Novell’s Linux Desktop distribution was widely expected last year. When it finally got released in December 2004, it had to compete with Red Hat’s own Enterprise Desktop solution and Novell’s very own SuSE. So, how does Novell Linux Desktop 9 (NLD) fairs?
NLD came in 3 CDs. Installation is almost identical to SuSE’s and so there is nothing new to report here apart from the screen that lets you choose between Gnome and KDE as your main interface. Everyrhing got autodetected automatically, except the monitor. In the second stage of the installation, right at the end of the configuration wizard, the machine froze with a black screen. The CapsLock was working, but there was no way I could bring the machine back, changing consoles didn’t help and SSH wasn’t loaded at the time.
After resetting the machine, NLD loaded fine. The framebuffer background is beautiful and elegant. The only things that weren’t configured at that point was the keymap and the sound card. Running Yast2 fixed these issues easily (however on a consequent boot a few days later, the sound card stopped working all of a sudden for my user and I had to re-setup it via Yast2, see screenshot). When tried to run Yast2 to fix the monitor/resolution it would again result to the same black-screen freeze as earlier. The monitor was defaulted with the fbdev driver running 1280×1024 at 60 Hz, while my 19″ Envision monitor can do 1600×1200 at 75 Hz and 1280×1024 at 85 Hz. The graphics card is a GeForce2-MX PCI 64 MBs and works well with the “nv” driver (the onboard SiS AGP card is disabled). Other distros and Mac OS X don’t have a problem with this monitor/card combo, the monitor is fully compliant in the way it reports its VESA capabilities.
I edited the XF86Config file myself to make it load the “nv” in the requested resolution/refresh rate. Problem was, when I got to Yast to deal with the keymap (it seems that it defaults to the DE keymap if no setup takes place like in my case because of the crash) , it would overwrite my XF86Config and produce a version that’s not parsable by XFree86. Ah… I wish for some XML-based configuration for XOrg…
Anyways, things got smooth after passed that point. The OS seems to be of the same performance as Red Hat’s solutions, including boot times (tested on a 1.2 GHz Duron with 384 MB RAM). With a quick look in “top” over the default installation, it seems to require about 130 MBs of memory for an empty Gnome desktop, which is far better than Fedora’s default 145-160 MBs (my very lightweight Arch Linux setup –most services removed– requires about 112 MB with an empty Gnome 2.8.2, barely running on my old 128 MB laptop when Firefox is loaded). I quickly also loaded KDE and it requires ‘only’ 98 MBs of RAM for its empty desktop, so I must call for Gnome optimizations, once again.
The distribution includes the applications everyone would expect from an office-oriented distribution: OpenOffice.org with the GTK+ widgets (looks really good), Evolution, Firefox 0.10 and even a Citrix ICA client. Then, there is iFolder, a major part of NLD. iFolder let’s you synchronize your files between different machines at home or work. It’s a super-convenient tool for business professionals who travel a lot or who work from home a few days per week.
Some of the neat tools included is the netapplet and the resapplet (both reside on the gnome-panel) that allow one to change a wireless/wired network and monitor resolution respectively, on the fly. Also, apparently there is a mail merge ability of OpenOffice.org against Evolution’s address book. It is nice to see some interoperation between Evolution’s address book and other apps, like Gaim’s contacts for example.
NLD includes Gnome 2.6.0 but some of its applications are updated to their 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 versions, so it’s a mixed version Gnome. The Gnome DE looks good (even if a bit bright for my taste because of the theme used), it’s as functional I would expect it, and the background images included in the distro are beautiful (way better than Red Hat’s ;). Problem is that they are scattered on different folders and so not all pre-installed background images are showing automatically on the “desktop background” dialog.
My favorite part of the whole NLD experience is Red Carpet (now called ZenWorks). Red Carpet let’s you download updates to the system from Novell’s servers and even subscribe to third party channels that might offer free NLD packages to enrich your desktop experience. Its interface is simple, elegant. I wish more distributions would use its engine and GUI to adapt it to their own package formats (e.g. Arch Linux for pacman packages would be great). I used Red Carpet to update the system and also installed the developer’s package (gcc, make etc) which is not installed by default.
Two other things that need more work in NLD in my opinion are these:
1. Mono applications! Mono 1.0 is included, but I have seen no actual Mono GUI apps included (except maybe some parts of iFolder) and that’s a shame because the Mono team at Novell does a great job. A good idea would have been to include Imendio Blam! as there was no other RSS reader included with the distro anyway (Liferea would been my first option if there was no Mono).
2. There are duplicate menu items. For example, Evolution appears 3-4 times in the Gnome menu (under different names some times), while Calculator and the Unicode/Char map also appear twice under the “Accessories” and its “More >>>” sub-menu. Duplications of this nature are UI bugs in my opinion, plus the Unicode and Char map should become a single tool.
Regarding Yast2, it feels out of place when under Gnome. I hope Novell works on the looks/HIG of it soon. Having said that, Yast2 does the job well (minus the monitor problem). It includes preference panels for most common settings, helping the user to setup services, hardware and software in a logical manner. I much prefer Yast2 over Mandrake’s setting panels, however I do prefer Red Hat’s over Yast2 in terms of usability (please note that Yast2 is more useful and feature complete than Red Hat’s panels though, it just needs to work on its UI). Also, there is a certain duplication going on with Yast2’s software package management front-end and Red Carpet. If Mac OS X had two 90% similar “software update” applications I don’t think I would feel good about it either…
Real Player is included, but it stopped loading here all of a sudden. It worked 2-3 times, but now it just doesn’t load (I reckon this has something to do with my SiS AC97 sound card not providing hardware mixing, an ALSA problem that Mandrake is trying to fix in their latest beta).
Now, to the really nasty stuff: Fast forward three days of normal usage without major problems going on. Woke up in the morning, turned on the PC, only to find the whole GConf database buggered. Nothing works correctly, no icons are loaded, no settings, nothing (check screenshot). I suspected that this was probably GConf’s error and so I logged out, and manually ran “gconftool-rebuild”. This fixed everything, but that wasn’t a great experience I got right over there, completely unexpected and without myself having messed up with the machine in any way (note: the gconf crash happened before I even got Red Carpet to update the system, so that was not it).
So, overall, what do I think of NLD9? I like it. It’s an interesting distribution, more modern than Red Hat’s Linux Desktop for the Enterprise and with some interesting tools integrated to the distro. Cohesion and consistency and interoperability between different applications seems to be the moto for NLD. However, some bugs plague the otherwise good impression I get from the system. For a first version, I find it to be definetely a positive effort and I have absolute trust to Novell’s engineer to bring innovation to the desktop. I can’t wait for that future version that would include Beagle, for example, and XGL, the OpenGL accelerated X server! That could kick Novell’s Unix competition out of the picture easily!
Pros: easy installation, modern looks, bundled with good set of enterprise utils, Red Carpet really convenient.
Cons: more UI clean up required, some bugs, slow boot-up, doesn’t push the envelope against its competition.
Overall: 7/10
After reading the review you could get the impression that GNOME is the default desktop of NLD – which it is not because there is no default.
No, but the installer gives you the CHOICE (as I already mention in the aricle), and I made that choice. I told it to install Gnome. And so the rest of the review would –naturally– be about that DE more than anything else.
It is amazing where Novell have taken the Linux desktop, one of our employees has pushed it upon a total newbie and had amazing success, you can read the article at http://www.xolinc.com/blog/index.php?cat=4 .
I think it is great that they have remained fairly neutral with regard to Desktop Environments, overall it is a great way to ween people of Windows based solutions.
I have found the Java Desktop System from Sun Microsystems to be a great solution when it comes to business desktops.
>No, but the installer gives you the CHOICE (as I already >mention in the aricle), and I made that choice. I told it >to install Gnome. And so the rest of the review would >–naturally– be about that DE more than anything else.
Still, you could have said up front you were only doing the GNOME aspect. I kept reading the article hoping to find something of interest to me (hmm… gconf meltdown, wouldnt affect me..). At least some KDE screenshots wouldnt have taken too much time and been very interesting.
iFolder is made with Mono!
The version of iFolder shipped with NLD is 2.x, not the Mono-based version.
>> Your monitor didn’t report its X- and Y-Size, this might
>> cause display problems like unreadable fonts.
>>
>> Do you want to configure your monitor geometry manually?
Reason 1 for not using SuSE/Linux/NLD: those error messages are crazy.
When are these reviewers going to view these distro’s properly? NLD is aimed at the corporate market yet time and time again we see reviews aimed at “prosumers”. As a Senior Infrastructure Admin what I want to see is how it fits in the Enterprise. Does it have remote managability? (Zenworks/NDS), can we do mass installs simply and easily? What about mass patch management? Desktop lockdown and policies? These are major issues which stop Linux getting on corporate desktops.
>Does it have remote managability?
Via VNC or X11 or SSH, I guess it easily does. Most Linuxes do that.
>(Zenworks/NDS), can we do mass installs simply and easily? What about mass patch management?
Yes. With Zenworks.
>Desktop lockdown and policies?
Didn’t see anything of this nature under Gnome/Yast2.
To be a bit more specific, there is a “remote administration” pref panel on Yast2 where you can turn it on and off.
As for lockdown/policies, I see no such thing, except if you manage to work around the “security settings” and “profile manager” panels and work through these for a satisfiable desktop configuration.
You CAN install both KDE and Gnome with NLD – just do a custom install and choose all KDE and all GNOME and then you get the usual choice on login.
I wasn’t too impressed with NLD 9 but then ymmv
Good review Eugenia.
I must say I do like the overall look of NLD; and I used RedCarpet before and that product is a major plus for any Linux distro. However, those weird bugs you mentioned are imho unacceptable for an enterprise-aimed product.
But that theme; it rocks
.
I’ll stick with Ubuntu for the time being.
Eugenia, you somehow misunderstood me. I just wanted to thank you for writing a review that actually covers the characteristics and specific strengths and weaknesses of NLD, unlike most reviews of Linux distributions, which mainly cover the installation procedure.
I’m not pissed off at you at all, and i didn’t submit any news about my product, because i have none.
about X.org configuration – try Elektra http://elektra.sourceforge.net/. It makes X.org configuration xml aware.
first, it’s great to see a review which is not written by a high scool student as part of his homework,
secondly I just wonder why you did not install the nvidia binaries drivers ? are they supported on NLD ? is there a problem between their respectives license ?
Cheers,
Djamé
Obviously you don’t know what you’re talking about. This error message is totally valid, and could affect the quality of your display (fonts)
I had a similar experience on a test install of NLD9. The install crashed on an attempt to use the i810 video driver for my intel extreme graphics 2 notebook. Afterwards, every reboot would disable audio, and reset my keyboard to German layout.
After several retries, I found out that the best install option was: during install, select the VESA framebuffer graphics. Now both video + audio settings are saved correctly. After install, use Yast2 to select the i810 driver, do not test it, but save settings; then, manually edit /etc/XF86Config, “Device” section, add line:
Option “DisplayInfo” “FALSE”
(xfree86 output here: Broken BIOSes cause the system to hang here.)
Several other distro’s (Linspire 4.5, Mandrake 10.1, SUSE 9.1, Libranet 2.8.1) were at least as troublesome in enabling video acceleration, so in the end, I couldn’t hold it against Novell.
Apart from that, it’s a very nice, slick, GNOME-defaulting distribution. On my machine, KDE’s installation was broken every time I tried (thrice), and there seemed to be an inconsistency between the distributed Mozilla (1.6) and some packages that required mozilla 1.7. Apart from these bugs though, it felt better than SUSE 9.1, and it encouraged me to upgrade to SUSE 9.2 eventually. SUSE 9.2, by the way, has no trouble enabling the i810 driver (probably because it’s using X.org). But it’s definitely less slick.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=194&slide=1
I installed SuSE Pro 9.2 on a couple of servers. The initial setup was great. Display was working perfectly but when it rebooted I got a black screen. Apparently, it rewrites the XF86Config file when I chose to change the resolution, to something a little bit incompatible. I fixed the problem by copying the XF86Config.install file that SuSE had written in the default setup over to the new XF86Config file. I can’t remember the name of the file. Problem solved. I’m pretty sure the Novell Desktop works the same way.
I remember seeing a few places saying you could download NLD that wasn’t an evaluation, but so far everytime I look, I only find the eval download.
Would really appreciate it if anyone who knows where to download it would pass it on.
Thanx…
I did an install of NLD9 b/c I was looking for a way to replace all the win98 installations in my office. I have to admit I was really impresses by the ease of installation. Unlike other distros I’ve worked with, setup was painless. I also did not have any of the nasty bugs that Eugenia ran into.
Despite that I had to ask myself whether saving 20-30 minutes on each install (7 workstations) is worth the constant subscription fee required to keep Zenworks patching and updating after the eval period. In my case the answer was ‘no’ but for others I could see how NLD might be worthwhile to look into.
The “evaluation” is actually the full version:
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/eval.html
The evaluation only allows up to 30 days of free package updates through ZenWorks (Red Carpet). As I understand it, everything else is the shipping version and will keep working beyond the 30 day timeframe.
If you buy the full version, you are basically paying for the upgrade support channels via ZenWorks.
If you are using KDE as the basis of or NDL install you can use Kiosk to control almost all aspects of the UI. Everything from command line access to editing controlling desktop backgrounds.
…and Yast does follow a HIG. It follows KDE’s HIG just fine and sense it uses QT it makes sense it would
Eugenia, would you please correct “fairs” to “fares” in the summary?
I’d hate to see OSNews fall to the level of Slashdot, where errors such as the use of “loose” for “lose”, “mute point” for “moot point”, and misuse of apostropes in plural forms abound.
I’d hate to see OSNews fall to the level of Slashdot, where errors such as the use of “loose” for “lose”, “mute point” for “moot point”, and misuse of apostropes in plural forms abound.
At least in the comments section OSNews is already there. Surprisingly, it’s primarily the native english speakers who have problems with words that sound the same, but make absolutely no sense (note the widespread use of “I could care less” for “I’m totally uninterested”).
But not quite as well integrated as JDS for Linux. JDS gets rid of the redundant stuff and focuses on desktop use, especially in corporate use. NLD and JDS are both designed for the coporate enviroment so when evaluating, keep that in mind.
I’ve been using NLD9 since the day of its release. Before that, I was generally a SUSE user, so NLD is quite familiar.
The Gnome install is clearly more polished than SUSE 9.1. It wasa real pleasure to find an out-of-the-box distro that logged into our Exchange server without a bit of drama. Great.
Gotta agree that having YaST and Red Carpet side-by-side is a bit ungainly. You’d hope Novell will eventually build all the setup and prefernce menus into a unified panel (including package management).
With ZenWorks for corporate administration, a clean Gnome desktop (or KDE — take your pick); Red Carpet; Novell support; and the power of YaST, I really think this is an impressive business desktop.
> Still, you could have said up front you were only doing the GNOME aspect. I kept reading the article hoping to find something of interest to me (hmm… gconf meltdown, wouldnt affect me..). At least some KDE screenshots wouldnt have taken too much time and been very interesting.
You’re new to OSNews, aren’t you?
i really dont like yast, and yes, i know pretty much everyone disagrees with me. i find anaconda blows it out of the water at install time, and for configuration i greatly perfer DrakX. not only does it do pretty much everything yast does, i find the interface is better designed, snappier, and depends on python, not qt (which i never install).
imho, the whole idea of a massive distro centric control panel makes no sense in a more general way. in gnome, yast really sticks out like a sore thumb, as gnome config dialogues really arnt done that way. i would imagine even in kde it wouldnt really fit in, since they already have their uber-panel. wouldnt it make sense to snap yast modules into the kontrol panel (or whatever its called), and have each module as a seperate applet in gnome. that way it would actually fit in. the bar is alot higher then it was five years ago when it comes to coheasive desktops in linux. (to my knowledge) redhat is the only one with gui config tools that actually looks like they fit in, and then only in gnome.
anyways, was just wondering if someone could explain why yast rocks so hard, cause im obviously missing something.
I like Sun’s JDS a lot more than I do the NLD. JDS seems more polished
Latest issue of the mag has the software packaged with it for free. full support and updates until January 2005.
http://www.crn.com/
But this is for channel folks…people that sell, support, design– software and hardware for a living. If you fit that bill you can also get it for free via becoming a Novell partner at http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/trynld/
Technically since Yast is GPL now any distro could use it and included it in to their setup (I believe Debian is working on it, not sure though). As far as integrating in in to Kontrol Center — it already is since 9.0 I believe. No integration with the Gnome Control Panel though. Of course that makes sense since it might be hard to do because of gtk/qt differences.
>> Obviously you don’t know what you’re talking about.
>> This error message is totally valid, and could affect
>> the quality of your display (fonts)
Oh I sure do know what it means, and I did not say the message was invalid in any way. It’s just the geek-level of the text I was talking about.
What’s up with the “X- and Y-Size” instead of just width and height?
And “monitor geometry”? Uhm hello, what’s wrong with monitor settings, preferences or properties?
Anyway, my point was that error messages should be in normal English (or Dutch, or Spanish, or any other language), not some geeky devspeak (at least, that’s what it looks like to me).
It doesn’t want settings, preferences or properties. It wants to know how big the monitor is. That is not a setting, preference or property, unless you have some sort of secret NASA monitor the rest of the world doesn’t know about. ‘Geometry’ is a perfect sensible word to use.
on configuration integration – I really like the GNOME project that’s dealing with this, gnome-system-tools. They’re doing a heroic job of keeping their tools working across many distributions. For everything it covers, I like using it a lot more than drakconf, although they do the same job. It’s not as comprehensive, yet, but it’s excellent at what it does. Is there an equivalent KDE project yet? I’d like to look at it if so.
OK,I got the install disks from a magazine (www.crn.com, refrenced a few comments ago). The install was a breeze and the Geek-speak X-Size, Y-Size doesn’t bother me, since I did pass my Middle School geometry class. The automatic updates work fine. So, I’m doing OK at getting started.
But, how do I find RPMs for this distro? It easy to google for “SuSE 9.2 RPM”, but googling for “Novell Desktop Linux RPM” doesn’t work so well. I would like to install Plone, Eclipse and KDevelop. Installing Plone from a source RPM is no big deal, but KDevelop and Eclipse would be rather taxing to install from source. Does anyone know it I can safety use SuSE 9.2 RPMs or if there is a repository of NDL RPMs?
Is the answer so simple that I’m overlooking it?
I converted a lab over to Novell Linux Desktop and in the process I created quite a few custom RPMs for NLD. You can download them at
http://www.pcc-services.com/files/NLDRPMS/
Basically I just downloaded the SRPMs from Suse9.2, edited the SPEC file and rebuilt them on NLD. I also rebuilt an updated KDE (3.3.2) if you want to run the latest stable KDE. All in all these packages are cleanly built, pretty stable and won’t bork your system up.
on configuration integration – I really like the GNOME project that’s dealing with this…
Yes, me too. Especially the network monitor applet in Gnome 2.9.6 is awesome.
>> The install was a breeze and the Geek-speak X-Size, Y-Size
>> doesn’t bother me, since I did pass my Middle School
>> geometry class
..and so did I, but you and others fail to see the point.
I would just like to see normal, no nonsense, English messages. That’s it.
Is it that hard to just have something like:
NLD could not query the size of your monitor. Would you like to configure it manually?
[yes] [no]
Thanks!
Maybe it’s more than just the theme that Eugenia doesn’t like, but there is a full Industrial KDE theme included with NLD that makes YaST feel much more unified with the system. Why it’s not set by default is beyond me but…
– run ‘/opt/kde3/bin/kcontrol’ as root
– go to ‘Appearance & Themes’
– under ‘Style’ choose ‘QIndustrial’
– under ‘Colors’ choose ‘Industrial’
– Apply your settings and exit
Now all KDE apps (YaST included) will run with a more unified theme…you might want to do this under your normal account as well.
Now all KDE apps (YaST included)
YaST is not a KDE application.
Eugenia interstingly enough has run into one of my major issues with using a Suse based distro in a corporate environment.
What hosed her manual settings was not so much YaST (the gui) but a background script run after almost any YaST change called SuSEConfig.
It tends to whack manual settings of almost any kind especially LVM settings btw. In addition, any sort of setuid changes including ones necessary for LinNeighborhood to act correctly will get changed by this script on most YaST updates.
This along with the fact I like gnome and the fact many projects do not support Suse as well as RH/Fedora for rpms led me to try out RH8 and ever since I have been working off of RH/Fedora but Suse is an incredible desktop distro for a KDE person if ….
they ever put a leash on that damn SuSEConfig script.
It essentially IMHO breaks a major tenet or philosophical principle of a Unix-like system.
“Unix was not designed to prevent you from stupid thing because that would prevent you from doing clever things.”
— Doug Gwen.
Annoying to say the least. Disruptive actually in some situations. This is not to say I would not love to see a Fedora distro with a good partitioning tool for install that allows resizing of partitions like SuSE or allowed for on first update the installation of the nvidia driver automatically for the user.
Love it! I use it at home…and is the smoothest and best performing (read that as USEFUL) Linux distro I’ve ever used.
Real Player 10 and Mozilla Firefox are nice built-in touches.
This is a very solid Windows substitute.
JM
The nice thing about Novell is that they have the resources to put engineer time into the USB malloc() problem. A segment of Linux users actively use their webcam on a ( sometimes ) daily basis. This type of problem puts a damper on their fun
Chuckles-
they’re still doing that?! Holy cow, I thought they would’ve given up years ago. Yeah, that was one of the things I hated the most when I had to use SuSE on my laptop for a while. If I go to YaST to change ONE THING I don’t want YaST to apply all the settings it has for everything else automatically! Sheesh.
I almost forgot…thanks Eugenia for a well written piece. (I describe NLD to my co-workers…and I’m sure I leave great features out all the time.)
One final cool note: As a beta-tester for SuSE/Novell, I received the 3-Dosk software a few weeks ago. I have one full year of upgrades for free…and all of the other “benefits” that come from doing this. (I had Enterprise Server 9 before release…that was cool, too)
Looking Forward to Spring….(agus La Feile Phadraig!)
JM
Good review BUT, let me help you out…
1) NLD is for the Corporate Environment, which means:
a) To do a “real” test, you need a corporate network
with SERVERS, hopefully all integrated with a
directory service like eDirectory. Think of managing
100s of workstations, not just one. Typically you
would have:
* ZenWorks Server
* Bordermanager Proxy Server
* Groupwise or OpenExchange Mail Server
* File/Print/SQL Server
b) The way it works is that eDirectory is distributed
accross servers for fault tolerance, so each server
has a copy. Anyway, say you’re the sysadmin and your
company hires a new employee. You run your web based
management utility and create a new user, assign rights
and security policy, etc. This information is
replicated through all your servers automatically,
then within seconds the mail server notices the new
user and creates a mailbox, the proxy server enforces
internet access policies and the Zenworks server
creates a roaming user profile, all automatically!
c) When the user logs-in to the network FROM ANY
WORKSTATION, RUNNING ANY O/S, all of the policies,
security, etc are automatically implemented. You
didn’t see a place to configure security policies
because that is done at the server level.
A network running integrated eDirectory servers is nothing
short of a SysAdmin’s wet dream. I encourage you to retest
NLD with all of the proper equipment in place and you’ll be
amazed. It is that good.
Please also note, NLD is based on SuSE Linux and thus runs
a LOT better with KDE.
Point very well taken. Well done, Lad.
JM