[KLUG Members] Review of IBM / Novell [Novell/Ximian/SuSE]

[Adam Williams]

I, and several other KLUGers, went to todays seminar put on by IBM &
Novell [ and minions ].  Thought people my want to know how it went.

NOTE:  This *ENTIRE* presentation was done on a Dell laptop running
SuSe/XD2, Open Office, etc...  No M$ to be seen.  Nice.

1. Novell went first,  this was pretty much the same thing we saw when
Novell came to KLUG - even many of the same slides.  So nothing terribly
new here.
1.1. The iPrint & iFile agents are operational on XD2 inside Novell and
possibly on their beta (haven't checked yet).
1.2. Evolution Groupwise plugin in March '04. (We already knew this).
2. Then the yellow-shirt-money-logo-got-up. 
2.1. He did a brief demo of XD2, showing that mere mortals can do crazy
things like use a file manager, open a PPT file, etc... Wow!  Really
stunning. ;)
2.2. Some interesting things did slip...
2.2.1.  A managed version of gconf is running inside Novell/Ximian; 
where admins can control the desktop, lock down functionality, etc...
2.2.2. He explained rather pointedly the reason for Mono - either
support .Net or die.  And of course Novell wants to be able to host and
integrate with .Net services.
2.2.3. The relationship between SuSe and the KDE project is verboten; 
Ximain employees are not allowed to discuss it.  The speaker used the
term "marching orders".  So, whatever that is worth.
2.2.4. They acknowledge the problem with Open Calc and Excel macros and
are working on it.  Simple macros work in recent versions of ooo.
2.2.5. Ximian has made no decision about supporting Fedora.
3. The IBM guy went third (last).
3.1.  Blade technology, SANs, etc...
3.2. This was actually a joint this with VMware (whose server operation
system is a tweaked version of Linux BTW).
3.2.1. They now support moving *RUNNING* VM's between VMware servers
provided they are SAN systems.

So thats it.  Also got a folder stuffed with cool promo stuff, I'll
bring that to Tuesdays meeting.