Novell and Ximian Archive

"At one time, NetWare was the network operating system for the PC world. In particular, there are still companies that depend upon its bread and butter networking on lovingly maintained NetWare 3.1x and 4.x set-ups. And why shouldn't they? It's been long acknowledged that for fundamental print and file services along with rock-solid stability, you couldn't beat NetWare." Read the rest of the article here.

Miguel de Icaza talks to Glyn Moody about Mono's progress, how Ximian was bought by Novell, and why he is so scared of Microsoft's Longhorn. Read the interesting interview here.

Underscoring Novell's commitment to the Linux operating system, the company's chief financial officer on Friday hinted at further acquisitions. Joseph Tibbetts, pointing to Novell's purchase late last year of two leading Linux companies -- Boston's Ximian and Germany's SuSE -- said the networking giant is on its way to becoming the world's leading Linux solutions provider. Elsewhere, alternative to Windows should play to its own strengths, says Novell Linux guru.

Ximian's Nat Friedman will deliver the keynote at this week's Real World Linux Conference, and in this interview, he discusses Novell's commitment to the Linux desktop, barriers, misconceptions and the importance of success stories.

"My team and other teams within Novell continue to develop and use Gtk as their toolkit (recently open sourced Simias/iFolder for instance) and all of the Mono GUI development tools. The only use of Qt that am aware of today is SUSE's recently open sourced YAST" said Ximian's Miguel de Icaza replying on Heise's recent article on standardization of Novell on Qt.

Following Novell's announcement that they will be combining the best of KDE and GNOME, Heise On-Line is now reporting (Google Fish) that Chris Stone let it slip during his keynote at BrainShare 2004 that Novell has chosen to standardize on Qt as development environment. If the latest SUSE desktop is anything to go by, we can expect an integrated desktop based on KDE & GNOME out of this.

Novell's Linux-oriented divisions, Ximian and SuSE, will work together to make one common Novell Linux desktop from Gnome's and KDE's best features, Novell Inc. CEO Jack Messman revealed in an eWEEK.com interview at the company's annual BrainShare trade show here. Ximian has been the main power behind Gnome, while SUSE has been KDE's chief backer.

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.

"During the next two to three years, I quite like the prospects for appreciation in Novell’s stock price, but I'd be inclined to stay on the sidelines for the next few months before thinking about starting a position. While I expect Red Hat to remain the sector leader, its dominant position will be eroded as strong competitors such as Novell/SUSE enter and consolidate in the space. It's still early, and Novell’s transition will take time as management reconciles its various challenges and opportunities." Read the article at ITManagersJournal.

Joe Shaw from Ximian released recently Open Carpet 0.2: This new version fixes some problems with multiple channels and now requires that the user supply the ChannelID directive in the channel config. Hopefully, enthusiasts around the world will join Joe in the developments of Open Carpet to add more functionality and support for more package formats (e.g. Slackware's, Solaris' or FreeBSD's) that will result to a nice, portable, package management front-end application for Unix and Linux.

Recently hired by Ximian (now a subsidiary of Novell) in order to further improve the Linux kernel, Robert Love has interesting tasks ahead of him—integration of all this low level work into the Linux desktop, specifically the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform. The work is already coming to fruition as developer releases of "Project Utopia" (as it's been dubbed) have already been released. So sit back and let's see how Robert Love plans to make the Linux Desktop "Just Work".

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo began this morning at the Javits Center in New York City with a keynote address by Jack Messman, chairman of the board and CEO of Novell. Novell, Messman noted, is a billion-dollar company that's wagering its future on open source, with the acquisitions in the past year of Ximian and SuSE. Linux convert Novell proclaimed its strong support for open-source programming Wednesday, but made the case for a pragmatic approach that blends in its own proprietary applications.

Novell expects this week to begin offering SuSE Linux customers some legal protection for using the open-source operating system, the fourth legal umbrella to emerge from a computing industry grappling with legal threats brought by SCO Group.

Networking software giant Novell Inc does not have any plans to change anything in the Linux operating system from its recently-acquired SuSE AG ... at least, not in the medium term. "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own," said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region.