Novell Inc. is banking its re-entry into the consciousness of IT shops on Linux. Through its acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE Linux AG last year, Novell is working hard to regain its stature as a major technology player. In this interview, SuSE chief technology officer Juergen Geck touches on Novell’s Linux strategy, starting with its recent release of the YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) management tool to open source, his thoughts on back-porting features from the 2.6 kernel and SuSE’s product road map for the rest of 2004.
SuSE CTO: Novell gives Linux ‘muscle’
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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.. under a KDE-Desktop. Maybe QtGTK is a solution here. Having Evolution and Gimp etc. integrate nicely would be so cool.
just my 0.02 Eurocent
That is what is going to probably happen. KDE and GNOME both, with Mozilla and Evolution.
I pre ordered it, and it is gonna be here soon.
BTW, what happened to all the SCO lawsuits? I hadn’t heard anything in a while, although I remember Novell was backing Linux big-time and refuting SCO’s claims. Have they just disappeared?
http://www.groklaw.net There you can find all you ever wanted to know about all the SCO cases.
“We’ve been working on our end for years to get YaST to where it is now — meaning GPL. Novell fully embraced that, supported us on that move and made that move.”
Maybe I don’t get it but can anybody explain to me why SuSE needed many years to make YaST a GPL software ? I always thought that kind of decision was made at the early stages of development. Why is SuSE CTO implying that YaST is the only game in town when it comes to managing sofware in a linux environment.
“SuSE Linux has only one code base and one source code repository from which we’ve built the desktop, the server, all the language-specific and hardware-specific versions.”
I thought Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, etc., had only one code base and one source code repository. Why is Geck implying (once again) the contrary ?
I’m not an SuSe fan, but even I know you could always download the code the Yast. You just couldn’t resell it with the intention of making a profit.
Sunny Dubey
He said they use the same source for their desktop as their Enterprise server. Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian don’t have Enterprise servers or desktop variants. Instead, those distros have countless packages that one must install and configure themselves in order to have a similiar OS, but the fine tuning you will have to do yourself and there is zero warranty and support directly from the distribution. He’s probably making a reference at their competition in the enterprise linux area which is Red Hat.
As for the yast comment, I was a little baffled too. I’m assuming that management at Suse wanted to keep yast in house while the developers wanted to open source it, and the developers had probably had little say in the matter.
“Why is SuSE CTO implying that YaST is the only game in town when it comes to managing sofware in a linux environment.”
Because its the only solution that is up to the task. Mandrake config tools are lame, although powerful, Red Hat’s are useless, and I can’t name another distro that even offers fine tuned config tools…
Not to mention all the companies that are apparently going to be using it in the near feature…
Why are Mandrake’s config tools “lame”?
They have parallel urpmi installation, they have an easy way to configure a terminal server with sound and local file saving, which neither Red Hat nor Suse yet offers, they have been doing CUPS configuration longer than anyone and as far as I can tell better than anyone.
I think your poor arguments deserve more the “lame” epithet.
Well, I have been using Mandrake since version 7.x and right now I’m using 9.2 @home and @work and it works well (after hundreds of meagabytes of fixes at least) so I’m not bashing their config tools just for fun but instead of working on a nice UI and making the tools rock solid they change the UI at every single release! So instead of stabilizing the tools they actually introduce new bugs for every release plus they seem to keep developing these tools when in beta test!?! which is beyond me. I’m not saying the SuSE tools (Yast2) is without any bugs or perfect but it’s an order of magnitude better than Mandrake tools. Just try the SuSE 9.1 Live CD to understand
I get puzzled by this one. I never have any problems with Gimp under KDE, it seems integrated enough to me (It integrates better than Photoshop does under Windows IMHO). Evolution is fine too – at least, it works OK, I tried it (I don’t use it – it’s not to my taste because I never used the Windows equivalent) – I use Kmail (and Kwhateveritis if I need it) – but it worked fine.
What I think they mean is:
1. To use a KDE like file selector dialog window
2. To take the current KDE theme hints for colours etc rather than folow the the current GTK settings.
3. Use KDE icons instead of Gnome icons for Gnome applications in general.
Everyone to their taste 😉
1. Yeah – fair enough. I don’t particularly like the GTK dialog boxes (tho’ Gimp2/GTK2 ones are nicer) as I’ve got out of the habit of double-clicking. A fair number of apps I use have their own (Windows-style) ones anyway, which I like even less – mostly MainActor and some commercial apps if I remember right.
2. This already happens, doesn’t it? (using ‘apply KDE settings to non-KDE apps’ which lives somewhere in ‘KDE control centre’ I think)
3. Never noticed. Everything seems to display the icon that comes with the app (like Wilbur for the Gimp).
Perhaps I’m just not fussy enough. I like things that work, and for me KDE/SuSE works fine, I don’t bother too much about adapting to minor eccentricities – (I’ve got plenty of my own) 🙂
Yeah I think your right on point 2 – its a long time since I used KDE as my main desktop environment.
On point 3 – what I meant was they want to KDEize the app by replacing the Gnome icons such as in Abiword and Gnumeric (or the Openoffice icons) in the app’s iconbars.
where is the yast source? I looked in suse’s open source projects page and can’t find it.