When Novell’s Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users. The desktop combines functionality from Ximian and SuSE Linux, both acquired by Novell last year. Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of R&D for desktop development, told vnunet.com that this was what enterprise customers wanted.
Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop
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In the article it says that Novell Desktop will be known as SuSE Linux Desktop 9, but meanwhile we already have SuSE Linux 9.1 – I’m confused!
I’m surprised Nat’s putting Dashboard and Beagle into a desktop release. My impression as that they were still in the early stage, i.e. you wouldn’t really want anyone to see them thinking they were finished products. It will be interesting of Novell gets behind the development of Dashboard for desktop users though.
Sounds like an interesting plan.
Novel might actually have the muscle and the money to make *nix on the x86 as simple and straight forward as OS X.
From what I read they’re on the right track with
(a) Firefox (And if this is pre-config’d with all media plugins working right out of the box, that would be awesome.)
(b) Evolution (the one app packaged with my YDL install that I thought was worth a damn)
(c) Open Office (Good, but not great)
(d) Mono (because alas, .net is being used)
(e) Real Player (because a lot of sites stream video in this format and I’ve had spotty results with non native players.)
If it’s a case of insert disks, install, go office worker go! Novel could have a hit on their hands.
Way to go Novell. Now if only Red Hat would do the same, then most people who use Linux would not be subjected to bloated monstrosities that hinder Linux adoption today.
Sure choice is good, but needing to download three or more CDs in order to install something that should fit comfortably one one…
Despite Novell’s history, I’m rooting for them. I hope they do well. they definitely have all the toolas at their fingertips to do so. Keeping it simple is a great idea for the market that they are after.
We’ll see…
Its nice to see a big company serious about Linux on the desktop.
Not like that Sun Java Desktop POS!
Funny, I thought that too. Either Novell is doing something out of community or this was just smoke in a mirror
From Beagle site
The most recent version of Beagle is 0.0.2, which was released on September 1, 2004.
[ http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/ ]
From Dashboard-CIA site
The last message was received 0.93 months ago at 00:56 on Aug 18, 2004
0 messages so far today, 0 messages yesterday
0 messages so far this week, 0 messages last week
0 messages so far this month, 3 messages last month
179 messages since the first one, 8.22 months ago, for an average of 1.38 days between messages
[ http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/gnome/dashboard ]
super_science_monkey, please change your nickname when you submit news, because my name and your nickname don’t fit on a single row and the sentence breaks down, making the osnews rendering ugly. I can’t change my name for what it is, but I am sure you can squeeze a bit out of your nickname. 😉
Let’s hope that these changes are reflected in the next release of plain ol’ SuSE, so us mere mortals can afford it.
I’m interested lately in Mono. Since SuSE appears to be, in effect, the reference platform for Mono, I’ve been trying SuSE 9.1 Pro. But, I’m a Gnomish sort, and Mono is as well, and SuSE’s current KDE focus gets in the way.
As has been noted elsewhere, Beagle and Dashboard seem to have a way to go. They’d be great additions, though.
The article lists Beagle and Dashboard as “for future inclusion” – it doesn’t mean they’ll be part of the distribution right now.
Sounds like nothing more than SUSE Linux with less packages. That isn’t that attractive. They could just as well include a new option in the SUSE Installer (“Novell Linux Desktop”) which would limit/set the package selection automatically. And while choosing just one app for every task is probably sound including two different DEs is totally against the philosophy behind this. Having two different DEs is a much bigger support nightmare than having to different image editors, you know.
No problem.
Heh. Way to go Novell. Simplicity like my Slackware
Hell hath no fury like a scorened Novell.
… one linux distro that has the potential of being as simple and yet powerful as OSX. I hope they’ll do right and success as it merits.
Go Novell, go (i’d never thought i’d say that 🙂
Suse doesn’t even come with decent codecs. We’re talking about a useable desktop, right? I mean, KDE is pretty and all, but without the apps, shall we just sit there and admire it. Some of you broadband people are too full of yourselves expecting that everybody should just have to download whatever they need and whatever ungodly slow speed some people are stuck with, instead of simply bundling apps with the distribution. I don’t understand what you slackware are thinking.