What came out of the Novell/HP roadshow

Reports have started filtering in from those of you who managed to secure a place in the Novell/HP “Delivering & Deploying Linux Across the Enterprise” seminars that began last week. The evidence keeps mounting that Novell is really taking to open source like a convert takes to a new religion – embracing it all and proselytizing at every opportunity.

Evidently, all the presenters were using laptops fitted out with SuSE Linux running the Ximian Desktop 2 (XD2) user interface and all of the presentations were created with OpenOffice Impress presentation software.

One reader was very *impressed* that Novell will offer support for SuSE, Ximian’s XD2 and all of its parts (evidently, even the games included in the XD2 distribution, perhaps even those distributed as part of the KDE interface which – up until now – ships with SuSE).

Standard channels of support will be used – for example, the free support at https://support.novell.com/forums/ already has venues for the Ximian and SuSE products.

Paid support will be offered under the same terms as NetWare and GroupWise products – and Novell has so many different support programs that you really should review them (https://support.novell.com/paid.html). In fact, I think we’ll review them in the next issue. Right now, though, let’s get back to the seminar content.

More details about what will be included in the upcoming release of Open Enterprise Server (OES) were let slip. One feature will be the much-anticipated Novell Storage Services (NSS – the NetWare file system) for Linux. Also planned is the long-awaited Linux client for NetWare – a full-featured, NCP (NetWare Core Protocol) over IP client, just like the Windows client that ships with NetWare 6.5. If any part of OES were to be made available early, this one feature would probably get the most votes.

Just to prove that there’s still development going on for NetWare, I guess, OES will also include a bash shell. The bash shell is a Free Software Foundation construct, emulating parts of both the Korn shell and the C shell, which are the Unix command line interpreters. These are typically used to process scripts, similar to DOS and Windows batch files.

The surprising thing is that the bash shell will run on the NetWare kernel as well as the SuSE kernel. Whether this is a replacement for Toolbox scripting, in addition to Toolbox or simply a reworking of NetBasic to be more “Linux-like” (rather than “Windows-like”) we won’t know until we actually see the product. But it could be intriguing.

Each attendee also got a full copy of the SuSE distribution as well as an evaluation copy of Nterprise Services for Linux. There are a few more sessions scheduled this week, check https://www.novell.com/linux/tour.html to see if there’s a stop near you.