To boldly go

• Article 15 of 16
• LinuxUser & Developer, August 2006
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 108K

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Papayianni said this unconfident approach was because of the company’s realistic aims. “We don’t expect everyone to rip out Microsoft and put in a Linux desktop – at first.” And Friedman also made the point that there were still classes of enterprise desktop users who wouldn’t be able to swap Windows for Linux, even with the advances of SLED10. Despite all this work by Novell and others, Novell still doesn’t think Linux is ready for every desktop.

Intriguingly, for an enterprise Linux day, Friedman spent most of his hour-long demo showing off most of the consumer-popular features of SLED10. While the new iPod-compatible, iTunes-like music player, the plug-and-play digital camera capabilities and the iPhoto-like photo organiser would certainly have pleased a crowd of Mac fans, the average CIO in the audience is likely to have remained unswayed.

However, there were a few nuggets in the demonstration for the enterprise user. The Spotlight/Google Desktop/WinFS-like search features in SLED10, which allow users to search for files by filename, metadata and content, threw them a bone – especially now WinFS has been rolled out of Vista altogether. The polished interfaces to the user-profile lockdowns would certainly have interested those fed up with users messing with settings, although given Microsoft’s similar Zero Administration policy (don’t let the users do anything and you won’t have to do any administration) never got much traction, this may turn out as a non-starter, too.

Importantly, OpenOffice is starting to look a lot more like a viable alternative to Microsoft Office for the average enterprise user, particularly thanks to the native support for VBA macros. Friedman’s promise that if anyone comes across a file OpenOffice can’t cope with, Novell will update OpenOffice to fix it in just a couple of days may have seemed like a good idea to Novell. But it undoubtedly would simply have highlighted potential compatibility nightmares in the mind of the average CIO in the audience – the last thing they need is 10,000 average run-of-the-mill users ringing up support lines, asking why their files don’t work properly, only for them to be told they’ll have to wait at least a couple of days to get the software upgrade that will allow them to do their work. There’s a reason why most organisations tend to upgrade Office all in one go, rather than piecemeal, and that’s to reduce management difficulties such as this, since even two versions of Microsoft Office can have compatibility problems.

Until OpenOffice can offer 100% compatibility with Office formats, Linux on the desktop is going to have difficulties making inroads in many organisations. Pointing out this flaw in OpenOffice shows just how far Novell has to go before it can convincingly claim to know what the enterprise really wants these days.

So it was fortunate perhaps that much of the focus of the day was on more comfortable enterprise territory: Linux on the server. SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10’s inviting enterprise features, such as its “iSCSI in a box”, Novell AppArmor application security system and ZenWorks management system, got a somewhat short summary since the main theme of the day was the greatness of virtualisation. Virtualisation involves running more than one operating system on a server, either using software or through hardware. For organisations worried about how much of their servers’ capabilities are being used and how many servers they can fit in their data centres, virtualisation is an important potential technology since it allows more resources to be used and redeployed easily.

For the hardware side of virtualisation, “Scott” from Intel spoke about how its chipsets would help virtualisation in future: in other words, doing the typical Intel thing of mentioning how great Intel and its technology is without really mentioning how its partner company manages to fit in with this vision.

On the software side, senior Oracle director Dave Pearson came out to explain how Oracle loves Linux and how Oracle loves virtualisation. He made important points about server utilisation rates, and did the typical Oracle thing of talking about how great Oracle is without really mentioning how its partner company manages to fit in with this vision.

So it was left to Novell to explain SLES10’s built-in tools for handling the bundled Xen virtualisation system with an impressive demo – well, impressive once the AV cable had been sorted out – that showed the automatic clustering failover of virtualised servers using the Xen technology.

It was Jeff Jaffe, Novell’s CTO, who spelled out Novell’s strategy for the enterprise: “to become one of the infrastructure companies that really matter to IT”. Despite all the boasts about the number of downloads of OpenSuSE making it the “number one Linux distribution”, it was this modest aspiration that really summarised Novell. Still bruised, demoralised and unsure of itself after its encounters with Microsoft during the 90s, Novell is slowly trying to convince itself and others of its return to enterprise-viability, while not being entirely sure how to do this.

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