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
