linuxplanet.com — Novell's SUSE Linux Desktop 11 promises support, seamless interoperability with Windows networks, an attractive price tag, and a lot of value. Paul Ferrill takes a close look to see if it lives up to its promises.
Apr 3, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountApr 3, 2009
There are distros that don't betray open source for Microsoft money that are more worthy to be the subject of an article.
Closed AccountApr 3, 2009
I quote websites that tell the truth about the Microsoft/Novell axis. You should try supporting computing freedom instead of the computing tyranny coming from Microsoft and it's puppets(such as Novell).
Closed AccountApr 3, 2009
I don't actually own a single Microsoft product. The last piece of MS software I bought was Windows Me. I was so pissed off at how crappy it was I vowed never to give them money again.That said, my personal vendetta with Microsoft doesn't get in my way of seeing things in a rational, balanced light. You are spewing crazytalk and hackneyed anti-Microsoft rhetoric with nothing to back it up. Your "proof" is other crackpots like Twitter blogging on slashdot or other no-name, no-credibility blogs.
Closed AccountApr 3, 2009
Link 1: Microsoft Betrays IBM and Uses Office Against OS/2.Apple wasn?t the only partner Microsoft exploited, turned on, and then tried to drive out of business. The earliest and most obvious example was IBM, which had launched Microsoft into significance as a reseller of DOS.Microsoft betrayed IBM in the development of OS/2, first by pulling out of the operating system partnership, then by canceling Office for OS/2 after shipping an initial version for it in 1992.IBM later bought up Lotus and worked to compete against Microsoft?s growing influence with Office. Microsoft responded by using its new monopoly positions to punish IBM in various moves documented in the Microsoft monopoly trial<a class="user" href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/09/10/office-wars-3-how-microsoft-got-its-office-monopoly/">http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/09/10/office-wa ...</a>Links 2 and 3:Shareholder Likens Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates to Bernard Madoff<a class="user" href="http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/12/shareholder-accusation-msft/">http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/12/shareholder-ac ...</a>Link 4: That article explains why Novell's betrayal of open source is disgusting. Every article about Novell should mention their traitorous deal with Microsoft.
Closed AccountApr 3, 2009
You don't want to debate OS/2 history with me. My grandpa worked for IBM during that time, I grew up using OS/2, and I followed the antitrust trial and the separation with great interest.OS/2 failed for a number of reasons, and MS is not even in the top 3. First, IBM stubbornly (but admirably) refused to break a promise to their customers, and insisted on making OS/2 run on the 80286. Microsoft wanted IBM to set the target to the 80386 because it (A) was 32-bit (B)had better memory management (C) had Virtual86 mode allowing multiple concurrent DOS sessions and (D) was much better at multitasking. OS/2 1.x was slow, driver support was poor, and OS/2's Presentation Manager put pixel 0,0 at the bottom right rather than the top right like Windows. This made porting existing Windows applications to OS/2 very difficult. Remember the goal originally was to posit Windows as a cheap upgrade from DOS that home users could install, and then "graduate" up to a serious OS later. IBM and Microsoft worked together on a series of specifications called SAA, or Systems Application Architecture. The goal of SAA was to allow an application to be run on anything from a cheap personal computer to a big iron mainframe with little to no porting or new user knowledge.IBM and MS also had very different corporate cultures at the time. MS and IBM often locked horns about KLOCS or 1000's of lines of code. Microsoft posited that they should be paid by the feature or by how much progress was made, rather than how many lines of code they wrote. IBM insisted on paying by the KLOC, so MS started adding unnecessary lines of code to programs to ensure they got paid fair value for their work. This is most obvious in OS/2 1.x's print manager. It takes almost a dozen steps to set up a printer, whereas Windows' print manager took 2-3.IBM also was absolutely terrible about marketing, and while OS/2 would run on any Intel machine, IBM didn't try to dissuade people from believing that OS/2 would only run on IBM hardware, which at the time was their unsuccessful and expensive PS/2 line.It was widely believed at the time that the x86 architecture was reaching its practical limits, and that eventually something else would necessarily replace it. However, because of the constraints of the 80286, much of OS/2 was written in x86 assembler. The kernel was 100% non-portable. Because of OS/2's stiff resource requirements, poor driver support, lack of applications and the infamously poor DOS support (nicknamed the Penalty Box), combined with the misconception that OS/2 only ran on PS/2's, sales of OS/2 were terrible. Windows, however, struck a chord with the public at version 3.0. Many in Microsoft started wondering why they kept wasting time on OS/2, when it had fell down before it even took off.MS and IBM knew that OS/2's lack of portability would be a problem, so they agreed that a new kernel would have to be written. The agreement then was that IBM would develop OS/2 2.0 almost entirely on thier own, allowing MS to work on a new portable kernel, which would debut in OS/2 3.0. Microsoft hired on David Cutler, a former OpenVMS developer, to design the NT kernel. Cutler was not at all a fan of OS/2's design, and kept pushing MS to ditch IBM and work on the NT-OS/2 kernel completely unfettered. Microsoft did finally decide to drop OS/2 and focus on their new NT kernel. Meanwhile, IBM revamped OS/2 with the very advanced Workplace Shell. Unfortunately, they did little to help with driver support and their marketing was terrible. Sales continued to lag partly because of OS/2 1.x's reputation, and partly because IBM simply didn't know how to market to home and small business users. When OS/2 Warp 3 came out, IBM did attempt a huge marketing blitz, and at brief point even outsold Windows. However, IBM had grossly underestimated demand, and customers came into stores only to find empty shelves where OS/2 Warp should have been ready to buy.Later, IBM announced their intention to port OS/2 to PowerPC. This turned out to be much more difficult than previously thought, and after numerous budget overruns and pushed back deadlines, IBM demoed a mostly (but not quite) finished PPC port of OS/2 at COMDEX. It ran slow as molasses on the first gen PPC chips and had zero application support. After almost nobody expressed interest in the product, IBM severely slashed the entire ESD (entry-level systems) division's budget and all but ceased development of OS/2. The remaining team was able to scrape together enough features and improvements to constitute another release in 1996 as Warp 4.0, but IBM barely even acknowledged it existed.The things Microsoft DID do were exclusive licensing deals with OEMs, and spread FUD about OS/2 reliability when NT finally came out. Ballmer had the guys that worked on OS/2 write a program that exploited a weird obscure bug in OS/2 that caused it to panic and throw up a TRAP error. Ballmer brought this on a floppy to Comdex and went to all the OS/2 computers, sticking the disk in the drive and running the app, then claiming that OS/2 could be crashed in 10 seconds. The thing is, MS did try to kill off OS/2 once NT came out, but by that time IBM had already pretty much done it in all by themselves. As far as Lotus, IBM bought them and then mismanaged them into the ground. Ever use SmartSuite? It was the EXACT SAME program from 1996 until it was discontinued in 2003 or so. It was nice, but it was old and even StarOffice had more features. Also, look up Lotus Notes. Most of what you'll find is horror stories about the user interface and how difficult it is to set up.But then you don't actually care about the whole story, just the part that makes you sound right, yes?