Novell chief information office Debra Anderson has been charged with the task of migrating more than 5,000 employees onto desktop Linux and Open Office during the next 12 months.
Novell to Migrate its Desktops to Linux
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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 wonder if they will choose RedHat Linux?
they bought SuSE and Ximian, so it’ll be one of these i presume – my first choice’s still debian
My two favorites are SuSE and Gentoo, for different reasons … Ximian isn’t actually a distribution though, so it’ll be SuSE.
Umm, Ximian isn’t a distribution. So yeah it would be SuSE.
I know SuSE is mostly a KDE distribution, but Ximian Gnome is simply beautiful. They probably run Ximian Gnome on top of SuSE – makes you wonder if SuSE is going to be a Gnome distribution eventually.
Novell is becoming a Linux distributor to the enterprise market, so it’s in there best intrest to use their own distro. The changes they make to the desktop will hopefully be submitted back to the respective projects. Novell is making a comeback and Linux will be the key to their success. Their experiance in the networking field will also help them along the way, no longer will they have to hope that Microsoft will play nice, now they have their own OS and I’m sure people will want some of their goodies.
I think it would be easier for them to roll out SUSE than Debian. If you watched the Brainshare videos, they showed how it was done. The computer ran some software that saved all the user’s settings from Windows to a back up space on the network. It also saved some information on what applications the machine had installed. After that was done, the computer rebooted, and went into the SUSE installer. It got a IP address and went into install, fetching the settings from the Backup. It then installs the equivalent programs and once all installs re applies all your settings and imports your information. After the machine reboots, you have a Linux desktop that is almost *exactly* like it was before with Windows, all your email has been imported and your account is set up, your documents are all there, etc.. Even your wallpaper is the same!
It beats ghosting 5000 machines and figuring out which machines need what and doing manual backups, etc…
J/k, but settioussly, this could answer if they are switching to Gnome or KDE internally.
I doubt they are swtching to stock Suse, more likely some modified Suse, probably with Ximian Gnome and some other internal software.
Well, they have said that they plan on integrating KDE and GNOME so that they can interoperate better together. So, if they’re going to “eat their own dog food” as the article said, I would think that their employees would pick between the two. If Novell only mandates one for their desktop, companies might so “oh, well you don’t use {GNOME|KDE}”. What Novell does in their internal organization will probably be very closely watched.
Is anyone else worried about what large corporations distibution Linux will mean for the Total Cost of Ownership in an enterprise situation? My understanding is that the cost of setting up Linux in the enterprise comes from the re-training of staff. After that things get cheaper as there are little or no licence fees…. If Novell starts selling SuSE with Ximian on top, wont that make licencing just as high as MS?
If they’re successful, it should be a big win for Linux. Just hope they don’t crash and burn
If you watched the Brainshare videos, they showed how it was done [snip]
Link? That sounds pretty interesting
It’s Suse 9 and Ximian XD2. That’s what the Novell sales people use today
Here is the link, http://www.novell.com/brainshare/keynotes2004.html
The example I gave was from the friday keynote it starts around 1:30 hours into it. There were a lot of other good demonstrations which I would hope you watch too. Everything they showed off is already shipping so this isn’t Micro-vapor-ware thats coming Real Soon Now.
Also for the Mono-is-only-copying-Microsoft people, at 1:00 hour into the friday presentation Miguel went over the Mono extensions on to .Net.
Oh, forgot to mention that you should watch “The Lord of the Net” video too, it’s good stuff.
http://www.novell.com/brainshare/lord_of_the_net_real.ram
The slide is kinda hard to see in the video for Mono, but they have the presentation slides in pdf form. Here is the link to the one for Mono: http://www.novell.com/brainshare/presentations/demo_friday.pdf
You can find the Mono overview on page 25.
now we will see if the bird can actually fly.
wouldnt be nice if ibm could do the same since they yak so much about linux too.
suse will be free for novell as they own it.
hope you dont have to go buy 10 or 100 or 1000 copies from novell though.
or suns java desktop. or red hats new model…
add it up. it aint cheap.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13485
I thought I heard more conclusive talks from IBM, but I have no sources but this rumor.
What remains to be seen is at what price. I will be very interested to see what Novell will ask for their newly acquired toys.
Novell has a long history of being a lot of things, however cheap or free have never been words used in those conversations. I don’t look for them to be selling anything for less than what MS or RH are asking.
If they are having trouble with Excel macros have they thought about switching some boxes over to StarOffice? That way you could still run Linux and use a open file format.
Why would Star Office be more helpful than OO.o for Excel macros. One reason they could be having problems w/ the macros is that they are using VBscript in them which OO.o doesn’t support in their macros. AFAIK Star Office doesn’t support VBscript either so how would it help?
They better prepare for this not only being for themselves and something to capture headlines. Potential customers will want to kick some tires, maybe even take a test drive before committing. And where else to go but Provo or Waltham to see the real thing in action.
I’ve only ever seen it in writing and never heard it spoken and I have always wondered… How do you say SuSE? Is it pronounced letter by letter, S-U-S-E? Or is to more like Soo-See, or Soo-S-E? I’ve been trying to figure it out for years!!!
I think it was Soo-sah, when a guy from the company came to our LUG and said it, that’s how it sounded.
According to this
http://www.gardencards.biz/html/flowernames_S.htm
suse is the German short for SUSANNA which in turn is
“From Sousanna, the Greek form of the Hebrew name Shoshannah which was derived from the Hebrew word shushan meaning “lily” (in modern Hebrew this also means “rose”).”
from the Suse web site:-
SuSE, pronounced soo’-suh, comes from the German acronym,
Originally:
“Gesellschaft für Software und System Entwicklung mbH; SUSE GmbH”
…’cause this is desktop-choosing time! Now we will know where does Novell go with their desktop: KDE or Gnome.
…’cause this is desktop-choosing time! Now we will know where does Novell go with their desktop: KDE or Gnome.
Ever consider tbe notion of neither?
…’cause this is desktop-choosing time! Now we will know where does Novell go with their desktop: KDE or Gnome.
Ever consider tbe notion of neither?
Or even the use of both?
— SuSE, pronounced soo’-suh, comes from the German acronym,
Originally:
“Gesellschaft für Software und System Entwicklung mbH; SUSE GmbH” —
And since its an acronym, it technically does not have a single correct pronunciation! Acronyms can be pronounced according to each languages rules. Personally, Ive always called it simply “soos”, according to the rules of american english.
Purely based on the name i believe that SuSE is not a very good brand name. If i where a Novell employee i would suggest to drop the SuSE name and change it to “Novell Linux”. On the other hand, Ximian is a good brand name, especially for consumer orientated software.
They dropped SuSE already. It’s SUSE.
And where branding is concerned, maybe they can do some advertising. There was a time before Nokia, Nike, Nintendo and Ikea were common names, too.
Atleast Novell is taking a first step here in the USA in adopting Linux as a desktop platform. Considering that a small handfull of companies use linux in the desktop that’s a beginning. I wish them luck.
If Novell manage to successfully migrate their desktop users to Linux, they will have a huge advantage in selling Linux to other organisations as a viable desktop solution. Not only can they point to their own migration project as an example of success, they’ll also have first-hand experience of the problems and pitfalls involved in such a move. Put another way, they’ll be perfectly placed to re-assure potential customers they have the expertise to support a migration and will probably be able to suggest contingency measures should problems arise. Good luck to them! Finally, it seems Microsoft may face some competition on the corporate desktop!
I’m more interested in whether that migration utility will be available to the public than anything else…
I hope this will encourage some application stability particularly with ConsoleOne (which likes to randomly break for me).
“I’m more interested in whether that migration utility will be available to the public than anything else…”
I’m certain it will be available to the public. Novell will be more than happy to SELL you a copy of it for about 10 grand. Novell has given very few things away over the years, and I really don’t see them changing.
Well I guess Novell will implement SUSE Linux with the default KDE desktop environment – but with the Gnome libs installed for XD2 duty. A great opportunity to demonstrate the power of Kiosk and the Enterprise capabilities of the Ximian and SUSE Linux products.