To make sure the company gets “it right,” Novell is taking its time with its Linux desktop, demoing only a version of it at LinuxWorld for the purpose of user reaction. Elsewhere, Miguel de Icaza has been accused of betraying the open-source dream, but Ximian cofounder Miguel de Icaza believes corporate partnerships are the best way to realize it.
Novell Won’t Rush Linux Desktop; Miguel de Icaza Interview
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Eugenia Loli
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they need to have a Ximian Desktop version released for every update for GNOME.
Does anyone know which toolkit they are using for this new desktop? I would think it would be Gtk simply because they could use it to create closed-source apps without a license fee to troll-tech, but I thought someone here might know better.
from Linuxworld?
Simply download the latest beta of Ximian Desktop and install it, and also add the SuSE tools (the new build I saw uses better fonts and the color of the pref panels is more welcoming and closer to the Ximian theme). That’s it.
Im not sure if this helps, but Novell announced a few months ago that they are standardizing on gtk# internally.
Thanks.
This “article” is a joke.
With the appearance of Linux [the kernel], the community had a viable, working alternative to Windows.
Right, Linus’ magic kernel could instantly compete with Windows upon it’s first release…
The entire basis for the article, “Sellout, or Savior,” is silly. He’s neither. While I respect his work, he’s a rather peripheral player at the moment. Evolution is about the only Ximian product that has see a wide degree of general adoption.
I’m sure some will claim Mono will revolutionize the OSS movement, but that remains to be seen.
How comes Miguel de Icaza is so vocal in the press regarding Novell’s Linux desktop even though he isn’t even in the Linux desktop group at Novell?
>> Im not sure if this helps, but Novell announced a few
No, they did NOT make such an announcement. Some Ximian related people stated back then that they were working on projects related to gtk# inside Novell. On the other hand there do exist lots of projects which are using Qt.
The only official statements that were made so far just mentioned that both toolkits are in use at Novell. Each one is used where they are suited best.
Don’t start it on this thread.
You must be the Novell CEO, ’cause you seem to be complaining more than anyone at Novell.
How comes you are so vocal regarding Miguel’s statements about Novells desktop when you are not even Novell?
Novell continues to surprise me. Could it be that they ‘get it’?
Doing it the right way the first time and keep it simple, stupid.
“I would think it would be Gtk simply because they could use it to create closed-source apps without a license fee to troll-tech, but I thought someone here might know better.”
</rant>
Yet another free-loader on open source.
If you want people to spend their hard earned money on your apps then why don’t you spend yours to keep that company running. Trolltech have the decency to provide 2 licences for the toolkit, GPL for free apps and the other for commercial apps.
</rant>
You can run both app types on both desktop environments and Novell will have to keep that option as neither desktop has the monolopy on the best apps.
I was vocal on the interview that was made by Technology
Review, not on the desktop piece 😉
I always wondered if people ran to comment before reading
the links, it seems at least a perecentage of people do.
That being said, am not on the desktop team, but I work
closely with Nat, who is the VP in charge of the desktop
so I tend to be somewhat in the loop, specially as his team
uses Mono and Gtk# extensively to develop new components of
the desktop.
Take care,
Miguel.
Miguel, do you know if this desktop will support languages such Portuguese and Spanish? I’m from Brazil and this desktop could be really interesting here. It seems that Mono will be integrated on it, no? Wiil Ximian/Novell deliver any RAD tool for mono?
Thanks
Joerlei
>>Simply download the latest beta of Ximian Desktop and install it, and also add the SuSE tools (the new build I saw uses better fonts and the color of the pref panels is more welcoming and closer to the Ximian theme). That’s it.<<
I am currently running Suse 9.1. The reason why i switched from Redhat 9 is because of Ximian (I used to run XD2 and absolutely loved it). Now my question. Has anybody had experience with the new Novell/Ximian Desktop? Does it run on Suse 9.1 or only older versions? Is it usable or does it crash a lot? Personally I can’t wait for the next official Ximian release – regards
Yet another free-loader on open source.
The way I see it, applications are what make an OS usefull. To accuse someone of being a free-loader for making applicaions for your favorite OS without paying fees to a third party company is very closed minded and biased.
You don’t have to pay Apple to develop for their OS, why should you have to pay Trolltech to develop for Linux? You being biased against closed source software is not a good reason.
You don’t have to pay Apple to develop for their OS, why should you have to pay Trolltech to develop for Linux?
Poor argument. You don’t have to pay to develop on MacOS/Windows because the consumer has ALREADY paid Apple/MS for you.
As a counter view. Why should you expect to use Trolltech’s source for free?
The desktop article was low on facts, but does the other article serve a purpose?
It simply talks about Gnome as the project that gave Linux a graphical environment (which it didn’t), and then proceeds to talk about it as the only one. Then we get a lot of meaningless tosh about Mono changing the world, and helping to unify everything. It might be a decent mundane development base for many things (that’s what infrastructure is), but that’s it. A CLR environment, C# – yep, looks like really promising stuff. Would I use and look at developing with it? Certainly, probably with some commercial tools together with free software. A revolution? No.
Simply download the latest beta of Ximian Desktop and install it, and also add the SuSE tools (the new build I saw uses better fonts and the color of the pref panels is more welcoming and closer to the Ximian theme). That’s it.
It’s become painfully obvious that Ximian Desktop is not actively developed as a project, not within Novell at any rate, hence the inclusion of much of its development within core Gnome.
That being said, am not on the desktop team, but I work
closely with Nat, who is the VP in charge of the desktop
so I tend to be somewhat in the loop,
Nat now works for Suse, and I don’t hear him being described in that way elsewhere.
specially as his team uses Mono and Gtk# extensively to develop new components of the desktop.
So has been said for the past umpteen years. Let me put it this way – when I see a Suse/Novell Desktop ship that really uses Mono and GTK#, and ships it, then I’ll believe all the talk about Mono being used for this that and the other internally within Novell.
I don’t see the Suse desktop people standardising on Mono, and I didn’t see it at Linuxworld nor did anyone say anything about it. I even tentatively asked around, but, certainly, the Suse people certainly have a habit of not running off and saying things until something concrete is there. Sometimes that can be misinterpreted, but that seems to be their general attitude and policy.
I’m sure the Suse and Novell people would look at using Mono as a basis for allowing people to produce nice desktop and web applications quickly and easily (as Microsoft have done successfully over the years). However, just like everyone else, they’re not going to write everything in it.
Although I totally respect GTK as a toolkit, would I use it on a paid commercial project (and run it together with a managed environment, Java or otherwise)? Probably not, for many reasons that should be well catalogued. That’s not religion, that’s the reality and the context that Novell/Suse are trying to put their future desktop into, free of the sillyness that has gone on.
Hey,
I can not answer your question on the Spanish/Portuguese
just yet, but I can check if we have specific plans to do so,
in general most of the translations come from the various
projects (GNOME, Mozilla, etc), so it should be fairly well
supported.
As to a RAD tool: we are shipping MonoDevelop, but we
are also planning (see the Mono planning posting for details)
an integrated GUI designer for it to support initially
Gtk# at least.
Miguel.
Hello David,
Nat does not work on the SUSE organization, the desktop
and Mono groups are each one independent groups at Novell.
I was trying to answer a few questions, if you want to doubt
my answers thats fine, am not going to loose sleep over it.
Miguel.
” is working on combining the best features of GNOME and KDE into a single, new best-of-breed Linux desktop.”
i hope that will not happen
how many time to sun to buy novell and push java?
who would one have to bribe.. I can’t do much but translate it to Danish since I’m broke.. but it does look cool from what little I’ve seen and heard.
” is working on combining the best features of GNOME and KDE into a single, new best-of-breed Linux desktop.”
i hope that will not happen
I hope it does. I think this is an excellent strategy since both GNOME and KDE independantly are not ready for the desktop at this time.
More vagueness in these articles about Novell. Not even a speculated date is given when we can expect the real plans to be disclosed. We want to know all about Novell Desktop 1 and its use of Gnome, KDE and Mono. Oh well…
However, I do have a question. Will this GUI designer for Mono/GTK# be based on Glade or will it be something fresh?
Miguel you are just too kind
Your patience must be infinite when dealing with people who have so little clue as to what they are talking about…
I know you are a busy man but I wonder if you could take the time to look at another article which I posted here which appeared on OSNEWS today, it is entitled: “LSB and “Dependency Hell”: the Buck Stops Here”. I am just curious as to what you think about the possibilities or problems with a “autobuild” system-would love your feedback. I corrected one mistake in a follow up post in that thread….
Karl Zollner
“However, I do have a question. Will this GUI designer for Mono/GTK# be based on Glade or will it be something fresh?
I think its completely new.
Take a look at this: http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/monodevelop-list/2004-July/…
I can’t wait. I love Novell, they’re my fav company, and so far, they seem to be heading the right way. A lot of people remain sceptical, but Novell is very much in contact with th so called business world. They knwo what’s playing, don’t forget, they’ve been active on the server-side for god know how many years, longer than a lot of other big companies. Novell ranks among MS, Sun and IBM. It’s only that their marketing has been bad, so they might not have to big a brand value, that’s probably why they are still using the Ximian and SuSE names.
But when the NLD comes, I’ll be there. I think it might take the linux desktop by storm (the way Sun couldn’t). Another thing to remember is that Novell is first switching it’s self over to Linux. That’s like a salesman saying: “hold up, let me drive this car for a year, and I’ll let you know if it’s good.”
NDL is being demo’ed at LWE. It’s basically ‘xd3’ on top of SLES 9, desktop + distro.
David: you must not have looked very hard. NLD includes iFolder which is built with Mono.
So does this mean that we ccan kiss SuSE and KDE goodbye? Saying that its SLES 9 and not mention KDE does give that impression …
In any case, if its the case, Novell/SuSE is going to lose lots of existing customers. Not a very healthy strategy, IMHO.
Why would they have an “Enterprise Server” as a base for the desktop distro?
If you want people to spend their hard earned money on your apps then why don’t you spend yours to keep that company running. Trolltech have the decency to provide 2 licences for the toolkit, GPL for free apps and the other for commercial apps.
It is true. But the Qt is the one of the most expensive development environment if you want to create commercial applications. The M$ Visual Studio Professional is cheaper and full RAD development environment not only a widget set some database support and gui designer.
And if you want to create free/open source application the Microsoft Visual Studio Express is far better. Yes, it is not a multiplatform solution, but IMHO the most of developers will chose it instead of Qt.
IMHO if linux want to survive it need a totally free (not GPL) based API and cheap (but comparable to visual studio) development environments.
Agreed. I understand that Telltech must make money, and I respect that, however, what Trolltech should do is rip the GUI designer out of source code, really pump dollars into its development, and make it a competitive alternative to Microsoft and Borland.
Make the widget kit free and charge for services and product. Services could include helping a company port their applications to Qt, possibly team up with Mainsoft to make it even easier, in terms of an IDE, build an application using Eclipse at its source.
Make Qt-swt, Qt#, Qt-C++ and Qt-c all exposed via the IDE, allowing one to adopt the qt toolkit for any they wish to do, be it in C#, C++ or C.
Yet another free-loader on open source.
Has it ever occured to you that use the line above that maybe the developers of GTK WANT to be “free-loaded” off of because THEY WANT LINUX TO SUCCEED and giving a good widget library to CLOSED SOURCE DEVELOPERS (horrors!!) just might be a good way of doing it. Not every one even on the Free Software side of the FOSS movement is an RMS fanatic.
If you look at
http://developer.novell.com/ndk/whitepapers/suse.htm
“This SDK is a comprehensive tool kit that supports application development for SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 and Novell Linux Desktop (NLD).”
As you can clearly see there are KDE/Qt development tools as well as gtk-related tools (With KDE/Qt obviously being the preferred plattform). So in case you wonder which development tools to use to make safe decisions for application development this is the spot to look at.