Linux Centric Company
Novell has stated that it wants to be a big force in the enterprise, which involves linux. With statements like “Novell’s ongoing commitment to provide customers a full range of Linux solutions.” (http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html), we would expect that to be a leader, you would provide software compatible with atleast the major distributions.
State of Netware in Linux
- Groupwise Email Client – Evolution provides feature complete implementation
- Gaim / Pidgin – Provides groupwise instant messenger functionality
- ncpfs – Provides access to file shares – Incomplete (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/IPX-HOWTO-9.html with respect to permissions)
Novell Client Packages
Novell does not provide packages for Fedora, OpenSuse (sorry state of Novell on OpenSuse: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=262319) or Ubuntu. There are RPMS available, but do not install without extreme tweaking and editing of files and symlinking directories.
Make it right
Dedicate 1 engineer to tying together existing open source utilities, and making a nice frontend (like the open source novel client), that ties everything together. This is not a large amount of work, and should increase novell’s reputation with the linux community, and people evaluating linux for enterprise desktop use.
Case in point
Supporting Linux != Not providing software for linux
Rebuttal?
Related posts:
#1 by Hub on June 12, 2007 - 2:30 pm
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Maybe for the Ubuntu packages, Canonical could contact Novell to be able to provide said package in the commercial repository.
For the Open Source part, maybe you could make them. Shouldn’t be too hard to package
Just my $.02
#2 by Jim on June 12, 2007 - 4:23 pm
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You didn’t mention iFolder or Hula? Have these been dropped as well?
#3 by Patrick on June 13, 2007 - 12:39 pm
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Hula was divested to Messaging Architects along w/the NetMail product. It is no longer a Novell product.
iFolder has pre-made bin packages for SLED (client) and SLES, Fedora, CentOS (server).
#4 by Ken Hawkins on June 15, 2007 - 12:49 pm
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iFolder client is not useful unless organization has already done full update top current product. Many orgs (like our college) have carried forward legacy configs, and still require Novell Client for network logins & shares. Moving to OES w/iFolder & iPrint is a MAJOR migration effort; in the meantime, a fully functional client is all that prevents linux adoption for many staff. I played with SLED, and while it was fine on current hardware, its default config is as much a resource PIG as Vista, for no appreciable gain in utility.
Regards,
Ken