Novell preps Linux Desktop 10It plans to go head-to-head against WindowsNews Story by Cathleen Moore
SourceMARCH 23, 2005 (INFOWORLD) - Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the forthcoming version of Novell Inc.'s Linux Desktop offering will go head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said this week at the company's annual BrainShare gathering in Salt Lake City.
Novell is currently developing Linux Desktop 10, which will lift the application suite from its current role targeting specific workgroups to mainstream enterprise deployment, according to Nat Friedman, vice president of desktop and collaboration engineering at Novell.
Currently, Linux on the desktop has been adopted primarily by technology groups and the public sector. "The next release of [Novell] Linux Desktop will be ready to compete with Windows," Friedman said.
Novell's Linux Desktop 9 includes a desktop operating system, Novell's edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, Mozilla Firefox, a multinetwork instant-messaging client and the Novell Evolution open-source collaboration client, as well as technical support.
New features in Linux Desktop 10 will include a desktop search feature dubbed Beagle and a desktop note-taking technology called Tomboy. Also planned for the release, due out next year, is F-Spot, a personal photo management application. Beagle is designed to search documents, e-mail, instant messages, Web history, source code, music files, PowerPoint files and other applications.
"What [Beagle] does is it indexes everything in your life," Friedman said, adding that with Beagle, instant messages, mail and Web pages can all be filtered by type. "Microsoft does not have that right now. They have been promising it for some time."
The Beagle search function, which beats Microsoft's long-promised WinFS search functions to market, is a clear indication of one of the biggest advantages of open-source: the compacted development cycle fueled by the large community of developers, according to Friedman.
"We are outpacing Microsoft on the desktop. The Linux desktop has been in development for less time than Windows, and we are already surpassing them," he said.
F-Spot and Beagle were built using the Mono Project open-source development environment. F-Spot was developed by Larry Ewing, the creator of Tux the penguin, the famous Linux mascot.
F-Spot lets users drag and drop icons, such as people, places and favorites, onto thumbnail images of the photos and then sort them. Images can be sorted by date, edited and exported to a number of different types of Web gallery software, including Flickr, Web Gallery and Original (Open Remote Image Gallery, Initially Not as Lovely).
Friedman sees F-Spot not only as an interesting application, but also as a proof of concept for Mono. "What is interesting about this program ... is that it was written by one developer in six months," he said.
Several of the Linux Desktop 10 features -- including Beagle, F-Spot, Tomboy, an Evolution 2.2 plug in and the Mono developer tools -- will surface in SUSE Linux 9.3, which will be introduced in early April.
Two of the biggest hurdles to wooing users to the Linux desktop are support and applications.
The biggest challenge is "applications on Windows that don't exist on Linux," Friedman said. The Mono development environment, an open-source implementation of the .Net framework, will help meet that challenge by letting developers create applications to run on Linux.
In addition, Novell is aggressively working to cultivate relationships with independent software vendors to get more applications on Linux. Several ISV announcements are expected in the next six months, according to Jeff Allen, product marketing manager for Novell Linux Desktop.
Linux Desktop also includes technical support. Novell has more than 800 support engineers around the world, Allen said.
"Support is key," he said. "Novell is really offering a bigger ecosystem."