The attached articles gives an alternative, and quite interesting, view. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3815/106/
Regards, Ashley On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 21:09 +1000, Linley Caetan wrote: > Whilst enjoying the expo I came across some corporate types at the > Novell stand. Very Friendly and handed me an evaluation version of their > Suse Desktop. > > I've recently taken on a sales role and our team use Exchange to > interact. Email, calendars, tasks. I've been itching to go to an open > source desktop for all the "group ware" stuff. > I was intially going to go with Ubuntu but being an open minded chap I > set aside my cynicism of the corporate world and decided to give the > Novell a go. > After all they are supporting Ximian and Linux (Suse) so I decided to > give It a go. > Unfortunately the experience was less than satisfactory. > In fact it has to be the clunkiest install short of any OS from Microsoft. > 3 Cds for a distribution meant for a corporate environment that will in > most cases have a fast reliable connection. > Round 1 to the well Dapper Drake in the one piece suit. > The duck flew rings around the lizard by ( I suspect) installing a bare > minimum and then latching on to my T1 connection and grabbing the rest. > Nicely done. half an hour from go to whoa, compared to 90 minutes for > for the lizard. > > Now, after weathering the long installation from Novell I move to > connect to Exchange server. > Remember that a huge part of Novell's client base will be wanting this > to just work out of the box. > No dice! > The connector Plugin is not installed by default. Look around for CD2 > after accidentally inserting CD 1 (repositories are not set up except > for the CD repos) and install the plugin. > 20 minutes later give up in disgust. This version is six months old so > the forums are no help and I cant be bothered hunting down yast or yum > or whatever bastard repos' are needed. > One mornings work up in smoke. Had enough so I wearily fire up windows > for the day. > Next morning I send in my fine feathered friend. > He has the lizard for breakfast and after 40 minutes I am reading an > email from a client whose business we have won. > Thanks Dapper. What a guy! > Lessons. > I am sure that the current release of Novell linux is probably much > better than the one I tried, but even if it is, a quick check of their > website still shows a bloated 3 CD set of ISOs. > But the packaging was beautiful. Being in the printing game I recognised > that a lot of time and effort and money had gone into the packaging of > the CDs. I recognised that the whole thing would have had to be locked > down months ago and to be economical they are making large batches for > use over six months worth of events. > So Novell, less money spent on packaging more on making a lightweight > distro that gets prospective clients moving quickly. > Declarations. > I have been a Ubuntu user since that hoary hedgehog so that may have > given me a jaundiced view of the install comparison. But I have never > used Evolution except for brief evaluations. > > > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
