Stories by: Dave Kearns

Last week the press, even the tech press that should be friendly to Novell and open source, headlined the fact that 3,000 out of 5,000 Novell employees had the capability to boot Windows on their computers. One typical headline read: "Novell's shift to open source makes slow progress."

Novell has taken the initial steps to help you gain familiarity with Linux. A few months ago, in an announcement that was almost overlooked by the press, Novell announced at BrainShare Europe a free online course called "Bridging NetWare skills to Novell Open Enterprise Server for Linux."

When SuSE Linux founder Hubert Mantel announced his resignation from Novell ast week, he became the third former SuSE executive to leave in the past six months. There was much speculation as to why Mantel left, which was sparked, in part, by the manner of his leaving. He announced his resignation via a Linux e-mail discussion list, claiming that SuSE had changed so much it was no longer the company he had founded 13 years before.

This time last year, there were speculations about what the consequences of Chris Stone's departure from Novell would mean (the answer in retrospect: not much) and the topic of the moment was a NetWare client for Linux. That is, client software that would allow a Linux desktop to access a NetWare server on an even footing with a Windows desktop.

Novell's recent quarterly financial announcements brought a good news-bad news mix for NetWare that's almost becoming the permanent snapshot for the company. Once again, for what seems like the 100th quarter in a row, NetWare was Novell's top-selling product. And once again, for what seems like at least the 20th quarter in a row, NetWare sales were down year over year.

I read a fascinating article in The Inquirer last week. In it, IT gadfly Nick Farrell documents his attempts to install SuSE Linux 9.3 on his home computer.

It's the holiday season, a time of good cheer and gift giving. I wish I could give each and every one of you a gift, but that's well beyond the means of this newsletter. Still, I can tell you about the Christmas present Novell is planning for you. In fact, it might already be unwrapped (as we went to press, the release date still wasn't set).

In the previous column, I mentioned the new Novell Linux Desktop, which began shipping recently, so maybe we should take a closer look at it.

ncpfs is an open source utility ncpfs which ships with many distributions of Linux. This is a command line file system access tool for Novell Core Protocol (NCP) based file systems (i.e., NetWare).

Hard on the heels of Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone's resignation came word that Microsoft was paying Novell US$536 million to settle an anti-trust action related to Novell's former NDS for Windows NT products. Some observers think there might be a connection.

There was another Novell press release last week, besides the one about Open Enterprise Server, and - to me - it was even stranger. It was headlined "Novell Supports Innovation, Competition in Open Source with Patent Policy."