[GLLUG] Novell Linux seminar report

[Michael Rudas (computer)]

I went to the Novell Linux presentation yesterday (9/19) in Southfield.  
Intel was the primary partner sponsor, though IBM was also a major 
presence; there were others as well.  I went not only as a Linux end 
user, but also because I wanted to see (and learn something about) the 
state of corporate/enterprise Linux-- besides, I figured these guys owed 
me breakfast & lunch anyway.

You see, for the last 4 years I have used Debian (Sid, currently 
installed via Kanotix) and am pretty happy with it-- but I was initially 
driven to Knoppix by my utter disgust with SUSE.  When I decided it was 
time to get serious about Linux, I purchased a copy of 8.0 Professional 
(6 CDs and a DVD!) at Best Buy for $80-- but I never got it to work 
fully.  First it wouldn't install (it turns out that it didn't like my 
USB mouse), then I could not figure out how to get on-line via DSL.  
Despite repeated requests for assistance (and several Google searches), 
I received only automated replies, never a live tech (I got the 
impression that's been fixed).

The quick view: The subjects covered included SUSE Enterprise Linux 
Server 10 (SLES) and SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10 (SLED).  SLES was 
first up, with a lot of talk about virtualization, centering on Xen, 
which ships with SLES and about the wide range of hardware it supports.  
The Intel Core technology supports hardware virtualization due to its 
multi-core chips.

There was a lot of discussion of heterogeneous environments, management 
tools, Mono, and other server-side stuff, an area that I MUST learn more 
about.  The discussion then moved on to SLED.  A very interesting part 
of that was a live demo of the XGL stuff-- it was pretty cool to see the 
desktops-as-faces-of-a-cube stuff live, as I have not played with it 
yet.  It's clear that a lot of study and work have gone into the SLE 
desktop to improve usability, and though GNOME is the default desktop, 
KDE users are not entirely left out.  It was certainly one of the most 
polished user interfaces I have ever seen-- and I've played with quite a 
few.

The Novell-customized version of OpenOffice.org has a built-in MS macro 
interpreter, so Microsoft Office VB scripts will run as-is (except the 
macro viruses, of course).

The SLED "Banshee" media player is based on the RealNetworks open-source 
Helix player.  Much was made of the licensing deal between RealNetworks 
and Microsoft, as this will soon bring "official" MS media format 
support to Linux in general.
One of the things that interested me the most was something called 
AppArmor-- basically a firewall for individual applications that 
monitored their operation at the kernel level.  The presenter claimed a 
performance hit only on the order of 1-2% and much easier setup & 
configuration than SELinux.

The attendee pack included evaluation DVDs of both SLES and SLED.  When 
registered, Novell provides 60 days of full support for each.

All in all, while I am personally not going to be spending $50 per year 
to run SLED, I AM going to try it out-- and I can see how, in the 
enterprise, it could be a LOT less expensive overall than Microsoft 
Vista & Office.  One presenter said the goal was replacing 90% of the 
desktops at 10% of the cost.

I'm glad I went-- I came away pretty excited.  While some of it was 
"preaching to the choir", there was enough there to sway neutral to 
Microsoft-leaning business users toward Linux, I think.  Supposedly, the 
full presentation will soon be available at 
http://www.novell.com/linux/yourlinuxtour -- but not yet, as far as I 
can tell.