Novell, who recently acquired both German Linux distributor SUSE and Gnome developer Ximian, Inc., announced Tuesday the release of Ximian Desktop 2 for SUSE Linux 9. The story is also here.
Novell Updates Ximian Desktop 2 for SUSE Linux 9
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looks like the only mjor KDE-based distro will soon be a GNOME-based one.
I hope they will continue to include KDE in their next version of SUSE/Novell.
SUSE has taken a lot of heat for lack of GNOME support. This would seem to correct that. As a KDE user, I am mostly unconcerned. The KDE/GNOME situation does not have to be either/or. By merging SUSE and Ximian, Novell will have the best distro by far IMHO.
Does anyone know of the nature of the additions??? I am a longtime SUSE user and XD2 support for SuSE 9.0 was added back in December, and announced on the ximian website…do with know if it has just been bugfixes since then, or are there additions that have been made since then in functionality??? Anyone tested it yet?
Hmm… “Ximian Desktop”. Not sure what that means. Are you supposed to buy some regular distro like Suse or Slack, and then buy “Ximian Desktop” to install “over it”?
Why isn’t there just a simple “Ximian GNU/Linux” distribution?
XD2 is still using Gnome 2.2? Anyone know?
… And its still the old XD2, the integration with SuSE still sux. Everyone who likes XD2 I sugest still using it with RedHat 9 as the integration is by far the best. I hope that in the future they will make the integration better.
And yes, XD2 is still Gnome 2.2, but is far more polished than a regular gnome 2.4.
@johnMG:
Ximian Desktop isn’t a Linux distro, but just a packaged and slightly modified version of Gnome 2.2 plus a patched version of OpenOffice.org.
@Joe User: Yes, it’s still based on Gnome 2.2.
Im a happy SuSE 9.0 user, converted from redhat/fedora…allways used kde, but honestly I dont give a rats ass if its kde or gnome…actually I wish one of them would “disappear” so focus could be on just one desktop. Its both a strength and a weakness of linux with all this choise. its hard to develop software and user guides for all the different desktop-versions out there…
“..actually I wish one of them would “disappear” so focus could be on just one desktop. ”
I would lend myself to agree in somepart. I wont go as far as to say one desktop, but it is very obvious that we have some seriously divided ranks when it comes to guis. this ends up leaving us with alot of desktops that do alot of different things, but no one desktop that does it all and does it with style. KDE is like a swiss-army knife, gnome is like a ginsu knife, when wut we nee is one of those steak knives with the serated edges…something that always gets the job done, but can still be dressed up in a tux…
I take it you question is facetious.
Ximian is a tweaked version of Gnome, plus Evolution and their Connector thingie. There’s no more reason to wonder why Ximian Desktop isn’t a Linux distribution than to wonder the same thing about KDE, Gnome, or any window manager.
Ximian wants to sell into the corporate market. By offering different Desktops for a number of distributions, they increase the size of their potential market. Marketing a distribution would put them in direct competition with the vendors that create their market.
However, it will be interesting to see now that Novell owns Ximian and SUSE. Personally, I think there’s barely enough corporate market space to support a single Linux distribution, much less a product like Ximian.
The announcement means:
Ximian has created a SUSE 9.0 package of their Ximian Desktop 2. You people are misleading if you assume that SUSE are those who made these packages and gonna use it as KDE replacement.
This would be like the XFCE team releasing RPM’s for Red Hat and SUSE from their XFCE Desktop.
It’s an initiative from Ximians side and not SUSE side. SUSE still continues supporting KDE as they ever did. Not to mention that the Ximian people are also working on KDE stuff these days which you should not ignore. Before they were aquired by Novell Ximian main concerns were only GNOME but after Ximian got bought by Novell they now do KDE stuff as well.
I agree completely. I don’t see how it will ever come to be though. Too many zealots for it to work. We can dream i suppose. I guess if the default DE for all the commercial distros were the same, that would be close enough. If a zealot wanted to switch after that, the more power to them. At least that way, companies wanting to write software for linux would somewhat of a standard.
well, lets look at this objectively.
Redhat and Suse contribute to all the desktop environment, the kernel, and other projects that are used in the GUI…..so all each group does is package these tools that they both help developed and sell it. the difference is what the company does to polish it up. how will having one Linux distro allow more concentration than is already there?
will Suse hire all the Redhat developers? or vice-verce? no..because to many developers in one place will slow things down and be more trouble than it is worth.
There are really no signs that this will happen.
I attempted to install it yesterday evening, but got a file conflict error from the installer. I emailed Ximian with the error message; waiting to hear back from them. I have used XD2 over RedHat and it is pretty slick. I love Suse 9.0 as I bought the professional version a few weeks back. It is the closest thing to a “windows-killer” linux desktop distro that i have seen, and I have used quite a few. Cheers..
Because it is tested. It works. XD2 is not about the latest & hottest. Its about a stable and usable desktop environment.
i dont think anyone said anything about having one linux distro…OH NO…I shudder at the thought..lol rather one more consistent desktop across distros. But many time is the desktop and the tools that set the distros apart..under the hood the parts are pretty much the same…so to ask them to all look alike would hurt the recognition of each disto…look at RedHat and Bluecurve….Mandrake and Galaxy…they are very distinctive if nuthin else…
attempted to install it yesterday evening, but got a file conflict error from the installer. I emailed Ximian with the error message; waiting to hear back from them
I attempted the install a couple of days ago, and received an error message related to the gnome-control-center package (or something along those lines). I’ve also emailed Ximian so I hope this problem can be ironed out.
From a SuSe perspective, I think its the best desktop distro out there. XD2 is a good product, and will certainly hopefully fix the little errors that annoy me about the gnome shipped with SuSe 9 – particularly SMB browsing. It will also be nice to have Red Carpet ;o)
Is there any news on whats going to be included in XD3, or are we waiting until mid March and gnome 2.6 before any announcements?
I wonder if Novell plan to re-write the YaST UI with GTK+ and turning Ximian GNOME into the default desktop. It may sound crazy but GNOME seems to be *the* desktop for corporate distributors (Red Hat, Sun. etc) such as Novell.
Ximian v.s. U-L-B GNOME?
http://ximian.com/products/desktop/
http://www.usr-local-bin.org/
Any pro’s/con’s using any of them on SUSE 9.0?
XD2 and Suse 9 pro work awesome. I also have an AMD64 bit machine with Suse 9 for AMD64, but I see no “64 bit” XD2 yet. I just love being ahead of the curve. XD2 has so much “polish” it fees much more advanced and stable than any other version of Gnome that I have ever used (even 2.4). Now that Suse and Ximian will be under the same roof I can’t wait for a full blown Ximian/Suse intertwined distro out of the box. I just hope it’s affordable for us average personal linux users. Congrats Novell.
I just installed Suse 9.0 via ftp the other day. I was surprised, everything worked on first install, sound, network, video, etc.
ONLY PROBLEM:
Maybe somebody here can help me. I have intellimouse plug in via USB and it work perfect during install. But running under KDE now (have not tried GNOME yet) the mouse works but there is no visible mouse cursor. Any ideas?
Maybe now though I will just install XD2 and see how that is. Although, the new XANDROS looks real nice too.
Maybe you didn’t notice yet that SUSE Linux 9 is not the SUSE product for business customers.
In the future the corporative desktop of SuSE might be Ximian. Main reson is: QT os proprietary.
YAST looks like a hard time to get ported to GTK widgets, so KDE will still be supported. IMHO.
GPL is proprietary?
Wow. just when you thought you heard everything…
– GPL is proprietary?
I said Qt is proprietary and not fully GPL’ed.
Is Qt fully GPL ?
Maybe you heard it wrong. ( Or I did ).
QT has been fully GPL’ed for years.
http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/viewMyth.php?mythID=10
Only if you release your code as GPL too.
Not much use for software houses trying to make money!
Guess you are rigth.
I know it’s on Debian also, for *some* time (stallman doesn’t like in there, tough).
From your link:
With the release of Qt2, the GPL was added as a licensing option. Software can now link against and use Qt as Free software using a broad range of licenses including the GPL, LGPL, X11, MIT and BSD licenses.
So it’s not for a long time really. Many dev people, however, run away from Qt, for some reason that I don’t recall now… I think it’s because if you decide *later* to sell your application (comercially) you have to buy the Qt software (~ $600) to make it legal, the same doesn’y happen with GTK. That’s why, for example, MAndrake system tools are all GTK. But I can be wrong about this.
“Only if you release your code as GPL too.”
And that is exactly the way the GPL works!!!!!!
If you don’t like it contact the FSF and stop using Linux.
I don’t know about the Mandrake tools but the difference is that GTK is LGPL.
“With the release of Qt2, the GPL was added as a licensing option. Software can now link against and use Qt as Free software using a broad range of licenses including the GPL, LGPL, X11, MIT and BSD licenses.”
The one catch of course is that if you’re using the BSD, X11 or MIT licenses, you must use the QPL licensed version of QT instead of the GPL version.
However, I will continue to write mainly GTK apps, because there are some projects I work on that the software is free for users but it is *NOT* open source. I feel like Qt should be free to use in freely available software even if it isn’t open source. Now if I was selling software I could understand the need to license Qt, but I’m not personally.
>> looks like the only mjor KDE-based distro will soon be a GNOME-based one.
XD2 has been available for SUSE since its release (albeit not SUSE 9). This was before Novell had anounced plans to buy Ximian let alone SUSE.
IMHO there is about as much chance of SUSE becoming GNOME based as there is of XD becoming KDE based.
…would give a long hard look at Gnome and KDE, GTK and QT, and choose the better one, both from the point of view of toolkit architecture, ease of development, user-friendliness, stability etc. and she would chose
QT and KDE.
And to hell all the Gnome politicians and PR spinners.
then I guess acquiring Trolltech instead of Ximian would have been a better idea (hope it’s proper english). I still don’t get it why they acquired a KDE distro and a Gnome company, it doesn’t make any sense to me
I guess acquiring Trolltech instead of Ximian would have been a better idea
Maybe that’s a little out of Novell league.
Trolltech is a much higer comercial and technological value than both SuSE and Ximian together, IMHO.
Trolltech is a much higer comercial and technological value than both SuSE and Ximian together, IMHO
While I would agree that Troltech is a very important company with tens, maybe hundreds of very large customers, I wouldn’t knock SUSE down like that. SUSE makes one of the best Linux distros and has support and productizing done right(much better than RedHat in all aspects) – and it has a rather nice marketshare, too. Give some credit where it’s dure: Novell buying SuSE was a big hit, no matter how you put it.
I just don’t get the Ximian move.
I’m a newbie so please forgive if my question is stupid. I’ve been using SuSE 8.2 Pro and love it. My SuSE 9.0 Pro was delivered today. Do I need to install Gnome first then install the Ximian product over it or can I just install KDE and then download the Ximian product? Thanks
Do I need to install Gnome first then install the Ximian product over it or can I just install KDE
I’m not 100% sure but you can just install KDE.
However, the Ximian installer will note the absence of the gtk libraries when inspecting your OS. This means a larger download size. If you can install the Gnome install it
(but … I think the version os Suse 9 is an older version – not gnome 2.? , so maybe you will not benefit from the Gnome install after all).
Anyway, You can just install the KDE and then download Ximian. Ximian is independent from the gnome desktop – it just takes advantages of already installed packages. It also compiles and uncompresses many binary files after the download, so be patient.
_________________________
@mario
Yes, SuSE is a very worthless company. I was not taking credit away rom them but it just happens that Trolltech is a very sucessfull tech bussiness with nice C++ and embedded (QTopia) products, and that means a lot of money on a buy ut (like Suse).
I think ximina was bought for them to have a fully LGPL toolkit and graphical handset to port the Novell networking applications to Linux with a nice feeling and look without the danger of propreitary drawbacks. Ximian is perfect for this Linux GUI porting and ximian has nice developers and professional looking graphical artistry.
> SuSE is a very worthless company
I meant is a nice value company …
I wish Novell would buy Trolltech. I wish they would buy it and LGPL the QT library. Then, I would like them to use Mono technology, get the QTsharp bindings done (this seems to be stalled lately), and also write KDE specific asemblies for mono to hook into the underlying KDE technology….which is great. I think this could be an incredible desktop along with a great programming environment.
Unfortunately, this will probably never happen. The KDE guys just seem to hate (from the limited amount I’ve seen on mailing lists) Mono. But, you never know….now that Suse and Ximian are underneath the same Umbrella, interesting things might happen.
I just think Mono technology embedded with KDE technology could make for one helluva desktop.
Ximian for SUSE 9 may have been announced Tuesday, but it was posted on the Novell webpage and available for download this weekend.
But I’m afraid to load it. My last Ximian install on SUSE 8.2 totally hosed the KDE desktop and gave Yast fits. Will be interested to hear of others’ experience with this version.
Yup, I’d think Ximian will be the default by SUSE 10. I have generally used KDE, but will likely give it a shot.
Hi
I installed redcarpet, rcd and rug from ximian ftp server but it does not start on my suse 9.0 box with gnome 2.4 installed. Does anybody experienced similar problems with redcarpet on suse 9.0?
I wish they would buy it and LGPL the QT library
Do you even stop for a second to think about what you’re going to say, before you parrot the illuminated representatives of the OSS community? Hey, what do you think Trolltech makes money with? QT is GPL-ed for all non-profit purposes, isn’t that enough? Oh, you mean they should work on QT and allow others to use it to make profit – for free! Brilliant idea.
Get a clue mario. I never claimed to speak for the OSS community! So big deal if Novell throws a boatload of cash at Trolltech and the owners/employees/stock owners walk out like bandits and never have to work again if they don’t want to. Is that such a bad thing? I want the people that work/own Trolltech to make a lot of money….just the opposite of what the whole GPL community seems to think a lot of the time! They could still work for Novell I’m sure and get a salary. And whether you like it or not, a big part of the why QT is not getting adopted as much as on corporate desktop is because of the licensing issue. I want KDE and QT to be the dominant desktop.
Anyway, the main point of my opinion was that I think a lot of interesting things could happen with a KDE desktop and mono technology.
Oh, and by the way, not everybody is affected by the Stallman reality distortion field. The GPL is viral and not as free as the LGPL or the BSD license no matter how much you or the FSF people try to spin it. I want the real freedom of choosing between making a closed source(gasp! oh the horror!) or a open sourced app without paying a license for a freaking toolkit. Even MS let’s you download the C++ sdk and use it without paying a licenese fee for distribute apps.