Posted on 11/05/2003 6:21:56 PM PST by Leroy S. Mort
Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.
On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.
For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.
On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.
For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. "When you go into a CompUSA or Best Buy, the only versions of Linux that you can find on the shelves are Red Hat and SuSE," said Jack Alderson, a Linux and Sun systems administrator for custom-chip maker X-Fab Texas. Alderson fears that Novell will stop creating consumer-oriented versions of SuSE Linux, which he uses at home. "With Red Hat's announcement, that pulled them off of the shelf and out of the general public's view. All there was left was SuSE. Now that's going to disappear also."
The moves could return consumers to a choice of Linux distributions from smaller companies--such as Mandrake, Xandros or Lindows--or from community projects such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware.
Novell appears to be planning to carry SuSE's open-source torch, but it hasn't made specific comments regarding lower-priced versions of its Linux products.
"Novell is committed to the open-source community," Chief Executive Jack Messman said Tuesday in a conference call. "With SuSE, we gain access to and will continue to actively support key SuSE-sponsored open-source initiatives."
While SuSE's high-end server products retail for $450 or more, SuSE 9 Professional--which includes publicly available Linux server packages--only costs $80.
Charles Philip Chan, a Toronto resident who has used Linux for about a decade, believes that Novell's acquisition is additional validation for the open-source operating system.
"On one hand it is good, because it looks like Linux is moving in the commercial space," he said, adding that consumers still have a lot of choice among community projects on the Internet. "There are a lot of other distributions out there."
However, Chan said the consumer market will likely expand at a slower rate, because there will be fewer versions on shelves at retail stores. While Red Hat Linux won't be available at retail, the company is supporting a community project, Fedora, to create distributions based on cutting-edge Linux technology.
Arthur Tyde, the founder and former president of the Bay Area Linux Users' Group, is optimistic about SuSE remaining a choice for consumers. SuSE Linux 9 has already been released, and he fully expects to see the next version at retail.
"I think it is wait and see," he said. "It might not affect the community at all. From a consumer standpoint, I think you will still see SuSE Linux in CompUSA."
Moreover, while some have viewed troubled Novell's purchase plans as a potential threat to SuSE, Tyde said that Novell is just getting a second chance and who knows what the company will do with SuSE.
"You have to think about what they are really buying," he said. "They are not buying the rights to all that code. They are buying credibility to that space."
And, Tyde said, for Novell to gain credibility in the Linux community means keeping consumer product on the shelves.
Huh? Last night I set up a box with an Gigabyte MB and an Athalon 1800+ that used to have Win2K on it with RedHad 9.0. Using the DVD that came with the software (so I didn't have to swap CDs), it took less than 25 minutes to get through the interactive part, and I just took all the defaults. The system was up and running in about the same time as getting a Windows system up. And it recognized the USB mouse without any problems. Add another 60 seconds to configure the printing to a HP PSC 2110 all in one, directly attached to a WinXP Pro workstation (and RH 9 has the right drivers for that printer too!) and I had no problems at all! And the system seems a bit faster, or at least as fast as the Win2K system that was running on the same hardware.
Mark
I think what you are seeing is that the 'pay penguin' is making it's market debut as support and upgrades sales. Not as free software. Money is being made in penguinville.
I wasn't a big fan of IBM when they wanted to rule the world of computing and am not a big fan of m$ now that they want to rule the world. Mono-culture in the marketplace is bad, whether it is computers or cars. Market choice rules.
The SuSe/Novell deal is especially interesting with Novell's announcement some time ago that they would be un-bundling the NetWare services from the OS, and in NetWare 7, you would be able to run the network services on either the NetWare OS or on Linux.
However, I do remember the UNIXware fiasco, where Novell actually pitted one of their own products against another! When it comes to taking terrific products and technologies, few companies have been more inept than Novell. Given the history of Novell (having the #1 network installed base, and losing all that market share, buying the #1 word processor program, and letting it die a slow and painful death, buying UNIX and doing nothing with it, except trying to sell it as an alternative to your main product, etc...), this may be what kills Linux completely!
But I hope that's not the case
Mark
Where Linux really kicks ass is on the server-side, and for that you don't need or really want a shiny drooler-friendly GUI anyway. Much ado about nothing says I.
On the other hand, OSX is just about the finest desktop OS currently being produced (or ever, though OS v9 and prior were giant turds), so that isn't particularly tragic. At least for desktop usage, I can't think of a better OS. And you can always put LinuxPPC on it if you want; some Apple resellers sell machines with LinuxPPC pre-installed. In fact, the US Navy uses Apple computers running LinuxPPC for some of their combat sensor systems.
Hmmm... I didn't even bother looking at the docs. I just thought I'd give it a try. Is the Windows computer you want to access the printer on in a domain? In my case, it's just a workgroup. But all I did was add an entry to the /etc/hosts file for the WinXP computer, then started the gnome print manager. (BTW, I did install the Samba system during the initial installation, but didn't do any configuration of it. You will need if for the SMB protocol.) I just "filled in the blanks." That was it: It printed immediately. Of course, you need to be sure that you tell it the user name of an account on the WinXP system.
Mark
This reminds me of early Novell setups with my first Arcnet.
Have you tried adding a LOCAL user to the XP machine, rather than trying to logon to the domain? If you're not sure how, right mouse click on "My Computer," then choose "Manage." Then select Local Users and Groups -> Local Users, then add the user.
It's funny that you mentioned Novell, since that's my specialty, not Windows. I know that there's a way to configure Samba to authenticate to a Domain, but I've never tried doing that.
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