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Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 16:05 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)
Parent article: Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

"Large organizations" do not *have* preferences, and it always worries me when people buy into that fiction. *Users* have preferences, and while you're welcome to prune the *menu tree* so as to avoid confusing users who don't need the extra stuff, ghod help you if you leave it out of the *distribution* -- power users do *not* enjoy being penalized for the stupidty of others, be they non-power-users or distribution managers.

Diskspace is effectively free these days; there is no call to leave "text editors" out. <slope type=slippery>What gets left out next?</slope>


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Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 16:36 UTC (Tue) by remijnj (subscriber, #5838) [Link]

<slope type=slippery>What gets left out next?</slope>

Games, Toys and basically everything which doesn't qualify as "Office" i think.

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 16:45 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Just 'cause it doesn't come on the install CD doesn't mean you can't install it yourself.

Granted, it'd be nice if SUSE/Red Hat/etc. has a Click-n-Run-ish service; i.e., a web site and repository with semi-official add-on packages that can be installed with a nice point-n-click GUI. (And no having to open up a shell, try to find/guess which package name you need, etc.)

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 17:07 UTC (Tue) by utidjian (subscriber, #444) [Link]

It is called Synaptic... available for (at least) Red Hat, Fedora and Debian and the appropriate repositories.
http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/

There may be other such applications, Yast, Urpmi?

-DU-...etc...

urpmi, gurpmi

Posted Sep 14, 2004 18:06 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Mandrake's urpmi is a great tool, and the graphical client gurpmi is very nice. However, the lack of official repositories is a shame -- you have to hunt for them, as they may change structure, change location and so on periodically. It may be due to my limited knowledge, but it's a tedious process to keep them working.

With Cooker, you are supposed to rsync the whole tree each time you update to it. Not funny.

I completely prefer apt, since the repositories are official and do not change location. And dselect is a very nice tool.

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 17:59 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Just 'cause it doesn't come on the install CD doesn't mean you can't install it yourself.

Sure, but realistically, how much of that do you want to do? What's the point of using a distribution at all?

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 14, 2004 18:40 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

If it's like previous SUSE releases, everything will be on the install DVD (or CD set), it will be just one more "install profile" -- basically a named and clickable collection of preselected packages.

If you want everything, just select that instead of "office desktop install" or whatever.

(Of course I'm just guessing here, but I have been using SuSE since about 6.1)

Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)

Posted Sep 15, 2004 19:05 UTC (Wed) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link]

> Just 'cause it doesn't come on the install CD doesn't mean you can't
> install it yourself.

Doing so will probably violate the support agreement, which is a big no-no
for corporate desktops. Many companies refuse to use anything without a
support contract, hence the reason I just had to arrange for Apache
support for our production environment (over and above my team which are
already on call 24/7) and why they insist of running F-Secure SSH rather
than OpenSSH.

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