Novell Linux Desktop 9 Operating System 

If your organization is planning to give you a taste of Linux on your desktop, then this may be a good product to

consider. Before we get into it, lets first see why this product is so easy to use. It's

actually a result of a number of interesting company acquisitions. To cut the long story short, Ximian a company that was a major contributor to the GNOME desktop, also had a mail client called Evolution, with features similar to the MS Outlook. This company was bought over by Novell and after this acquisition; Novell also acquired SUSE Linux, which has the famous YaST configuration and installer tool. After these acquisitions, Novell introduced its Linux desktop, which has the best of both SuSE and

Ximian. 

The distribution comes in a set of three CDs with both GNOME and KDE desktop environments. The installer for the OS is YaST, which is standard for all SuSE Linux distros and is one of easiest installers around. It can install the OS in just a few clicks. All you need is 2.0 or more GB of unpartitioned space on your hard drive. YaST will automatically create the partition, detect all hardware and update the boot loader. 

It is possible to configure any service or device with YaST, and it only takes one or two clicks

You will be just prompted with one selection where you have to select which desktop environment you want to install (GNOME or KDE) and that's all. Obviously you have an option for manual installation wherein you can also change the

default settings done by YaST. However, for an end user it's not needed because the automated installation process is too easy.One not so good thing we noticed in the installer is that you can't do a full install by default. This means you can not install both KDE and GNOME at the same time. Though this saves some disk space, it's not good for those who like to use some applications each from GNOME and

KDE. 

Look and feel



Usually when you install a regular Linux distro, you get a huge list of applications to choose from. These can be quite

intimidating for a newbie to see tens of mail clients, browsers and media players. All that an ordinary user needs are applications that would meet his productivity

requirements. This distribution provides a very uncluttered desktop with only the best desktop applications. Looks wise, we found the GNOME desktop more professional and uncluttered when compared to the KDE. But at the same time KDE was more application rich and stylish looking. The standard applications are same in both like in OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, FireFox-1.0 and Evolution-2.0.1.

Configuration and updating



YaST is the installer/configuration tool of SUSE/Novell Linux Desktop. Name any service or device, be it a Kerberos client, LDAP client, remote administration or Tftp server, you can configure everything within one or two clicks. Obviously since this is a desktop, don't expect to configure services such as DHCP, DNS and Web server using YaST as these applications are not present in the

distro. 

As far as updates are concerned, this is the first distro that uses Red-carpet for updating the OS and applications. Red-carpet was natively the online installer for Ximian desktop environment and it is the first time that it's been used for updating the full distro. However, even here it's quite easy to use. 

Bottom Line: Overall, it's a very easy to install and use the desktop, which could be a good desktop to start if you're

planning to give your users the taste of Linux on the desktop.

Anindya Roy