Ok,
This thread seems to be getting a little crazy; but against my better
judgement, I'm throwing in my two cents.
I think that my two cents is worth at least three cents, however. I have
worked in the market selling, building, networking, and supporting both Red
Hat and Caldera systems, for personal desktops and networks of up to 400
workstations. I was also the primary contact with Caldera in the company of
my former employment, where that company was a Channel Partner of Caldera.
I ran into the issue of nkfs.o when I was trying to implement a Novell client
solution on an OpenLinux base 1.0 system , which certainly did not come with a
novell client. However, Standard _did_ come with a client; and I worked
through a method with Caldera tech support for implementing it on the Base
system. The issue was that nkfs.o needed to be updated to reflect the
different kernel version in Base. Standard shipped with a later patch. That
right there worried me at least a little bit, that changing your kernel
required you to update nkfs.o, by _hoping_ that Caldera had built an
appropriate version and making it available for download. In response to my
wanting to use the novell client on the Base system, the technician seemed
shocked and said something like, "Well I've never heard of someone wanting to
downgrade!" It's not called "downgrading;" it's called "integrating." People
get paid big bucks for integrating and innovating solutions--which is what
Caldera claims to be all about with the whole "Glue that hold your system
together" metaphor that they use in their LJ adds. As much as I'm in favor of
progress, and am leary of software that becomes bloated and superfluously
complex due to it's generations worth of backward compatibility, I would hate
to think that 5 kernel patches worth of differential in an arena that is the
Linux kernel, would be considered a shocking downgrade.
Now, having said all of that. Let me say that I was quite pleased with the
Caldera people; in most every conversation that I had with them. Sometimes I
wondered about their tech support guys; but everybody's green once--so I cut
'em some slack--they're good guys. But on the whole, it was a good
experience. Caldera has a vision for taking our favorite tools and toys
commercial. It's a dream come true. And I know that there is fear of a
fragmented commerical market,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> My views with respect to this are not meant to be mischievous, but to
> rather demonstrate how fragmented the commercial linux market appears
> to be, and how this has practical implications.
but there is one thing that I can't get past. And that is that if Caldera is
successful in their aims, Linux is going to be a bigger deal _everywhere_ .
And when it is, all of us Linux junkies could stand to make more profit, if
that's what we want. Or we could stand to see more cool stuff ported to Linux
faster, if that's what we want. Or we could enjoy developing cool software
that even a larger audience uses and enjoys, if that's what we want. There
are some things that Caldera can never take away. The GPL keeps them from
doing that. They aren't taking away the Novell client. Before they had it,
there wasn't one (not a full NDS one with the cool looking graphical interface
in Looking Glass, anyway). I think that the Linux market is a burgeoning one;
and I think that Caldera is and will continue to play an important role.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not in their camp. I've switched back to Red Hat
because it suits
me much better. And frankly, I'm much more impressed with Red Hat's
development of utilities and the Red Hat Advanced Development Labs. Caldera
was using a not so well rounded recycled LST distribution; and their usage of
rpm seemed bastardized. But
they've got good stuff. And they are not the enemy that I see Micro$oft to be.
> > I have never heard of anything more ridiculous than having to
> > buy and install a whole unix operating system to get a functioning
> > novel client.
>
> Well, I guess I have just heard of something even more ridiculous --
> trying to get a functioning novell client without first installing an
> operating system (unix or otherwise).
Now, that latter statement is just a foolish twist of semantics. I doubt that
our friend really meant for us to think that he was trying to write a novell
client image directly to his hard disk!
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> The novell stuff that comes with RH5.0 does work, I work in a Win95/
> Novell environment and my workstation is Redhat 5.0 with Applixware
> and PostGres. the Novell stuff works great, SAMBA works great, and
> more and more people in that office are looking at RH5.0 as a viable
> option to get away from the dreaded GPF.
> -Paul
Is that an NDS environment?
Well, I've said my thing. But I want a freaking Novell client too! So, if
anybody comes up with a good solution, that supports NDS, and is also easy to
use within dosemu, I'd love to know about it! I used the Caldera one on that
OpenLinux Base box, and tried to make it work within dosemu, and couldn't get
it to do NDS stuff within dosemu. And Caldera tech support didn't throw me
any bones, so I'm still searching for a better way...
--
======================== Mike Wilkerson ==========================
"You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point
of seeing through something is to see something through it."
C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man"
PGP Fingerprint->
1E 5F 0F 39 54 28 73 4F 27 7C 48 69 E6 0D E9 3A
==================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] =====================
--
PLEASE read the Red Hat FAQ, Tips, Errata and the MAILING LIST ARCHIVES!
http://www.redhat.com/RedHat-FAQ /RedHat-Errata /RedHat-Tips /mailing-lists
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe" as the Subject.
