Kennon’s Space

A quick note about my Linux distro of choice. I love Suse, and I love Novell. I have over a dozen Suse Linux Enterprise servers in production at work, and they do the work of twice as many Windows servers. And I have been using Suse as my primary desktop distro since 9.3pro, prior to that I was a diehard Redhat/Fedora user. On the server side of things I have very few complaints. eDirectory on Linux rules, it is a real directory system for Linux. I mean eDirectory makes Active Directory look like some CSci major’s freshman year project. That is how awesome eDirectory is. And the best part is, it runs on everything.

OK now that I have my love for Novell + Suse servers on the table let me gripe a little about their desktop solution.

It has been 2+ years since since Novell picked up Suse, and a lot of stuff has happened since then. Intergrating two companies like these I am sure is a massive effort. But here are a couple or 3 things that I feel as a Novell sysadmin/desktop user need to be addressed like 6 months ago:

1. I should not have to manually edit the ConsoleOne script in /usr/ConsoleOne/bin to add the path to my JRE when I am running a Novell owned distro. OK so if I was running C1 on Fedora or any other distro I can see the need since for some reason few distros can put something in the same place twice. But not when I am running a Novell OWNED distro. The JRE path should default to the correct one for Suse, regardless if it is SLED10 or OpenSuse 10+

2. I should not have to edit the same ConsoleOne script manually when I install the Groupwise admin plug-in for Linux to fix yet another variable to avoid the dreaded gwadj2 errors!!!

3. Evolution is NOT a suitable replacement for the native Groupwise client. In SOAP mode it actually works pretty well…when it works. But it is very unstable unless you run it in IMAP mode. In IMAP mode it sucks. Why doesn’t the Groupwise 7 client for Linux look anything like the Groupwise 7 client for Windows? If Novell wants people to seriously get onboard with the Linux destop in the Enterprise they really need to focus on this area. There is no way I could expect one of my managers or non-techy co-workers to use either Evolution or the X-plat client as their primary email app.

That is all for now. Despite those three annoyances I am really quite happy with Novell+Suse on my desktop. I work in a company with over 50,000 employees in like 50+ countries worldwide, so I know how difficult cooperation and “Being on the same page” *cringe* can really be. But sometimes it is hard for me to believe that they are a company of only 5000. When they act as if they are a company of 500,000+.

So I downloaded and installed Picasa for Linux the other day. I was so stoked when I saw it was available. After I installed it though my excitment turned to disappointment pretty quickly. Not sure how anyone else feels about the project but apprently it is running on some custom Codeweavers wine server. It really isn’t a Linux app, it’s a windows app with it’s own emulator built-in, and that sucks.

Wow, what a let down that was for me. I couldn’t figure out why it was so sluggish on my Athlon 64 3500+ with 2 gigs of uber-low latency ram. Most Gnome or KDE apps scream on Linux at home for me. So I went looking through my process list and saw wineserver running, plus is had that kind of sick Windows grey almost purple tinge to it’s controls theme…total let down.

My question for Google can be summed up in one word…why? I mean if you have to use .Net or something at least do it in Mono so that it can run half way decently. This is not a total disaster or anything. My picture editing/sorting needs are quite admirably met by F-Spot and The Gimp. I guess I was more excited about the idea that Google actually put together something cool like Picasa for Linux, but that isn’t the case, oh well.

I decided to do away with the old site finally. Not because I have a ton more time to maintain a site, but because stuff like Wordpress has made it a lot easier to do so. If you are looking for anything from the old page like the top 25 ways you know you are in Fresno, or my pictures from the Navy I will be putting them somewhere you can get to them soon.

So this is mainly a test post, nothing to see here, move along.