Published: July 7, 2010 - Pageviews: 9082
Novell's SLED11 SP1
- Introduction and History
- What's new, Installation & Configuration
- Working with SLED11 SP1, Additional Software & Final Thoughts
Introduction & History
Regardless of how you view Novell as a company, few would argue that their release of SLED10 back in July of 2006 was one of the most well engineered Linux Desktops ever released. It was the first release to include "3D Desktop Effects" thanks to David Reveman, a Novell Employee. It had the most comprehensive integration with Samba thanks to their Samba team, which, at the time, included Samba Superstar Jeremy Allison. It had one of the best and fastest OpenOffice.org implementations, thanks to the Novell OpenOffice.org team, which started the excellent go-oo.org development version, and many more features.
For that release, Novell decided to really focus on a Desktop Linux product and they went on a road trip and recorded various people trying to do certain tasks on a Linux Desktop, you can find these videos at http://www.betterdesktop.org/. The result of these tests helped Novell develop a new menu and application management system, codenamed "SLAB" as shown in the following image.
Suse Linux Enterprise's new "SLAB" Menu System and the Compiz 3D Desktop Effects
Even though other Linux Distributions took a release or two to catch up with the features and stability of SLED10, the popularity of SLED10 was very short lived.
Controversy
In November 2006, Novell announced a "Collaboration Agreement" with Microsoft in which the two companies would work together to ensure their software would better interact with the other's software. This helped Novell's software to an extent as you can now manage Active Directory using Novell's tools and it also resulted in the decent OpenXML/ODF Translater for OpenOffice.org.
Unfortunately, the agreement also included a joint patent agreement. This sent shockwaves through the Free Software / Open Source community and many accused Novell of "Selling Out" to Microsoft, since the agreement also included a sale of licenses to Microsoft for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Subscriptions.
As a result of this agreement, many Free Software / Open Source Developers and Fans still distrust Novell and some left the company in protest, the most public was Jeremy Allison, whose resignation can still be read on Groklaw's website.
For more information on why Software Patents pose such a risk to Free Software, check out these articles on the GNU Project's website: Fighting Software Patents and The Danger of Software Patents.
A Note on Linux: Linux is actually only the kernel of a complete system. Many contributors like to call a complete Linux system a GNU/Linux system. The GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix (a recursive acronym) and is the system first started by Richard Stallman, then later developed with the coordination of the Free Software Foundation. The idea of GNU/Linux is to get the point of freedom across when you discuss the operating system. We have decided that our site will use the generic name Linux to signify the whole system, but please, keep software freedom in mind when reading our Linux articles.
