Submitted by Michael Loeffler has announced the release of OpenSUSE 10.2 to the ftp servers. “As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power managment and last but not least our improved package management.” Update: Screenshots.
let the complaining begin!
It seems that ever since the MS/novell deal that’s all people can do anymore; too many have become overly sensitive.
Edited 2006-12-07 13:08
precisely…and nobody seems to have read the Novell responses in detail, everyone just jumps on the word Microsoft in title and becomes all hyper.
precisely…and nobody seems to have read the Novell responses in detail, everyone just jumps on the word Microsoft in title and becomes all hyper.
Been through this already. The Novell responses have been read, they are meaningless and there is no detail to read in them (‘we’re doing this for customers, blah, blah, blah, customers, blah, blah, interoperability’, and so on and so forth).
Also, saying that everyone has been going hyper just because of the name Microsoft (well, we all know what their thoughts are, don’t we?) is just not true. The deal Novell have signed is just highly incompetent and stupid.
Allowing your main rival, who is taking business from you and has stated it hates open source software, to send out letters to your customers claiming it won’t sue them (what message does that send?), to give totally empty and non-specific guarantees on interoperability (they’re not adopting ODF, it’s Novell adopting OpenXML) and to collect royalties on the number of SLES licenses sold is just simply stupid. Period.
Edited 2006-12-07 13:51
I didn’t make any comment on whether the decision was sensible or not, I tend to avoid politics whenever possible
However in my experience people on the OSNews lists are far happier to start flame wars than to provide detailed analysis/comments like you have, and much kudos to you for taking the time to do so.
My comment was that a lot of people can’t see past the headlines, and disassociate the parent company from the openSUSE distro, which in my opinion is a shame as I have had a lot of positive experiences with openSUSE.
I tend to avoid politics whenever possible
You can’t avoid politics; all you’re doing when you ignore what’s going on in the world is deferring decision-making to others. You still have to live with the decisions they make, like them or not.
Hear, hear!!!!
like you quoted, “I tend to avoid politics whenever possible”, of course it isn’t possible all of the time, and where it isn’t possible or where it suits me to take a stance I will 🙂
My comment was that a lot of people can’t see past the headlines, and disassociate the parent company from the openSUSE distro, which in my opinion is a shame as I have had a lot of positive experiences with openSUSE.
And how are we supposed to disassociate openSuse from Novel?
OpenSuse is Novel’s baby. They can flip the off-switch any time.
There are plenty of other, better distros.
There is no reason to support some piranha that’s trying to take a bite out of Linux.
OpenSuse 10.2! Next stop, Microsoft Suse Windows! All travellers, please have your credit cards ready.
And please don’t forget to validate your license with our WGA servers, as you have only 30 days before your Microsoft Suse goes into “reduced functionality mode”.
Nice future if Microsoft and Novel have their way.
OpenSuse 10.2! Next stop, Microsoft Suse Windows!
Or Microsoft RedHat or Microsoft Ubuntu … as Oracle has proven any company can offer any Linux distro.
Maybe you could list all the companies that have any kind of agreement with Microsoft and create a long list of companies to be excommunicated.
I’m sure IBM has some sort of agreement with Microsoft, even if its just an OEM agreement to distribute Microsoft software.
Excommunicate them all before its too late!
…as Oracle has proven any company can offer any Linux distro.
You wish. Producing a distro is a lot of hard work, and it needs to be done by people who are committed to it and know what they’re doing.
Oracle are a company who are anything but, and have proved it in the past. I doubt we’ll hear anything more from Unbreakable Linux………
Maybe you could list all the companies that have any kind of agreement with Microsoft and create a long list of companies to be excommunicated.
I doubt whether any of them are stupid enough to pay Microsoft royalties on their own products.
segedunum , I notice all of your recent comments have a score of 2 or more, as does archietsteel’s.
Thats pretty amazing.
Do you two have some sort of Digg conspiracy thing going on?
http://www.osnews.com/usercomments.php?uid=570
http://www.osnews.com/usercomments.php?uid=161
I notice that you two have been modding down all of my factual, referenced posts.
Edited 2006-12-07 22:27
segedunum , I notice all of your recent comments have a score of 2 or more, as does archietsteel’s.
Your off-topic ramblings can’t hide your frustration at not being able to reply to something that has you cornered.
factual, referenced posts.
You wish. As usual.
segedunum , I notice all of your recent comments have a score of 2 or more, as does archietsteel’s.
Thats pretty amazing.
No, it’s not. I already explained to you what it was. The top 150 most trusted users of OSNews have a +1 bonus to the rating of their posts. It was explained on the Meta Blog:
http://www.osnews.com/meta/read.php/1165241630/a_change_to_default_…
Do you two have some sort of Digg conspiracy thing going on?
No, we just write thoughtful, sensible posts and avoid trolling, which means we have a good Trust rating.
I notice that you two have been modding down all of my factual, referenced posts.
Not at all. For my part, I have been modding down your off-topic and/or abusive posts. Also, we are certainly not the only ones to mod you down, anyone with any amount of common sense and mod points to spare would do it…
It’s easy, NotParker. You want a positive trust rating? Stop posting BS.
No, it’s not. I already explained to you what it was. The top 150 most trusted users of OSNews have a +1 bonus to the rating of their posts.
Ok. Now I get it. Open source zealots get an extra point. I’ll remember to disregard all posts like that.
Sure, whatever.
Anyone with mod points, please mod down my post as well as the parent’s, thanks.
Or Microsoft RedHat or Microsoft Ubuntu … as Oracle has proven any company can offer any Linux distro.
Maybe you could list all the companies that have any kind of agreement with Microsoft and create a long list of companies to be excommunicated.
I’m sure IBM has some sort of agreement with Microsoft, even if its just an OEM agreement to distribute Microsoft software.
Excommunicate them all before its too late!
Why don’t you list them. Looks like you’re making claims without having any facts to support them.
I’m not aware of any agreements between RedHad or Ubuntu and Microsoft.
And IBM has been around very long time, longer than Linux, I think. Ummm, let’s see, isn’t IBM the company that started the PC industry?
And Linux is not IBM’s main business.
Whereas Novel bet just about their whole business on Linux.
And we are talking about Novel, aren’t we?
One positive side effect that might come out of this, is that you might buy a computer in the future with Microsoft Suse preinstalled and unintentionally join the “cult” NotParker. And we all at OSNews would have a good laugh at your expense.
I’m sure IBM has some sort of agreement with Microsoft, even if its just an OEM agreement to distribute Microsoft software.
IBM started the PC business and gave MS (run from a basement somewhere) an opportunity.Instant marketshare garanteed.All their current marketshare isn’t based on fierce competition or choice by customers.
I for one don’t care what others say. openSUSE is a great distro (i moved from Ubuntu to openSUSE) and i will sure give it a whirl. The only downside i found is sometimes certain packages don’t exist for openSUSE and you have to compile them yourselve (Jokosher springs to mind, well at least last time i checked). Whereas you can always find a redhat or debian package.
Well, actually if you add all the extra repositories either to YaST or Smart, you’ll have an awful lot to choose from.
Sorry but you’ve been completely sold out by Novell and reality is bound to collide with the incredibly over optimistic view of, “Oh MS just wants to be friends”, well they don’t and sadly like most men they’re only after one thing and that is to totally fsck linux.
Yep, I know the parent company has done some silly things (and I suspect people like Andreas Jaeger have been embarrassed underneath about having to reply to it all), but congratulations to OpenSuse on a nice release.
From my perspective, I’ve been running a release candidate for 10.2 for a few weeks with wireless networking, WPA and an Atheros chipset and it’s been very lovely to use. Of course, I had to download the driver separately, install and add the repositories. Ubuntu had a choking fit when I tried to get this to work on Dapper with NetworkManager, although the situation may have improved.
Additonally, OpenSuse still does the best KDE oriented distro around – even amongst the commercial distros. YaST’s front-end is the best graphical administration tool around. Also, Suse have always done a KDE desktop that just ‘feels right’. They don’t alter KDE radically at all unlike other distributions, and what you see is pretty much what you get when you pull a KDE release out of SVN. I think the quality of your desktop and the upstream desktop project improves dramatically when you stick to getting your code upstream, providing feedback and improvements in that direction. Some of the things Kubuntu does, I just find pointles and embarrassing to be honest.
Oh, and I know updating to new versions of KDE (and other software) from backports is not supported, but it’s always been a pleasurable experience for me. All I do is an update via YaST and then a restart of X, and voila.
OpenSuse is the only Linux distribution my Dad has been able to install, get configured easily (with a small and minimal amount of help from me) and use on a daily basis. Now that’s saying a lot.
Small wonder that Shuttleworth guy wants to try and half-inch OpenSuse’s developers! Although it caused a storm, I agree with him doing what he did because Novell have just been silly beyond belief. It’s way, way, way beyond toying with the idea of including binary drivers and there isn’t even a comparison.
Novell want to wake up and realise what they have ;-).
the big problem of opensuse, i foud it’s performance….
i tried a couple of other distribution, mandriva, fedora and the boot it’s faster, same thing for desktop manager (kde)
hope suse will build their package with more optmisation
IMO it’s just the boot, package management and yast that’s slow. The desktop is pretty fast compared to fedora for example. I use gnome btw, I haven´t tried KDE in 10.2 yet.
“IMO it’s just the boot, package management and yast that’s slow. The desktop is pretty fast compared to fedora for example. I use gnome btw, I haven´t tried KDE in 10.2 yet.”
Not 100% sure, but I think that technically, ‘Yast’ (or a component of it) is also used for package management.
i talked for kde… don’t use gnome, not enough good program and it take user for morron
in fairness SuSE’s goal has always been a full featured OS, with more focus on aplications than performance.
it focus on desktop (kde, gnome) not really application
suse a few package if you compare it with mandriva, ubuntu….
Yeah, I always experienced this problem with Suse. The boot time were always slow as well as the package manager. Don’t know about this release though. On the other way, the rest of system was always pretty stable for me.
Chocobanana, out of the box I don’t think it boots very fast either. But after I disable all of the services I do not need (isdn daemon, cups since I don’t have a printer, …) it boots way faster, faster in fact than most other distros I tried (without changing anything).
It’s really easy to do with Yast Runlevel Manager. Of course be careful first you do not disable services you DO need.
…I’ll never see this. I destroyed all my SuSe discs the day I read about the deal they had signed, and I won’t be replacing them. Not even for the community version.
I admin a pile of Internet-facing and customer Linux boxes, too. If it matters to Novell.
Edited 2006-12-07 15:03
…I’ll never see this. I destroyed all my SuSe discs the day I read about the deal they had signed, and I won’t be replacing them.
Ritual cleansing.
Ritual cleansing.
Much like windows hardware requirements with any new version.
…I’ll never see this. I destroyed all my SuSe discs the day I read about the deal they had signed, and I won’t be replacing them.
Did you burn them at the stake?
Good for you that you destroyed all disks; it’s you’re own choice, isn’t it?
Luckily we now start seeing people using their intelligence and minds instead of gut feelings and not being able to read past the headlines.
We’ll see what it will do for Novell. Here we want interoperability, so there are good things going. Just like PostgreSQL that has te ability to do authentication against LDAP/DC. That’s not bad at all.
OpenSUSE has btw nothing to do with the Novell/MS deal; also, the patents issue MS has is wothless. We have to take care about the bad feelings some people will have — it damages the linux community, damages Novell _and_ feeds the FUD MS likes to see.
We really do not want to help MS, do we ? Also, the FSF might do a lot of damage if they persist in trying to block issues like this.
It’s really not good for linux and the community.
Think about it, instead of the “I burnt all my disks and went to <insert another distribution here>”. It’s ointless, and useless to mention.
Use your brains, try thinking.
I 100% agree. I can’t see how people cannot see this is agood thing Linux will continue to thrive on merit but the communiity has become so anti Microsoft that we fail to see any benefits in anything with the name attached. If Microsoft donates 5 billion to help Aids in Africa. It’s oh because they used proprietary money so the should. I mean lets be a community and invest in Linux instead of the constant oh this deal is bad Novell is signing with the Devil and looking out for only it’s customers. Correct me if I am wrong Novell is a business and opensuse and SLES are two entirely opposite creatures.
I mean I love suse and look forward to SUSE 10.2
I can’t see how people cannot see this is agood thing
Because Novell have allied with a company that seek to destroy Linux? Allying yourself with Stalin to win the Second World War is one thing; allying yourself with Honecker to crush Andropov, another (and quite a stupid one).
Linux will continue to thrive on merit but the communiity has become so anti Microsoft that we fail to see any benefits in anything with the name attached.
As long as Microsoft comes out with anti-Linux FUD like “Linux unspecifically violates our unspecified ‘intellectual property’ unspecifiedly, and we aren’t going to specify what specific ‘IP’ it specifically violates in any court, specifically”, there are NO benefits to linking yourself to anything with the name “Microsoft” attached, for anyone but Microsoft.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If Microsoft donates 5 billion to help Aids in Africa.
Then it’s donating 5 billion that it hasn’t earnt, in my opinion.
If I want to donate the money I’ve had to unwillingly spend on Windows throughout the years to help Aids in Africa, then I’m perfectly capable of doing it without using Microsoft as a middleman – and saddling myself with crap like Windows in the process.
Correct me if I am wrong Novell is a business and opensuse and SLES are two entirely opposite creatures.
I hope you’re NOT wrong; but we don’t know that – and we can’t afford to take the chance that openSUSE might not be a weakpoint in our defences. If that hurts Microsoft, tough; and if it hurts Novell in the process, they shouldn’t have gotten into bed with Ballmer.
…I’ll never see this. I destroyed all my SuSe discs the day I read about the deal they had signed, and I won’t be replacing them. Not even for the community version.
Did 666 suddenly appear in the serial number?
Did 666 suddenly appear in the serial number?
Nope those are the last three digits of the XP activation code.
Edited 2006-12-07 18:16
“Did 666 suddenly appear in the serial number?”
Nope those are the last three digits of the XP activation code.
You’ve got one too!
You’ve got one too!
lol
How many Suse disk did you have. It might be a wild guess but you have Suse disk like I have cds of Ubuntu,Debian, Fedora, and Mandrake(I gave up on it before the name change). Each of those had its own merit. Well except Fedora, I’m sure its a fine distro but everytime I break down and tried it I relearned how much I hate it. I think its personal thing. Either way I’m sure destroying all those discs made enough room for more free Ubuntu disks you keep just in case.
How many Suse disk did you have.
Three.
I had one sitting right beside my computer at work because I planned to review it for our final conversion to Linux on all our desktops (we have one legacy app that we can RDP into a windows box for, so it’s all good to go).
Novell’s announcement lost them a few dozen installs. No big deal for Novell, I know, but there it is.
So it was SLD, ok that makes more sense. Hmm, so what do you plan to replace it with out of curiosity?
Hmm, so what do you plan to replace it with out of curiosity?
Ubuntu Feisty, probably sometime in February when they are near the end of their beta cycle. I’ve been using Feisty for a while and for my use it has been very stable.
I don’t want to use Edgy simply because I know how bad the upgrade path was. Maybe by then it will be dramatically improved but I’ll be plenty busy until we’re ready to put the manpower down and get the move done, so no need to rush towards Edgy and then do an upgrade in the spring anyway.
I had one sitting right beside my computer at work because I planned to review it for our final conversion to Linux on all our desktops.
I’m curious now, what did the your company’s lawyers have to say about this? While I don’t think Microsoft has any substantitive claim on Linux, buying a copy of SUSE to insulate a company has got to be on the legal department’s mind.
I’m curious now, what did the your company’s lawyers have to say about this? While I don’t think Microsoft has any substantitive claim on Linux, buying a copy of SUSE to insulate a company has got to be on the legal department’s mind.
I didn’t ask my lawyer about Novell, but he runs Linux at home.
and will upgrade when I get home from work. I’ve been using the RC2 dual booted (KDE and Gnome). As a former Windows only user, I have always been enamored with KDE. But with this release I am making the switch to Gnome. the opensuse devs have done a great job.
opensuse is not the best distro for old hardware. (If your hardware is slow with opensuse, I suggest you try Xubuntu.) I run it on a 3.2 GHz P4 with a Gig of Ram and it is as fast as anything I’ve gotten to install on that hardware. I recently pulled my ATI card and let it run off the integrated Intel graphics and it is much improved. 3D accelaration works out of the box.
Despite Novell, opensuse is and remains my distro of choice. Many Kudos to the developers for what is shaping up as a stellar release.
metalinks ( http://www.metalinker.org/ ) are available for faster/simpler downloads. they list mirrors, p2p, checksums, & other info.
I am against this deal there for i’m not using SUSE anymore, read between the lines and you’ll see.
If not always the quality of SUSE, when you buy a product you tend to look at the company, would you buy a coat if it was made out of real fur?, no way I wouldn’t. It’s down principles so go figure.
We don’t care, how about you stop posting in SUSE topics?
Thats why i’m doing it now, just so you know.
would you buy a coat if it was made out of real fur?
yes…as I buy my shoes made out of real leather and my steaks made of real beef…
no. but only because i have never wanted to wear fur, not because i have anything against wearing fur in principle.
back on topic:
Congrats to the openSUSE/SUSE/Novell crowd. i have been following the progress of 10.2 with interest, and it is shaping up to be a thoroughly excellent release.
I have used SUSE on and off since 9.1 and always thought it excellent, and now use 10.1 KDE exclusively on my work laptop. there is no sign of this changing, despite flirtations with Mandriva 2007, Kubuntu/Ubuntu (5.10 & 6.04), Sabayon 3.1.
I am currently d/l’ing Sabayon 3.2 64bit and SUSE 10.2 32bit and will use them for very different purposes.
Sabayon I love for its inclusion of drivers and codecs, not to mention the bling desktop, all of which makes it perfect for use as a media PC.
SUSE I love for its kitchen-sink design, great GUI tools, superb polish, and bomb-proof nature. It is ideal for a Centrino work laptop, especially given the feature rich and stable versions of openoffice, kontact, and taskjuggler. When i need something to just work, or be configurable by precisely the method I imagine i should be able to, I cannot trust my n00b’ish skills to anything other than SUSE.
On a final note; i hear Novel is working to integrate the MS document standard into Openoffice…………
fantastic! I can use linux for work only because it IS capable of communicating with the 99% of business/institutions that are currently addicted to Windows and MS Office.
regards
(a happy SUSE user)
I started downloading Fedora yesterday because I’m irritated at the comments MS had made after the fact, and then tried to downplay what they meant.
Someone once told me, “The first things out of your mouth in public are always your true feelings – everything else after to curtail any political damage is BS.”
So far, out of everything I’ve seen that relates to MS speaking in public about open source, all of it IS total BS.
So here I sit – trying to decide whether or not to switch my servers to Fedora or keep them on OpenSuSE and ride the train with the few others willing to sit with Novell and the alleged huge mistake they’ve made.
I started using SuSE at 9.3, having switched from Slackware, due to its PAM support (which I needed at the time), and I was pleased because of its stability. Then 10.0 came out and I was less than satisfied – it was infested with more bugs than a roach motel on the morning after Thanksgiving.
And then the MS deal happens. I stated I wouldn’t be using it, however, after reading Stallman’s absolvement of Novell, I asked myself one thing – “Am I conforming to a publicly induced panic attack or do I really feel this way?”
Time’s going to tell me the end on this one, methinks…
Do whatever you want, we don’t care what you do with your servers because that’s your problem, do you people have to come here and cry and confess your sins waithing for approval or something?
“ride the train with the few others”
There are more than just a few that like openSUSE for personal use, and business users don’t exactly dump an operating system overnight. I have seen a lot of very negative comments toward anything related to Novell just like you have, but I’m not making any assumptions about how well SUSE or openSUSE will do in the future based on these comments. SUSE might not fare well because of Novell’s decisions, but I think we all need to take the last month or so with a grain of salt.
I started using SUSE at about the same time you did. It hasn’t been a perfect OS, but since then I haven’t found anything that I felt was really better or even quite as good for me. Version 10.1 was an embarrassment, but I’m hoping that 10.2 will put the major issues in the past.
If it doesn’t, there are other distributions to look at. I think that Mandriva has made some positive changes. Ulteo might turn out to be something really great. I’ve never really liked Fedora, but it has seemed better recently. Ubuntu and Kubuntu have spent a decent amount of time on my systems recently, and even though I haven’t bought into the Ubuntu hype it is certainly a better option now than it was a year ago. For now, I still like SUSE.
I’ve tried the last RC for some time now and i have to say that its really impressive. Being a kde fan and not having liked the direction Kubuntu took kde in, i have to say that i really like this.
* The new start menu, despite me being very negative in advance is actually very good.
* Package management seems lightning fast, searching is instantaneous. A mile ahead of 10.1
* Kerry beagle search works great. Its UI has been greatly improved and its even integrated in konqueror through some sort of ioslave or something.
* Fonts look quite good, although they were very small inside the new menu, but that might be necessary to make it all fit.
* Flash worked out of the box and the system ran fine on the 256mb of ram i allocated to it.
After being let down time and time again by big distros and each time ending up restoring my gentoo disk image i have to say that i might actually keep this.
I have yet to see how well it handles removable media and wlan cards (ran it in vmware)
Politics aside (and i don’t feel they apply that much to opensuse) this is a great distro for kde fans (kde distros seems to in shortage these days).
Edited 2006-12-07 17:42
I was very disappointed to learn that Xorg 7.2 RC2 is included. But I was told that Xorg 7.2 final will be made availible in the Build Service repository. So I suppose that will be OK. When this happens, I’ll get openSUSE 10.2.
As for the rest of the distribution…
YaST has a couple more modules, making it even more comprehensive. The package manager is faster and more stable now.
YaST is arguably the most complete configuration utility there is. From my observation, it’s more functional than even Mandriva’s control center!
…
Did I mention I like YaST?
Edited 2006-12-07 18:20
I was very disapointed with the 10.1 release.
The Novell/MS convenant just made it less likely i will ever install a SuSE again.However i’m still interested in any thorough review of OpenSuSE 10.2
SUSE Linux 10.1 was largely spoilt because of early issues with the package management, but once that was fixed the distribution was actually incredibly stable and pleasant to use.
I can’t find any thorough reviews yet, probably because people have been waiting to download install etc.
“I was very disappointed to learn that Xorg 7.2 RC2 is included. But I was told that Xorg 7.2 final will be made availible in the Build Service repository. So I suppose that will be OK. When this happens, I’ll get openSUSE 10.2”
I am wondering why this is a problem ? 10.1 comes with experimental XGL and that works quite well if you are interested in effects. Granted, sometimes some software may be shoddy. A RC2 at least sounds a bit solid, No alpha code or beta code, it’s a RC already.
I am pretty sure it will work as expected, given the track record of such projects.
Well for one, its not even the last release canidate; RC 3 is the last one. Dozens of bugs have been fixed since RC 2 and even more will be fixed in time for the STABLE release.
Xorg is one of the most important components of any graphical distribution and having a STABLE one is crucial for “less than perfect” proprietary drivers to function reasonably.
I have to use ATI’s proprietary driver because the R300 DRM driver wont let me play my games properly.
Regardless, 7.2 stable should make it in the Build Service. I could just upgrade to that version after installation.
Edited 2006-12-07 19:59
Possible or will it b0rk my system?
I have been using smartpm for OpenSUSE 10.1 packages on top of SLED10, so my system is a bit of a kludge.
Anyone able to clarify whether upgrading will be safe?
We at Computers for All are still using Open SuSE! When we started we tested several distros (Fedora and Debian among them). We settled on SuSE as our distro of choice. Last month we ended a test of Ubuntu and have decided that for the average non-tech user Open SuSE with the Packman add ons is still the best choice. When all was said and done last year we gave away 97 computers all with Open SuSE. For more information on this and our decision see http://Computer4all.org/page2.html
http://Computers4all.org/page2.html
butter fingers!
I can use linux for work only because it IS capable of communicating with the 99% of business/institutions that are currently addicted to Windows and MS Office.
Get it through your heads, people! Supporting OpenXML does not mean supporting Office documents!
See:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19…
OpenXML is the standard. The standard permits for proprietary binary data (as does OpenDoc, BTW) and the devil, as they say, is in the details of that binary information. OpenOffice won’t be able to support Office documents any better than today – but Microsoft will have additional fuel to light on fire in the FUD and misinformation wars.
Please, stop telling people (or yourself) that supporting OpenXML is going to help with interoperability. Microsoft is the only one that has ever held the keys to interoperability with their software and they have done more than ever before to be sure that the door is slammed tightly shut
Get it through your heads, people! Supporting OpenXML does not mean supporting Office documents!
No, of course it isn’t. OpenXML is an entirely new format that Novell is unwittingly help take off.
They should stick to reverse engineering the existing Office formats well and getting them into ODF rather than getting sidetracked by a new MS format, because they represent the vast majority of office documents around to day. Quite why Novell believes that OpenXML is a goer, I really don’t know. My only primary concern would be that I could read it in Open Office to convert it to ODF.
Yep, Novell are helping Microsoft to convert existing binary Office documents over to OpenXML for Office 2007, which has things like rights management and other things built in, which when used will further cement the lock-in and give Open Office a far greater interoperability problem.
When Novell have helped it to take off, and they’ve started to rely on it, Microsoft will pull the rug out from everyone’s feet in MA by adding binary data into the file format via Office and more extensive (they hope) use of rights management – if they’re not doing it already. Office is the dominant office suite, so………..
It doesn’t change a thing, and actually makes things even worse.
Yeah, because OpenOffice supporting the latest Microsoft format will be the basis of the success of Office 2007.
Seriously, folks. Linux on the Desktop is such a minuscule blip on the radar compared with Microsoft, that all you accomplish by NOT supporting OpenXML is punishing those who work in Microsoft shops.
The rest of your post is more unsubstantiated conspiracy theory nonsense, and frankly, not up to your usual level.
Edited 2006-12-07 22:50
Yeah, because OpenOffice supporting the latest Microsoft format will be the basis of the success of Office 2007.
It means that if OpenXML is supported by Open Office, especially by government bodies like MA looking at mandating ODF, Microsoft can say “Hey, Open Office supports OpenXML – just use that”.
It doesn’t get away from the fact that Microsoft owns the format and controls its direction – something you’ve demonstrated you just can’t comprehend.
The rest of your post is more unsubstantiated conspiracy theory nonsense
I’ll just take that as frustration. Unless you can quote the relevant parts of my post and say why it’s nonsense, you’re talking out of your posterior.
Does OpenXML allow Microsoft to pop Office specific binary, or encrypted, blobs into a supposedly open standard and force it with the monopoly that MS Office has (which you’ve admitted they have in your first sentence)? Yes.
Does Microsoft Office have rights management? Yes.
Edited 2006-12-07 23:35
Suse was not born as a real “community distro”, it is in fact a (German) corporation that created the distribution, out of Slackware originally, and developed it for years. It was Novell that acquired it and opened it up to the community (Suse 10.0).
So without this move Novell made (which was cool), opening Suse up, the deal with MS (which was not so cool) would have left “the community” as cold as when, say, Xandros would have made a deal with MS.
What many people forget as well is that before Ubuntu and its free CDs were all over the place, Suse Linux was (especially in Europe I suspect) the perfect beginner’s Linux. It still is for many, actually. Suse deserves credits for actually selling their green boxes in stores. That, YaST2 being all graphical, including the installer, KDE being all polished, and Suse being rather stable, made Suse Linux a Windows-generation-proof OS.
If Suse 10.1 wouldn’t have been the showstopper it was, less people would have gone over to Ubuntu. But there still are many new users that prefer OpenSuse for its all-encompassing GUI, its completeness, etc. If we like it or not, it still scares people to manually edit Xorg.conf.
On Suse’s downsides (slow, bloated) we might say that they won’t matter much in a “Vista Premium Ready hardware” age. I do hope Suse won’t entirely ditch the KISS-principle.
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q=node/58
Thanks for the link to the screenshots.
I was disappointed to not see one Microsft logo or picture of Steve Ballmer. (Just kidding).
Is this aimed at new PC users? There seems to be way too many choices.
Yes, because no choice is better than too many choices when it comes to software.
The Novell-Microsoft deal isn’t a huge issue for me. I don’t see it as Microsoft trying to destroy Linux, I see it as what Microsoft did when Apple was having hard times
http://news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+Apple/2100-1001_3-2…
and nothing different. Microsoft needs competition, even if it has to stimulate it, both because Microsoft has always worked well under pressure and for the fact it’ll keep the anti-trust lawsuits away.
Look at all the four major Linux distributions today- Ubuntu, Suse, Mandrake and Fedora. All of these “community projects” are headed by a company. There are true community distributions out there such as Gentoo, Slackware and Debian, but ultimately the company backed distributions have the largest marketshare. Look at what great products Novell brought us. We have Evolution, Mono, Tomboy, Tango, Beagle, F-spot, compiz and Xgl because of them. I’m glad Novell vested an interest in the Linux community. As far as I know OpenSuse also only contains opensource code. Ubuntu on the other hand has announced plans on bundling proprietary modules in their next distribution. Which company is better at promoting “free?”
Personally I have no alliance to any distribution. I’ve spent years switching between Gentoo, Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu. I recently made the switch to Opensuse from Ubuntu because I’m a supporter of the mono project, I love Novell’s artwork and their improvements to the Gnome desktop are impressive. I love how beagle has integrated with everything on the desktop– from Gaim to Firefox, everything is searchable. I have yet to see that level of integration anywhere. The only qualms I have with this distribution is the fact that multimedia support, especially gstreamer functionality, has been crippled. It’s a pain trying to get Mp3s, AACs and wmvs playing. My wireless card also doesn’t work out of the box. I have to manually install ndiswrapper for it or manually compile and install the opensource driver.
I see several people claiming opensuse is entirely detached from Novell and should be considered safe. I was almost willing to start partially believing it too. That is until I just went through the screenshots and it’s STILL basically mono with a touch of gnome on it. I’ll be damned if that’ll ever touch my hard drive.
Since when did Mono become an operating system, or a window manager, or a desktop environment?
Since when did I say it was any of those? My point is that there is no way I’m going to install a system that makes extensive use of a technology that 1) is meant for Windows machines 2) absolutely sucks and 3) is a patent time bomb.
Since when did I say it was any of those? My point is that there is no way I’m going to install a system that makes extensive use of a technology that 1) is meant for Windows machines 2) absolutely sucks and 3) is a patent time bomb.
I agree to one extent or another with your points, but mono is part of Gnome now, you’ll find mono in Ubuntu and Fedora and a host of others. Using that as criteria alone reduces your choices substantially.
If you install a KDE desktop in Suse, you can easily eliminate the two mono packages installed by default (zmd and beagle) or simply choose not to have them installed if you do a custom package selection, and you can do so without hosing your system or dealing with a raft of dependencies. Improved system performance is an added bonus. openSuse did not intertwine their mono framework with the Gnome libraries to the same extent as other distros do, specifically for the benefit of KDE. It’s possible to have gtk and the gnome libraries installed to run gtk/Gnome apps in a KDE environment without heavy mono dependencies.
If you’re using the standard Gnome desktop, it’s a different story. Mono is pretty much embedded into it and the various applications, the fact that the system updater for Gnome depends on zmd makes it difficult to work around. But then, Gnome users don’t seem as adverse to mono as non-Gnome users do.
If you’ve got an aversion to using mono on your desktop, openSuse is ironically one of the easiest mainstream distros for eliminating it.
Actually, I would say it’s easier to remove it on Fedora. ‘yum remove mono-core’ will rip out anything even resembling mono with no breakage. As said before though, with OpenSUSE intertwining mono with their package management, trying to remove it would not give me the warm and fuzzies.
Edited 2006-12-08 05:09
Since when did I say it was any of those? My point is that there is no way I’m going to install a system that makes extensive use of a technology that 1) is meant for Windows machines 2) absolutely sucks and 3) is a patent time bomb.
Fair enough. Your initial post didn’t make much sense at all. This cleared it up.
see several people claiming opensuse is entirely detached from Novell and should be considered safe. I was almost willing to start partially believing it too. That is until I just went through the screenshots and it’s STILL basically mono with a touch of gnome on it. I’ll be damned if that’ll ever touch my hard drive.
You wouldn’t want to catch Microsoft cooties would you?
Have you thought of performing some sort of exorcism to be really sure?
It’s the first release of Suse that isn’t dog-slow on my computers. Actually it’s quite snappy, Yast isn’t as fast as it’s supposed to be but it’s certainly faster. Whole desktop experience is very polished, I still have problems with font rendering though (I’ve set up the same DPI and other settings like in Ubuntu but still isn’t as good as on the other distros).
One thing I wonder about is why QT/KDE apps in Gnome don’t use QtCurve style, they would blend into desktop and it’s needed especially for Yast. QtCurve is even included on the installation DVD.
Good job, Suse devs, I might consider trying Suse for a bit longer
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6141703.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3…
So, IBM doesn’t think OpenXML is a good thing. Surprise!
So, IBM doesn’t think OpenXML is a good thing. Surprise!
Standards are just a con game to attack Microsoft.
Now that Microsoft is playing the standards game IBM admits it is against standards. Typical behavior from a monopolist who only went free because they bribed the judge. I really wonder why cultists can stand working for someone who is against standards? When are they going to open source AIX or DB2?
Standards are just a con game to attack Microsoft.
This is an incredibly idiotic argument, even coming from you I am surprised at the paucity of intellect in that statement.
OpenXML is an end-run around standards. OpenXML is a standard in itself but everything Microsoft intends to do with it will have a proprietary binary component (it’s not a guess, this is already the case in Office 2007) which makes interoperability impossible. But Microsoft intends to shout “SEE, WE SUPPORT STANDARDS AND INTEROPERABILITY, ODF IS JUST AN ALSO-RAN!!!” from mountain-top to mountain-top while entirely ignoring the fact (probably even when asked face-to-face) that their XML format is open but the data stored in it is not.
Now back to your regularly scheduled NotParker dementia.
OpenXML is an end-run around standards.
OpenXML IS an ECMA standard.
Standards are just a con game to attack Microsoft. Look, nothing Microsoft does is acceptable to the cult. The cult wants total capitulation.
Anyone is free to impliment OpenXML.
What the cult really wants is to legislate the mandatory use of the completely inferior ODF.
while entirely ignoring the fact (probably even when asked face-to-face) that their XML format is open but the data stored in it is not.
The document data is always available. The file is just a zip file. It maybe that Microsoft chose to allow embedding of spreadsheets and other items. But the core document is always there.
This is just Java all over again. Microsoft wanted a java that ran fast on Windows. Sun wanted a Java that runs equally slow on all platforms.
Microsoft wants features in their documents that ODF doesn’t support.
The cult wants the Micosoft dead. Microsoft plans to thrive for a long, long time.
Its the cults market share that is shrinking.