Posts by Ilmehtar

Novell's Vibe Cloud floats away

A Good Decision

Vibe Cloud was an ugly red headed stepchild compared to the much more useful Vibe OnPrem product.

It's been a long time since a Novell product has captured the imagination of my Management but OnPrem did that in spades.

@James 100 - Netware hasn't been discontinued. OES on Linux brings all the good stuff from Netware, dumps the useless rubbish, and adds a ton of nice new features, some of which are really innovative - eg. MS & Citrix supported AD running on Linux that can run faster with more users than AD on Windows. What's not to like?

I won't argue that Groupwise needs attention (and it seems to be getting it), but I think the biggest problem for Novell sites is too many of them have sat on their laurels and not explored the new products Novell have been pumping out for the last few years.

I have no sympathy for anyone moaning about Groupwise performance when they're still running Netware - Groupwise on Linux is a dozen times faster.

Can't really put all the blame for that on Novell, and even if you do, the new leadership seem to have a good plan and the will to execute it.

Dell refreshes Alienware laptops

Overpriced?

Comparing the M11x to an Thinkpad X220 I can't help but feel Dell haven't quite got their pricing right

Looking at 'top option' specs (Sandybridge i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, 2x2 Wifi, etc) - for £600 *less* the ThinkPad can match the best the M11x has to offer plus give you a faster CPU or an IPS monitor plus its a fair bit lighter and smaller (despite having a larger screen size)

Sure, the M11x has a meaty video card and therefore gaming potential which the ThinkPad does not, but £600 for gaming and some flashy LED's a bit of an excessive premium.

If only it was £200-300 over a similarly specced business ultra-portable and they could probably rake it in..

Virgin Media Superhub customers still hitting big speed bump

Update: 9PM 19/04

Just a quick update regarding this problem. I am a VM beta tester and in the last few hours Virgin have pushed out a new firmware to their SuperHub beta testers.

It is version R26, intended to fix the problems mentioned in this article

After a few hours of testing, I would certainly say it looks very promising - this is the first time since R25's test and general releases I've been able to reliably stream audio on Last.fm and watch YouTube videos in HD.

If you're strucken by the issues, I'd recommend you keep a close eye on VirginMedia's forums, as I believe the plan is to offer R26 to new testers before any general release.

openSUSE 11.4 rocks despite missing GNOME

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 will be available for OpenSUSE when it is released. I believe this will include a GNOME 3 'remix' ISO.

The GNOME 3 project are actually using openSUSE for their demo CDs on WWW.gnome3.org

Virgin Media to issue firmware update after Superhub slows to crawl

It's not just 30Mb/s Users

All new 50Mbps users are given superhubs too

And experiencing the same issues - I haven't had a useable evening/weekend internet connection since installation on the 4th, and no sign of any fix yet.

Novell fannies about with Open Enterprise Server 2

Ummm?

I don't get it either.

The OES2 SP2 Public Beta includes Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3.

Last I checked SLES was one of the major business Linux server distributions.

The OES extensions to SLES include some very fine services, from AFP, SAMBA and NFS services (allowing a single volume/DFS pool to be visible natively from Mac, Windows, or Nix clients), to NetStorage (a nice web based front end to network storage), not to forget LDAP enabled DNS/DHCP services, and a directory-enabled printing service in iPrint that is perhaps one of the best featured network printing solutions available..

Maybe this is an attempt at irony, the only thing I find funny about this is that the Register seem to think Novell's products are funny.

SLED 11: a distro for businesses, not idealists

@Adam Williamson

YaST in openSUSE 11.1 and SLED 11 doesn't rewrite all configuration files, especially not the X config - if it did, the Nvidia driver and its lovely (read annoying as M$) configuration tool wouldn't work, given that likes to write strait into the X config

I find YaST to be quite a nice management tool, and improving - web-based Yast coming in 11.2..

RE: Why Gnome?

When Novell bought SUSE, one of their first changes to SLES/SLED included a totally horrific dalliance with KDE as the Default GUI for SLES 9.

It was a terrible implementation of a not so great version of KDE, and made the entire SLES 9 experience as fun as administrating a Windows 2008 box.

Novell's senior Linux staff (Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, etc) mostly come from a very GNOME centric pedigree, I suspect we have them to thank for Novell's policy implemented after SLES 9 that GNOME was to be their 'Enterprise' desktop, and the default on all their Enterprise products.

In the last year, I've actually turned from a total KDE fanboy to a GNOME user. I've seen huge improvements in GNOME in recent years and I jumped ship when KDE 4.x shipped and started trying to be LinVista

All that said, its worth mentioning that openSUSE doesn't share its Enterprise cousin's (or my) bias.

I understand that KDE 4.x on openSUSE is one of the best implementations of KDE 4.x, and both Novell and the great openSUSE community seem to be big players in the KDE world while Novell's Enterprise division focus mainly on GNOME.

(ps. GNOME in openSUSE can open PDF's without Adobe too, Evince is installed by default)

Very Dissapointing Article

While I appreciate the conclusions and praise for a product I like a great deal, I must say I am very disappointed at the quality of the article. It includes a number of inaccuracies.

Page 1 states that openSUSE has no 'direct connection' to Novell.

openSUSE is sponsored by Novell. http://en.opensuse.org/Project_Overview

Its community board of 5 members is chaired by a Novell employee and contains two more. http://en.opensuse.org/Board

Page 1 continues to imply that SLED11 contains 'extras' (when compared to openSUSE) that come as a direct result from the Microsith/Novell agreement.

Many of these are already present in openSUSE, such as:

AppArmor - installed by default on openSUSE

Mono - installed by default on openSUSE and integral to their GNOME desktop

"It just works" functionality with Microsoft Networks - SLED copies its free-love cousin in this regard

Page 2 seems to be where our reviewer seems to get even more confused. Application Browser is not a customisation tool, but an Application Browser, for launching applications.

I'll concede that the Control Centre/YAST arrangement in SLED/openSUSE can be a little confusing (Control Centre includes links to some YAST modules), but on the whole, Control Centre deals with user specific settings, and YAST deals with system settings. That is why YAST requires the root password to open, and Control Centre does not.

Evolution and OpenOffice in SLED have few, if any, modifications from the version currently available in openSUSE - the Exchange functionality is the same, and Novell make their 'Novell Edition' of OpenOffice available for all (including Windows users)

It's a real shame that the reviewer seems to have done a rather superficial review of SLED, and in practice it ends up being a review of openSUSE 11.1 (though a better one than TheReg did for 11.1)

SLED brings a lot of unique stuff to the Linux business plate:

Zenworks for Central Management

Novell's desktop platform for their future client software (iFolder, iPrint, Teaming&Conf, Groupwise, Novell Client) - Many sites still have a very Novell heavy ecosystem, you just don't hear much from us because it all works ;-)

Update/Download Software Repositories that are considered the most secure in the Linux market

Traditional Long Term support for multiple years, similar to Ubuntu's LTS releases

Support from Novell and their partners, which are considered some of the best available.

Its a real shame the reviewer didn't give any of the above a mention, or put any of them through its paces, particularly Zenworks, which is probably any Desktop admin's fantasy