[KLUG Advocacy] linux news

[Adam Williams]

> > Ximian rocks!  [I have a hard time saying "Novell rocks!" after years of
> > decomissioning those &*^$&@( things,  but I guess I'll have to get used
> > to it.]
> I can say it. "Novell ROCKS!". I've been staying up to date with what
> Novell's been doing over the past few years and I really like it. Most of
> the "&*^$&@( things" were probably older 3.x boxes

Yes.

>  ran on IPX which seems
> to have gotten an bad rap somehow, but you never really had to do much of
> anything with the box.

It had everything to do with the box, the box didn't use TCP/IP.  So
anything not Novell had to be hacked/extended/somehow-whacked.  Their
TCP/IP support was a long time coming, and not exactly wonderful at
first.  But that was quite some time ago.

>  It did what it was supposed to do and did it for
> years with out ever having to even be rebooted.

Yes, thats true.  In part that was its problem.  Some Novell box sat
around doing its thing long after the guy who set it up was long gone, 
and left no documentation, etc... nor was it ever updated.

> Anyway, I don't mean to start a fight here or anything. I just like
> Novell. I believe they'll be around for a long time to come. I'm also very
> excited on how they are embracing Linux.

I am as well,  they can bring a real up-scale mentality to Open Source; 
something that is sorely lacking {cough, MySQL, cough, flat files
everywhere, cough,...}.  It is just the old red-box-with-white-stripes
are-you-sure-this-isn't-M$-DOS impression that is hard to get over;  and
there may be some philosophical underpinning to their admin tools, but
the experience I've had with them leaves me bewildered (the tools in
M$-2003 seem more intuitive - yikes!).