Brainshare 2007I'm attending
Brainshare 2007 this week and there are a number of topics that seem to be on everyone's mind. First and foremost is the Microsoft agreement and what that means. In his keynote address yesterday Ron Hovespian stated "It's all about our customers." At the end of the day the agreement was done to ensure that Novell could address the needs of their customers and the realities of heterogeneous environments.
Virtualization is another topic with lots of interest. Novell is banking on the Xen virtualizaiton tool for moving NetWare customers over to Linux. One of the keynote demos showed multiple NetWare 6.5 instances running on a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server box using Xen. They are also pitching ZENworks as the tool of choice for managing any and all virtual machines in your environment.
Novell's desktop Linux offering (and server) is getting an update (
SP1) and has a new sibling in a
Thin Client version. During the keynote Nat Friedman and Guy Linardi showed off a version of SLED running on a Wyse thin client box. The key to this approach is the ability to build custom images with applications that run locally on the box, like Firefox, and links to applications running on a server. The key part of this demo was when Nat launched Visio from a Linux desktop and it just worked. Behind the scenes it actually launched a Citrix session to a Windows box with Visio installed.
I'll try to post more as the week unfolds.
Labels: Brainshare Novell
Brainshare ThoughtsI'm still trying to collect all my thoughts from the annual trek to Brainshare. One of the biggest wins for me personally was having Peter Bartok get the latest version of Mono and the Windows Forms stuff up and running on my laptop. I'm really looking forward to getting a copy of SUSE 9.3 professional to try out. Looks like it will have a boatload of cool stuff.
After a slight delay due to the default install of Novell Linux Desktop under VMware 5.0 he got the latest source using SVN and built everything from there. It's really cool to take an EXE created on Windows and see it just run on Linux. Even works (for the most part) with VB.Net. I did, however, manage to find a small bug with the date picker control.
Bottom line from the conference for me was the energy that Novell seems to be getting from the new Linux direction. You can see it in the employees, you can hear it in their presentations and hopefully it will result in continued growth for the company.
I'm reminded of a line from the movie
It's a Wonderful Life, "This town needs this measly old building and loan (re: Novell) if for no other reason
My review of Novell Linux Desktop is up on the
Network World site.
It will be interesting to see what kind of comments I get :)
Mono Update for NLD
I tried to update Mono using Red Carpet today and got errors about conflicts. Thanks to some help on IRC I was able to get it to work by first removing Mono with:
rug remove mono
Then a new install from Red Carpet and everything works. As a side note I was able to get Tomboy to work and Beagle to install with the latest Mono stuff.
Novell Linux Desktop
I'm doing a review of the Novell Linux Desktop product for Network World. Should be out in a week or two. In the mean time I plan to continue playing with it as a development platform.
My first impressions are that it takes a little tweaking to get things set up. I did manage to get Monodevelop loaded but I can't seem to get the latest Mono stuff to install from Red Carpet. Seems as if there are conflicts between the installed version and the newer stuff.
Note: You need to add this service to get the Mono stuff in Red Carpet
http://red-carpet.ximian.com
I tried both the KDE and Gnome desktops and I think I prefer Gnome. I really want to get
Beagle up and running along with
Tomboy.
More as I go.
Chris Stone Resigns
Wow. Just when it seems like Novell is getting some momentum they lose a
guy that had a clue. I was really looking forward to some interesting times with the rollout of the Novell Linux Desktop. I hope this doesn't put a damper on things...
