesn’t really want to use. How higher the price, how less likely this practice is. $1 for checking out 10 DVD’s including shipping (all over the world) is still pretty damn cheap, but it might have the effect you proposed that less people who are really interested will order this. It doesn’t guarantee it, nor does it mean one who’s not willing to pay for this (or doesn’t order) ain’t interested.
Bringing this solution with some generalized statement however is also unfounded and flamish.
Loaded 9.1 Pro on a box I have. Wasn’t terribly impressed. Perhaps it was the fact that the installer crashed if you tried to put lilo on /hdb, or anything but /hda. Actually it never did manage to use lilo, it only worked with Grub on /hda.
Perhaps it was the fact that since I have two ethernet ports (one on the mother board, one a PCI card) and eth0 isn’t connected to anything, eth1 is, if you do anything but delete eth0 during the install it complains that it can’t find the network.
Perhaps it was the overly large (on a 1024×768 monitor) pre-school inspired KDE. Large brite candy colored buttons, for a moment I thought I was looking at WinXP. Perhaps that’s the point.
Maybe it was the pain of wading through all the pop ups when I had finished. The only browser installed, or offered for installation was Konqueror, perhaps that’s just how this browser works, I’ll admit I use FireFox pretty exclusively in both Linux and Windows. I figured I would try surfing the web after reboot. At one point nearly my entire screen was filled with pop ups. Ugg…
If you stick close to the defaults, and don’t mind a desktop that looks and acts like IE under WindowsXP, you just might like it.
I have an ATI card, no it doesn’t download the ATI drivers, but it did offer to download and install the Microsoft web fonts, after the obligatory EULA.
Personally, I think I’ll try Debian Sarge.
(Formerly Slackware 8.1, but I’m looking for a distribution that might have more exposure than Slack.)
someone247356
Thanks for the info.
I would just love to know how many they shipped, and how many copies will be burned from these (I have no idea what the terms and conditions are, but those may not stop people…)
It seemed like a nice offer. I learned of this over a week ago, didn’t know it would get so much press. Seemed more for developers, so i didn’t fill it out immediately.
I don’t generally lie on offers, i always say hobbyist or independent. I recall electronics hobbyists used to print bogus letterheads to get free samples. I never bothered with lying, and still got free stuff occasionally.
The point is SuSE 9.1 Pro is virtually free anyways. Sure you can drop $90 in it, but you can make a bunch of copies and distribute the discs legally to friends. It’s all over the P2P networks, ftp sites, and available for $12 (plus shipping) mail order online.
SuSE server is the bit I would like to have seen. That’s a fairly pricey OS as i recall.
shows how it pays to check OSNews…check it often and you might get something nice out of it.
🙁
Went their just now 7:10 US Central time, and got a no more copies notice and a place to leave my contact info….
🙁
SuSE server is the bit I would like to have seen. That’s a fairly pricey OS as i recall.
Novell & IBM are holding 1 day trainig sessions covering SLES8 and their recently released NNLS (Novell Nterprise Linux Services). I just went today and found it very informative. Mostly aimed at those with minimal/no Linux experience or Novell Experience and they supply you with eval copies of most of their software portfolio.
While eval only, they are fully functioning, just no support is available.
The only thing that’s ‘time limited’ is a product called DirXML for interfacing with other directory software ala Active Directory, etc
For $40 AUD you get a days training, the disks, and LUNCH to boot.
I was able to beat the buzzer and get my request in..question to those who have received it already.. Does the software come with valid serial numbers for registration minus support? Without being able to register say SLES8 you wont be able to use maintenance updates. So more directly , I know there is no support, but do you get maintenance updates???
I would guess that maintenance would only be provided after you paid for it, as the updates for enterprise are on password protected servers.