Kennon’s Space

I just wanted to link to this blog entry from Matt Asay. In it Justin Steinman from Novell gives us a really decent snapshot into how much Novell is contributing to FOSS. In the last 6 months Matt has been busy lambasting Novell for how much they have supposedly been hurting FOSS. It is nice to see the disillusioned Ex-Noveller show the other side of the coin too.

I am still waiting for the massive damage that the Novell deal has done to FOSS to rear it’s ugly head. I don’t think I will hold my breath. Glad to see some of the most vocal chicken littles calming down a bit.

So yesterday SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 was officially released for download. I have been running the Brainshare beta now since March and it is definitely the best, most usable desktop Linux on the market and I will argue that point on it’s technical merits with anyone who cares to say otherwise. The improved Gnome menu is an awesome enhancement. The applications, documents, and places tabs make it extremely intuitive. One of the other nice features that actually didn’t really work in the Beta I was using but seems to work great now in release is the new gnome clock with the timezone thinger. The clock has some cool integration with Evolution calendar too. Throw those features in with the beagle integration and what you get is a real enterprise desktop. Nowadays when I have to use a Windows workstation for something it feels like I am stepping back in time. Granted OSX has some great interface features, some would argue better than SLED, but throw in the $50 price tag and the fact that it is open source and OSX can take a flying leap.

I am trying to use Evolution again as my GroupWise mail client. So far 24hours into this thing it seems to be working really well. In the past I had a lot of bugginess with new message counts, calendar items and the clock integration. It seems like all of those problems were addressed. In the Brainshare beta of SLED10 SP1 I was using the gnome-screensaver would crash on a regular basis leaving my desktop naked and exposed when I was AFK, looks like that was resolved too.

One of the first things I did after loading up the new OS was to upgrade GAIM to Pidgin via this repo:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/GNOME:/Community/SUSE_Linux_10.1/

Then I install W32 codecs, mp3 support, mplayer, mplayer plug-in for Firefox via packman:

http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.1

Then I upgrade Firefox and install Thunderbird. I know Evolution can do more than just my GroupWise but I use Thunderbird at home for my labyrinth mail and I just feel more comfortable using it in both places. So I use this repo for that:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/mozilla/SUSE_Linux_10.1/

And last but definitely not least is a new gem I have just started using in the last couple months called SMplayer. It is a better graphical front end for Mplayer. IMHO it completes Mplayer. The guys who’ve done Mplayer made an awesome engine but the interface on the mplayer-gui is lacking to say the least. SMplayer fixes all that. I highly recommend it. It can be installed from this repo:

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.1/

A lot of people give Novell shit about their deal with M$. And if you read my previous posts from around Brainshare time you will see that I am not nearly as enamored by the company as I used to be. But it irritates the shit out of me when people won’t recognize that they are making huge contributions to desktop Linux. Regardless of any other business scheming everything they are doing on SLED and SLES with virtualization, Windows integration, etc is all contributed back upstream and free for any other distro to take advantage of. As long as that remains true I will be a SLE devote.

Here is a little ditty that continues on the thread I have spouted off about a few times regarding big American based companies supporting Internet censorship. Like I’ve said before, profit is all well and good but eventually these companies will comply themselves into a corner.