Novell sold for $2.2 billion

[Christopher Chan]

On Tuesday, November 23, 2010 06:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 23 November 2010 10:04, Christopher Chan
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>  wrote:
>
>> Well, Openindiana or Nexenta. You don't get that funky no proprietary
>> driver business too. Did I mention stable API/ABIs? Even
>> FreeBSD/Dragonfly is usable as a desktop today
>
>
> The trouble with other OSes is that it's Linux's world these days and
> everyone else just lives in it.

Eh? It ain't that hard to find/get drivers for most common essentials on 
Solaris or FreeBSD I believe. Maybe Linux gets more press but I don't 
see it owning the game on this side of the divide.


>
> e.g. Ubuntu and Fedora are moving to Wayland, so all the software will
> need to follow. (And the Wayland devs are all Xorg lead devs, and Adam
> Jackson in particular has spent the last six years trying to make Xorg
> not suck and is quite terse about it and why he's pushing Wayland ...)

Right...there has been some talk on Wayland on the OI/OSOL lists or irc 
channels but I don't see that as a major problem.


>
> I've been using a Mac Mini as a server at work of late. If you ssh
> into it, it's a BSD. A slightly weird BSD, but a BSD. I just don't
> feel at all the slight friction I feel trying to get nuts'n'bolts
> sysadmin done on Linux or even Solaris. It's like the pain in my
> forehead going away when I stop banging my head against the wall.

Huh? Doing all that ldappy stuff for administration on Mac OS X had me 
banging my head against the wall. Somehow I don't see that happening on 
Linux, Solaris or FreeBSD.


>
> But my netbook runs Ubuntu, because I want things like "hardware
> support", and Linux supports *bloody everything* (approximately). It's
> protean compared to the BSDs. And the software I want to run is
> written by people who think "cross-platform" means "Ubuntu *and*
> Fedora", and is just clunky as hell on anything else. I find this
> enormously frustrating.
>
>

Ah, another person who speaks the truth and not politically correct 
garbage. Too bad that save for kernel interfaces, system calls and POSIX 
stuff, precious little is stable with respects to interfaces or 
libraries on any UNIX (excluding Mac OS X) box. I hope this buy up of 
Novell and the earlier buy out of Sun will sink that ugly ship called 
GNOME. I sure can see their new owners wanting to contribute to GNOME, NOT.