Lots of Novell news today, Linux certification, migration to Linux desktops, iFolder release as GPL and a VPN solution for Macs. Read more for the details.Move over MCSEs, Novell is offering a new Linux certification, CLE, for its partners.
In the 1990s, Microsoft defeated Novell in the market for server operating systems. Now Novell is taking the battle back to Redmond, Wash., launching an attack on Microsoft’s desktop stronghold. eWEEK has an article about NetWare too.
“Novell’s installed base represents a large, loyal group of customers for Novell — prime prospects to deploy SuSE Linux alongside their NetWare systems,” said Al Gillen, research director of System Software at IDC. “By introducing Open Enterprise Server, Novell is converging its licensing strategy used with NetWare to cover both of its operating systems in a seamless, customer-friendly manner.”
Also, Novell has just released iFolder as GPL. iFolder is a file sharing solution for workgroup environments. The project is built on the mono/.Net framework to integrate seamlessly into existing desktop environments. Currently the project consists of the following components:
iFolder: integrated file sharing in the GNOME, Windows, and OS X desktops.
AddressBook: vCard 3.0 compliant address book supporting private, public, and shared address books.
Simias: a general purpose object repository that provides a foundation for building collaborative solutions.
Additionally, Novell and equinux team up to provide VPN connectivity for the Mac market.
This is an awesome week. I’m writing up a business analysis on Novell for a project in school and all of a sudden there’s a ton of news about them. Keep it up Novell!
I have always loved Novell and like with Apple I have always thought that they make great products but have bad, bad marketing. I hope with Linux in the fold they can change some of that and get some marketshare back.
If they don’t do it this time they might as well fade off into the sunset.
Mac OS X already includes a VPN client which plays nice in most cases but is unsupported in certain configurations. For those you may need to get the VPN app supplied by Novell.
That the addressbook will be ‘changed'(?) to actually sue the evolution-data-server that is coming out with evolution 2.0. After all, evolution is under the Novell umbrella as well.
I gotta hand it to novell, well done! Btw, I think everyone can basicly apply for an account in novvel’s-forge. I dont know what thier requirement for acceptance is.
I didn’t expect that at all… right on.
Just spent a few minutes poking around their sourceforge-esque Novell Forge. On the plus side, some of the projects sound really promising. What has me concerned though is most of those projects are inactive or at least show very little activity. It kind of seems Novell said “Everyone, sign up for an open source project. We’re an open source company now. Pick whatever you like. Now get back to work.” Let’s hope they let their developers work on these projects and more importantly, that their devs want to work on these projects.
iFolder, according to the presentations I’ve seen from Novell is a very integral part of their “Nterprise” server solutions… thus, you can be ensured it’s not going away. Krammit, not sure if you’re familiar with Novell in the paste, but they provided fairly unified file/printer sharing to a number of clients, iFolder is sort of their new file sharing incarnation which is a big part of what they’re marketting, so the project should follow right along with whatever they produce for businesses. I just took a quick jab at trying to build it, but my Mono is sorely lacking in features as I’ve wiped out most of the components of gnome that I built it against originally.
Honestly, I really want Gnome/Mono to make it big, but some of the bloat I feel comes with gnome keeps me away for the most part. Furthermore, I don’t want another Gnome install on here until 2.6 is fairly stable and 100% feature rich. Once I’m confident 2.6 has gotten where I want it to be I’ll be merging all of the new gnome stuff into my system (away from /opt) and letting it overwrite all the versions of the support libraries I’m using now. Until then I’m keeping the older support libraries that I know work for all my applications that require them. Since most of my applications are not strictly part of gnome but require many of the gnome support libraries I’m sort of at a a loss when gnome makes a big move that I want to be part of but don’t want to break my other apps. People can talk all they want about binary compatibility, but I tell you it just doesn’t exist like people say it does.
Once I DO get a solid gnome install on here (or at least an installation of the majority of the newer support library versions), I’ll be getting the newest mono at the time and giving this ifolder a hopefully better shot at building.
But I wouldn’t be worrying about iFolder being “inactive” — I haven’t browsed the rest of their projects yet, but I’m sure it’s the same for the rest of them. They all have their place within the products novell sells, and thus are probably not going anywhere.
Actually, I’m very familiar with Novell and their products (got my CNE, after all). My concern wasn’t with iFolder specifically, but with a lot of the other projects on Novell Forge. There are a couple hundred projects out there and most seem to be inactive. The only projects that seem like they have files to offer are ports of existing F/OSS (apache, mysql, bash, perl, etc) and not their new initiatives (groupmage, madius, plus a few others I can’t seem to remember). I just hope they follow through on some of the more ambitious projects.
I could be mistaken, but I thought iFolder was just a well polished WebDAV implementation. I’m fairly sure they released it initially with Netware 6 almost 2 years ago. Perhaps this incarnation is just a reimplementation of iFolder in C#. Anyone know what the plans for the current code base are? Is that being GPLed? But all in all, it’s a good showing from Novell.
Frankly, that’s why I do away with binary based distros. They are a pain to manage.
On another note, Novell is impressing me. I might finally break my oathe never to purchase the SUSE operating system. Even though, I would never use SUSE as my main operating system, I’ll purchase it to show my appreciation and support for Novell and their contribution to open source.
It really has nothing to do with a binary based install. The reason I’m having issues with Mono and for that matter Gnome 2.6 is because I didn’t want to merge the beta software into my normal /usr prefix. However, my /usr prefix still contains a number of the same libraries but more stabled versions of them, thus, I had a number of issues trying to use my original apps with my original libraries and keeping the gnome libraries in my ldconfig path at the same time and what not. It’s not a Mono, Gnome 2.6, or a distro problem, it’s a problem I faced myself because of what I choose to keep on my system and my attempt to isolate Gnome 2.6’s new sources for apps/libraries while still trying to use them at the same time as my other apps using older library versions.
Krammit, I was under the impression you were implying iFolder might turn into an inactive project. Either way, If the number of projects on their Novell Forge site are GPL then I don’t think it’s an issue. Even if the company makes minimal progress those ideas may then be able to be folded into other projects, of course, that’s the beauty of open source. So if you ask me, any progress they make, even if the project dies in a week, is progress in some form or another, just don’t get your hopes up I guess.
iFolder is an excellent product, and so simple I’m surprised there aren’t a ton of clones of it out there. I’m not sure if it has any ties to WebDAV internally, although I think you can use a WebDAV client to access the server if you don’t have an iFolder client. iFolder is very handy if you have a few different machines and want to sync your Documents between them. You get the security of storing your files on a server that gets backed up (and can be accessed from anywhere if it’s internet facing), and the performance/convience of storing files on your local disk.
I’ve often thought about trying to make a Linux clone using rsync, but hopefully I won’t have to now.
I would like to see NDS on OSX! Apple should license it from them. Stop chasing after MS Active Directory!
Pardon my error, I thought you were experiencing the binary libs dependency incompatibilities that plagued me in my early years of using many binary based distros before I gave up on them. I’m sure things must have improved now.
Just came from a conference in SLC, UT where Miguel de Icaza made his case about Mono and Novell. It was awesome! One of the things that he mentioned was that Novell will not renew his contract with Microsoft this year (or something like that). Man, that’s a bold move! Novell is going Linux full board and I must applaud them for that.
Some time ago Miguel de Icaza hinted that a future version of iFolder wound have functionality equivalent to WinFS. I wonder if the “Simias” component mentioned on the iFolder project site is part of that.
Interesting times.
A quote from one of the docs on the site:
“Simias is a technology that will allow various types of data to be stored and related in what is
known as a collection. Initially Simias is the underlying data store for the iFolder project although
it has potential to do much more.”
Sounds WinFSish.
Sweet…Novell Suse Linux preloaded in a store near you.
yah.
From the most recent entry in Miguel’s blog:
“Chris Stone just announced that Novell will be moving the whole company to OpenOffice by the end of the year, and to Linux on the desktop a year after (I did not see the graph clearly).
iFolder and Simias (A metadata-based file system, with built-in synchronization) have been Open Sourced as well, and you can check it out here. Simias is similar to Longhorn’s WinFS and i tis built on Mono.
Nat just demoed the desktop, with iFolder/Simias to share and synchronize the data between a Windows machine and a Linux machine and demostrated the Groupwise support for Evolution and Gaim. “
ifolder is an excellent product. Im really starting to like to this company.
More than I can say for SUN. </me boos>