Crazy Days

SuSe 10 ELDS

Good fellows from Novell suddenly decided to have a look at people who are driving FOSS in enterprises. Metropolitan been the Novell agent for ages and since they have a good relationship with us for several reasons, they asked for a appointment to introduce an evangelist/marketeer from Novell India.

Since we're always curious about other peoples business Kevin also tagged along to meet the Novell guy. After a friendly chat we got in to a business talk, and came to the question of latest direction of Novell, and realized...ok...they really rock the boat. Novell at the moment, placing their complete strategy on Linux and amazingly, they're moving out of, once I thought as a brilliant paltform, NetWare...too bad I know few CNEs...they will be antique soon :).

After all the interesting discussions, he convinced us to look at SuSe 10 desktops...I never attracted to sues or any RPM based distros other than Mandrake, again long time back. Two days later finally we received DEMO DVDs of SuSe server and Enterprise Linux Desktop (ELD).

After several issues finally installed SuSe on a machine with a DVD...still most of the enterprise desktops come with CD roms...not DVD....Looks of the desktop remains the same, cool enough impress any non geek. But what really impressed me was the Xgl, or 3D features built in to the distro....wow...that is what you call cool.

So I showed this to few colleagues and they were officially impressed. Well after several unsuccessful trial with my laptop, this is the first time I got Xgl to work. From what I felt, SuSe/Novell suite will stand strong in FOSS market soon, in Sri Lanka, I hope they will take the correct marketting path, unlike with NetWare. Lets hang around to see what happens...