07.19.08
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu, HP, Virtualization, Mandriva at 7:41 am by Roy Schestowitz
Following the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, quite a few people decided to explore the distribution. Novell has begun studying OpenSUSE 11.0 users. It’s doing it at the moment using a survey that was launched last week. In addition, the OpenSUSE community pays its respect to Bryen Yunashko and Frank Sundermeyer, both of whom seem like veterans.
Listed below are articles and blog posts that shed some light on opinions and assessments of the latest distribution and its surrounding system.
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07.12.08
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse at 5:49 am by Roy Schestowitz
Hot summer, hot news
The most major news of this week was Build Service. However, equally important was the departure of Brian Proffitt. Joe Brockmeier published an interview with Brian (of Linux Today) over at OStatic and he has also had his own self-introductory interview put up in the OpenSUSE Web site.
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Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, FOSS, xandros, Corel at 3:23 am by Roy Schestowitz
Free software companies? Surely, that would a joke
As a gentle reminder, Novell insists that it’s merely a mixed-source company [1, 2, 3, 4], a concept that even Microsoft is trying to adopt for public relations purposes. It’s easy to subscribe to this agenda because opening up 1% of your code (abandonware) and keeping your crown jewels closed is an easy responsibility to live up to. there is also costly dependency which a ‘mixed stack’ leads to. It’s a total ‘bastardisation’ of the original goals of Free software because to a large degree it involves exploitation of Free software, e.g. the ‘Google way’ a.k.a. free-riding. with minimal returns compared to the available capacity (Google makes billions of dollars).
When companies like Nokia and Microsoft pretend to be contributing [1, 2], then surely it’s nothing like Novell. The truth is that Novell does contribute some code; some fairly valuable code, too.
Nevertheless, why isn’t Novell assisting the Utah Open Source Conference? That’s where much of Novell is located. The following scoop is an eye-opening change.
…we’re going to have the UTOSC 2008 (Utah Open Source Conference, August 28-30, 2008) at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus.
And Novell is not one of their sponsors!
I suppose this is not because Novell is not really caring about open source at all, right?
Recall what we’ve stressed many times over the past week or so (because of Xandros [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]): Novell is the next Corel. It’s losing its focus due to the deal with Microsoft.
Looking into the past, consider this new and excellent article:
Where Xandros is sold in a box, Ubuntu is given away free. Where Ubuntu is seen to donate code back to the community, Xandros and Linspire have developed proprietary extensions. Where Ubuntu asks for manufacturers to free their drivers, Xandros and Linspire have signed patent covenants with Microsoft.
Then there’s SLED/SLES, and OpenSUSE which you can only use ’safely’ provided that you don’t make money from it.
The article also contains an interesting history lesson on Corel. Is this Novell’s vocation?
Cowpland, and Corel, may have made the classic mistake of realising too early where the market was going, and running before the market could walk. Within months Cowpland was forced to step down from the company he had founded, vowing to devote his time to working with unspecified Linux start-ups. “Personally, I intend to get my hands really dirty with a lot of Linux technology,” he told reporters. “I’m fascinated by the potential that’s now emerging.”
He was replaced as CEO by Corel’s chief technology officer, Derek Burney. “Open-source software isn’t a moneymaker”, said Burney, “Microsoft’s .Net strategy will change computing as we know it.”
By this time, Microsoft, which had an interest in keeping WordPerfect afloat for antitrust reasons, had invested $135 million in Corel. According to Burney: “There is a contract that says we have to put the .Net framework into our major applications within six months of the release of .Net.”
Shortly thereafter, Corel divested itself of its Linux distribution, and discontinued support for WordPerfect and CorelDraw on Linux. It has been assumed by many that this was an unwritten condition of Microsoft’s investment in Corel.
In August 2001, Xandros Incorporated announced that it had secured the rights to Corel’s Linux distribution and a US$10 million investment from Linux Global Partners, a Venture Capital firm. Like Corel, Xandros has its roots in Ottawa, Canada, and retained the majority of Corel’s original Linux software development team. Linux Global Partners also invested heavily in other Linux companies, the best known of which are probably CodeWeavers and Ximian (before it was sold to Novell).
[…]
The biggest problem for Xandros and Linspire has been the “patent covenants” that both companies signed with Microsoft, and the detrimental effect that these agreements have had on ongoing relationships with the Linux user and developer communities.
Jeremy Allison of Samba made the point when he resigned from Novell over the same issue. “Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is nothing we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing,” he wrote. “Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs…. Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be changed… has passed, and so I must say goodbye.”
[…]
To which, Alan Cox, the best known of Linux kernel developers after Linus Torvalds, replied: “That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term ‘open source’ also did the decent thing and died out with you.”
Can you see what happened to Corel? Two-way assimilation (Microsoft to open [1, 2], and open to the Microsoft API). Good luck to Novell and .Net Mono. The major news at the moment is about GNOME 3.0 (version number bump from 2.3). Miguel de Icaza once said that GNOME 4.0 would be based on .Net. A recent appointment makes the mind boggle a bit [1, 2]. Mono is already there. █
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07.05.08
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse at 7:28 am by Roy Schestowitz
It has been just over a fortnight since OpenSUSE 11.0 was released. People still write about their experiences with this distribution, so here is just a sample of what people have found.
Reviews and Experiences
We’ll present this as a list of stories with selective snippets.
eyereex.eryell.com: The first 24 hours with openSUSE 11
I’ve installed Mozilla Firefox 3, Google Earth, XMMS, K3b, Apache, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Wine, Tremulous, VLC player, Bluefish, and many other applications. Everything works great!! CompizConfig manager is installed by default so you can straight away show off the desktop effects to Vista’s fan around you after the installation.
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07.01.08
Posted in Novell, Opensuse, SLES/SLED, Review at 3:09 pm by Roy Schestowitz
The morning week+ after
It hasn’t been long since the important release of OpenSUSE 11.0. Novell is already trying to downplay the viability of OpenSUSE in order to sell its proprietary software-enhanced SLES/D. Watch this:
The differentiation for corporate customers is what comes next. Why is openSuSE not well suited for corporate use? It’s built by great people, with the purest of intent, and they will want to make things better. The problem is that corporate needs something more.
Given an in-house skilled person (or people), this just isn’t true. Moreover, support can be called from the outside even for a community-driven distribution. That’s how Free software works, and that’s how profit is extracted. Acquisition costs are belittled by maintenance costs no matter if the software deployed is Free or proprietary.
Unconvinced Users
The above example may seem like a bit of a stretch, but OpenSUSE’s woes needn’t be tied to Novell’s attempt to overshadow its presence. Quite a few people were displeased with the following elaborative report, whose conclusion is as follows.
openSUSE 11.0 is a difficult system to qualify. Highlights include good availability of current packages and YAST GUI configuration tools for some advanced features. However, these advantages are largely eclipsed by a chaotic, dysfunctional package management system and marginal performance. New Linux users with more complex network configurations or challenging hardware may be forced to use openSUSE due to its unique innovations in GUI system configuration. Yet, experienced and inexperienced users alike may find themselves increasingly frustrated by the grave lack of refinement in what is an otherwise capable Linux distribution.
Here is another interesting take from Steve Carl (BMC).
As usual, I have to ask the question, is OpenSUSE 11 a viable desktop for an enterprise. Not for geeks like me but for the average computer user that does not want to know anything about the computer itself: they just want a tool to get a job done.
The desktop itself is easy to use, easy to configure, easy to update, and a strong preview of what is to come in the next release of SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). It has all sorts of standard Open Support, from Wikis to mailing lists to online doc.
There are still those who suggest that Ubuntu, for example, is an inch ahead.
In my own choice of categories and tests, and in my own judgment alone, Ubuntu 8.04 has beaten openSUSE 11 but only by a very slim margin. It only shows that openSUSE is worthy to be called the second most popular Linux distribution at the moment, and Ubuntu is still the cream of the crop.
Admittedly, it’s very user- and PC-dependent, but the reviewers in this case are experienced ones and their PCs are definitely not Linux-hostile.
Technical Assessment
We gave some examples of technical deficiencies a few days ago. There are some more minor peeves, which probably ought to be seen as bug reports. Here is one about suspend to RAM.
In my notebook computer, HP Compaq NX7300, the “suspend to RAM” functionality had worked without any problem in OpenSUSE 10.3, with kernel 2.6.22.5-31. However, it suddenly did not work after an upgrade to OpenSUSE 11, with kernel 2.6.25.5-1.1. I became nervous, tried to find out the solution, and fount out: downgrading kernel to 2.6.22.5-31.
This one is about Beagle-ReiserFS incompatibility. The former is Mono and the latter is better off forgotten.
I installed OpenSuse 11.0 today. Beware that if you install using reiserfs andl KDE your computer will freeze periodically in KDE. It took me 6 hours of debugging to figure out that beagle was causing the problems.
We apologise for being hard on OpenSUSE, but it’s clear that Novell continues to use OpenSUSE as a ‘free sample’ to lure users in to its Microsoft-taxed distribution. It’s also a case of free labour.
As a side note, I received my new PC just a few hours ago. Without going into specifics, the plan is to multi-boot it, with a 64-bit distribution that’s already installed and probably Mandriva 2008, which I’ve just downloaded. All the setups (e.g. need to buy another monitor tomorrow morning) are likely to affect activity on this site for a few more days. Summertime is a good time for readjustment. █
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06.28.08
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse at 5:38 am by Roy Schestowitz
Further to the previous grouping, there have been some more technical blog posts too. Here are a few which could prove handy as informal bug reports or instructional texts.
HOWTOs
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Opensuse, Review at 5:16 am by Roy Schestowitz
The coverage from last week, which mostly comprised pointers, ought to be made a little more complete with the addition of the following:
Release Announcements
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06.27.08
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Opensuse, Ubuntu, SUN, IBM, FOSS at 4:28 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“It is in Novell’s interest - selfish interest, I will admit - to advance-remove whatever those inhibitors be to the advancement of Linux and open source.”
–John Dragoon, Novell
N
ovell loves free software. Free — as in “free lunch”. It receives a lot of code without paying for it. It’s free labour, so what’s not to like? Novell admits that it is not willing to disengage from its proprietary past [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s not prepared to say goodbye to its roots. It’s planning to just mix it all up; you know, just like its business partner, Microsoft. Novell takes pride in it, too. While the following article requires a subscription to read in full, the opening paragraph is too telling.
NOVELL HAS thrived by being able to offer customers a mixture of open source and proprietary software, even though it attracted the wrath of the open source community by doing a deal with Microsoft, according to chief executive Ron Hovsepian.
It would be interesting to read the remainder of this text and absorb the main messages of this article as a whole. Nevertheless, the Web site insists on living in the ‘Golden Ages’ when people always paid for the news. Groklaw, in the mean time, writes about Sun and NetApp, and therein also lies an important observation.
Releasing code is not all there is to it. Ethics, fairness, honesty — it’s the FOSS culture, and it’s the value add. Any company that tries to play by the old rules undercuts that advantage. It’s the one thing Microsoft can’t embrace, extend, extinguish. They can’t even offer Brand X, because we’d all laugh. It would, in any case, take decades to live down their rep. So players in this space need to morph that part of their way of doing business also. If you don’t believe me, look at Oracle’s play to try to undercut Red Hat. Blech. And Red Hat is doing fine, thanks. It always will, unless it starts importing proprietary tactics into the mix. The community is made up of brainiacs, you know. They know what is happening, and there are no secrets, long-term. So I would hope that all companies wanting to make use of openness as a model will scrape the proprietary crud off of them before they enter. We want to keep things clean in here.
That is exactly why Novell became a black sheep. Add to this the possibility that Novell is just IBM’s attempt to dilute the values of GNU/Linux and elevate intellectual monopolies at their expense. Novell has already admitted its selfishness and Sun appears to have acted in a similar fashion. Microsoft’s talk about open source is too obviously a self-serving (for Windows) affair.
Such companies, which brought themselves up in a non-Free software environment, cannot properly reform themselves; they hardly seem willing, partly due to shareholders’ expectation and analysts’ targets.
Sadly enough, a forceful community project, OpenSUSE, will continues to suffer from Novell’s and Microsoft’s shadows. Just watch how Sam Varghese puts it:
OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians
[…]
More good news: you can still remove Mono, the infamous attempt to clone Microsoft’s .NET development environment, and all its insidious dependencies without breaking anything in OpenSUSE. I had to remove a total of 39 files, both applications and libraries, to get it off my system. Anyone who is planning long-term usage of the distribution would be well advised to remove Mono as it could lead to problems down the line.
OpenSUSE has all the applications that an average desktop user needs. It is a distribution with an excellent pedigree. If only it had better custodians.
OpenSUSE could be today’s market leader in the Linux world had it not been for that blasted Microsoft deal and unnecessary affiliation with Novell. For the time being, some people who experiment with OpenSUSE just run back to Ubuntu. Here are two new examples:
1. Fun with openSUSE 11.0
I’m told that because of Novell/Microsoft ties, OpenOffice as shipped with openSUSE has more features than the stock OO.o shipped with Ubuntu. I need to investigate this further to have an opinion on the matter (although I can say right away that I don’t have an issue with the politics of this deal …).
I still have a lot of investigating to do, however, in the interim I think that if I had to choose between Ubuntu and openSUSE, Ubuntu would be the winner - familiarity is a key factor.
2. My OpenSuse 11.0 experience. OpenSuse or Ubuntu? I have made my choice.
I will make a list of the things which I didn’t like about it.
1. The smoothness of ubuntu is still lacking in opensuse-11.0
2. On my Dell Latitude D600, the visual effects were not running as smooth as ubuntu.
3. I would agree that they tried to make the interface look better and more user friendly but it still doesn’t come close to Ubuntu.
4. I didn’t find much online support for the new release of openSuse-11.0
5. The start-up/loading time was at least 10 to 15 seconds more than Ubuntu.
6. I checked the system monitor and the programs were running slower in openSuse.
So he moved back to Ubuntu at the end. To many people, OpenSUSE just doesn’t shout out “Freedom” anymore. Not with Microsoft’s and Novell’s presence anyway. Mind mind users; developers appear could be affected similarly. OpenSUSE would reach a broader community of developers, drive-by patche offerers and bug reporters if it became Novell-independent (it’s currently just an illusion). People prefer contributing to projects, not corporations that liaise with a sworn enemy of libre software. █
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« Previous entries ·
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.