It plans to go head-to-head against Windows
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,100574,00.html
News Story by Cathleen Moore
MARCH 23, 2005 (INFOWORLD) - Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the
forthcoming version of Novell Inc.'s Linux Desktop offering will go
head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said this week at the
company's annual BrainShare gathering in Salt Lake City.
Novell is currently developing Linux Desktop 10, which will lift the
application suite from its current role targeting specific workgroups to
mainstream enterprise deployment, according to Nat Friedman, vice president
of desktop and collaboration engineering at Novell.
Currently, Linux on the desktop has been adopted primarily by technology
groups and the public sector. "The next release of [Novell] Linux Desktop
will be ready to compete with Windows," Friedman said.
Novell's Linux Desktop 9 includes a desktop operating system, Novell's edition
of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, Mozilla Firefox, a
multinetwork instant-messaging client and the Novell Evolution open-source
collaboration client, as well as technical support.
New features in Linux Desktop 10 will include a desktop search feature dubbed
Beagle and a desktop note-taking technology called Tomboy. Also planned for
the release, due out next year, is F-Spot, a personal photo management
application. Beagle is designed to search documents, e-mail, instant
messages, Web history, source code, music files, PowerPoint files and other
applications.
"What [Beagle] does is it indexes everything in your life," Friedman said,
adding that with Beagle, instant messages, mail and Web pages can all be
filtered by type. "Microsoft does not have that right now. They have been
promising it for some time."
The Beagle search function, which beats Microsoft's long-promised WinFS search
functions to market, is a clear indication of one of the biggest advantages
of open-source: the compacted development cycle fueled by the large community
of developers, according to Friedman.
"We are outpacing Microsoft on the desktop. The Linux desktop has been in
development for less time than Windows, and we are already surpassing them,"
he said.
F-Spot and Beagle were built using the Mono Project open-source development
environment. F-Spot was developed by Larry Ewing, the creator of Tux the
penguin, the famous Linux mascot.
F-Spot lets users drag and drop icons, such as people, places and favorites,
onto thumbnail images of the photos and then sort them. Images can be sorted
by date, edited and exported to a number of different types of Web gallery
software, including Flickr, Web Gallery and Original (Open Remote Image
Gallery, Initially Not as Lovely).
Friedman sees F-Spot not only as an interesting application, but also as a
proof of concept for Mono. "What is interesting about this program ... is
that it was written by one developer in six months," he said.
Several of the Linux Desktop 10 features -- including Beagle, F-Spot, Tomboy,
an Evolution 2.2 plug in and the Mono developer tools -- will surface in SUSE
Linux 9.3, which will be introduced in early April.
Two of the biggest hurdles to wooing users to the Linux desktop are support
and applications.
The biggest challenge is "applications on Windows that don't exist on Linux,"
Friedman said. The Mono development environment, an open-source
implementation of the .Net framework, will help meet that challenge by
letting developers create applications to run on Linux.
In addition, Novell is aggressively working to cultivate relationships with
independent software vendors to get more applications on Linux. Several ISV
announcements are expected in the next six months, according to Jeff Allen,
product marketing manager for Novell Linux Desktop.
Linux Desktop also includes technical support. Novell has more than 800
support engineers around the world, Allen said.
"Support is key," he said. "Novell is really offering a bigger ecosystem."
Reprinted with permission from
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Story copyright 2005 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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