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KDE GUI Businesses SuSE

Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE 146

Posted by michael from the gearhead dept.
Fabrice Mous writes "At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE and their relationship with the KDE community, his view of a Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE. Read the interview at the KDE news website."
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Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE More

Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE

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  • What's the big green thing in the photo?
    • The KDE Dragon mascot :)

    • Re:Big Green Thing? (Score:2, Informative)

      by cmbofh ( 538916 )
      It's Konqi Konqueror [kde.org]

      • Re:Big Green Thing? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by GR1NCH ( 671035 )
        Ahh! I see... Sadly I find the Konqi interview more interesting than the one posted above. For a while I liked KDE a lot but its getting too big, and they are only talking about making it bigger. What linux needs is a window manager thats more scalable. So that 1 guy could have his desktop set up in a *box config and another guy could have his set up in a fully loaded KDE type config, and yet they both use the same toolkits and stuff. Standardization wont happen if all they do is keep bloating KDE, there ar

        • Re:Big Green Thing? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @01:36PM (#10461444) Homepage Journal
          What linux needs is a window manager thats more scalable. So that 1 guy could have his desktop set up in a *box config and another guy could have his set up in a fully loaded KDE type config, and yet they both use the same toolkits and stuff.

          The closest thing to that right now is GNOME and XFCE. GNOME provides your big heavy "provide all the libraries you could need" approach (which is very useful for most people), while XFCE provides a fairly light fast Desktop environment. Both use GTK2, and share a certain amount of configuration.

          Yes, XFCE is not as light as a pure *box WM, but then it is actually providing a reasonably rich desktop environment rather than just window management. It is a remarkably fast and light DE all things considered.

          Jedidiah.
    • I think Konqi looks much better in that photo than in SUSE's log-off screen.

  • Novell/SuSE? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gatesh8r ( 182908 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:12PM (#10460471)
    No no no no! You got it all wrong! It's GNU/Novell/GNU/SUSE. Sheesh. RMS will be here shortly...

    • Re:Novell/SuSE? (Score:3, Funny)

      by xlyz ( 695304 )
      No no no no! You got it all wrong! It's GNU/Novell/GNU/SUSE

      ehi! shouldn't we mention linux as well?

    • change it to GNooSE. Then change the logo from a lizard to a hangman's ....you get the idea...

    • Re:Novell/SuSE? (Score:2, Funny)

      by aurb ( 674003 )
      Well, actually, it should be GNovell (GNovell is Not Novell) and GNUSE (GNUSE is No USE).

    • Re:Novell/SuSE? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Thursday October 07, 2004 @02:21PM (#10462024) Homepage Journal
      This joke is getting awfully tired.

      RMS only wants "Linux" systems that use the GNU tools to be called GNU/Linux. He doesn't want, for example, embedded systems that don't use GNU to be called GNU/Linux. He doesn't want the Linux kernel to be called GNU/Linux. He just wants systems that are constructed predominantly from GNU code to be called GNU/Linux.

      Linux is great, but we wouldn't get very far without GCC, the binutils, bash, the coreutils (which include chmod, cat, su, ls, tail, and on and on), etc.

      Just a little credit where credit is due. This seems reasonable to me.

      -Peter
      • Linux is great, but we wouldn't get very far without GCC, the binutils, bash, the coreutils (which include chmod, cat, su, ls, tail, and on and on), etc.

        Unless you are working in text mode always, you also would not get very far without X and without a window manager / desktop.

        This is why I like the abbreviation KGX (Kde/Gnu/linuX/X). Credit where credit is due.

        • Re:Novell/SuSE? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by pete-classic ( 75983 )
          Well, GNU covers Gnome. To my chagrin it seems to be the most popular desktop. Getting X in there would be good, but you can operate without that stuff.

          IMO the "OS" is kernel plus the basic tools I mentioned above. So I would want to call the OS GNU/Linux.

          -Peter

          • it seems to be the most popular desktop.

            My impression is different, but it is impossible to get reliable statistics.

            IMO the "OS" is kernel plus the basic tools I mentioned above.

            I think it depends on how you are using your computer. For me the most important thing is the desktop I use, because this is what I really work with. To the normal user, a computer running KDE on top of Linux, GNU and X looks and behaves in exactly the same way as one running KDE on top of BSD and X.

            The perspective is very d

      • BSD runs fine with just the posix utilities and libraries. Only gcc is used so this makes the emphasis on gnu kind of unimportant. There were many free c and c++ compilers back in the 90's and if gnu c was not around, we would use one of them and they would probably still be updated.

        Besides for something to be gnu all of it needs to be gnu. Go read the license?

        Only debian with pure non free software even meets this requirement.

  • Groupwise Integration (Score:5, Informative)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:18PM (#10460532)
    One of the nicest features in Groupwise was the message tracking. Without setting up back notifications, I could see if the message was received, opened, and/or removed. Then, when someone told their superiors they did not receive a message, I could grab the history and show if it was received and just ingored or removed.

    Adding this to Linux is a good improvement.

    • Hehe, but some groupwise servers have pop3 enabled so before I just pulled my mail through it and they never got those messages (as they were left unopened). Then one day I went through and deleted them all in the actual application. A whole year worth of notifications went out to people. :)
    • I like the "yes, you did receive it" part, but it's also nice to have your privacy. I turn off email notifications for just that reason. I've had clients call and ask me why their request wasn't done because they saw that I opened the email yesterday and it should only take a few minutes to do.

      People don't always respect your time.
      • These weren't email notifications. (This was awhile ago so maybe it changed): Groupwise had a status panel that had the dates displayed. No return emails were needed to track when something was received, opened, or deleted. It was just in the metadata attached to your original message.
        • This would presumably only work locally though, right? I mean, if you send an email to me across the Internet (and I use a different email client), your status won't be updated. You have no way of knowing whether or not I opened the email because I am not sending anything back to you.

  • Too Many Toolkits (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dante Shamest ( 813622 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:19PM (#10460543)
    Linux is plagued by too many toolkits. We've got Tcl/TK, Java, Motif, Athena Widgets or the old X toolkit, GTK, and Qt, and all of them look and feel totally different. Applications written in those toolkits do not follow the same standards and guidelines and are a mess to use. Especially if you have them side by side or you need to use them frequently. - Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE

    This has been said many times before, but I have to agree because there hasn't been much improvement in this area.

    To an experienced Linux user, multiple applications using different toolkits doesn't pose much of a problem. But for Average-Joe, who is used to most applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows, this is a BIG deal.

    We really need some simple standards, e.g. standard shortcuts. But alot of people think this would kill the flexibility of Linux.

    • Re:Too Many Toolkits (Score:2, Insightful)

      by chez69 ( 135760 )
      so why don't all the versions of ms office that look different confuse windows users?

      • so why don't all the versions of ms office that look different confuse windows users? Really, only the colours have changed. The shortcuts/etc remain the same. =) And the changes aren't as drastic as Motif to KDE.
        • There aren't many Motif apps left today. The only Motif apps that I know are Netscape 4 and RealPlayer. Netscape 4 is dead; nobody uses it anymore. The latest version of RealPlayer uses GTK 2. 99% of all GTK and QT apps use the same or similar keyboard bindings. Also, inexperienced users are likely to use RedHat/Fedora/Mandrake, which have unified themes, thus making both toolkits look the same.
          • Well, it's science oriented, but the Grace plotting program uses motif and I find it extremely useful.

            Geomview, iirc, is also motif based.

            Then there is Nedit, which is still my favorite casual text editor. (Sorry emacs/vi crowds ;-) I do use emacs, but only when something heavy duty is required.)

            For mainstream desktop programs, you may be right. But believe me there is a LOT more out there than that, and a lot of the more specialty programs would be a LOT of work to convert to another toolkit. More t
            • But then, when people talk about 'too many toolkits' aren't they talking about mainstream users, who would only use mainstream applications?

              There are a couple more 'mainstream' apps that use motif. Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 uses motif, as does xpdf. But even those are unlikely to be used by the casual user who people always seem to be worried about.

              I don't disagree with you, but Motif apps are largely invisible to the people that these types of chicken little arguments are talking about.

        • I have to disagree vehemently on this one. Open two word documents (in Office 2002), then two excel documents in Office 2002. Close Word (by clicking the close application button in the top right), then close excel the same way. The behaviour for the two applications is different. One will close the whole application (both documents), the other will close only the active document (can't remember which way around, too lazy to check)! If they can't even manage to get Excel 2002 and Word 2002 to behave the sam

      • so why don't all the versions of ms office that look different confuse windows users?

        They do. But it's not the difference between versions that confuse them, it's that all of them do confusing things. *$$#*&$% Stupid Figure TOC won't recognize figure captions &%$(*$ !!!!.

      • It does look a bit weird when you upgrade office, you get the feeling that you are actually installing a part of the next version of windows.

        But then it's better than IE, where you ARE installing part of the next version of windows!

      • Fortunately, most people do not have multiple versions of Microsoft Office installed side-by-side.

    • Re:Too Many Toolkits -- only two that matter (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:33PM (#10460698)
      This statement is silly, the problem does not really exist any more.

      Tcl/TK, Motif, Athena Widgets and plain-X-toolkit are not really in common use anymore, atleast not for recent apps. They're out there, it is not like the can be recalled, but who cares?

      Java is not a GUI toolkit, he probably means Swing, but there are not alot of Swing apps. Anyways, QT and GTK+ can both have Java interfaces, so unless Sun opens Java, Swing will die too.

      So really there are two GUI toolkits, GTK and QT, and that choice is A GOOD THING.
    • I suspect that over time those firms that do migrate to linux will be going with a product that works correctly with minimal administration and narrowed options. I don't see the market rewarding a kitchen sink distro...RedHat likely is further ahead in grokking this vs. Novell.

    • Re:Too Many Toolkits (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @01:28PM (#10461344)
      applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows,
      In what alternate reality? Windows, in particular, is completely schizo. You've got so many toolkits:

      Office XP toolkit. Note the lack of Luna-style buttons. [softpedia.com]
      The Visio toolkit. Note the freaky blue gradient toolbars. [cyber-aspect.com]
      The .NET toolkit. Note the flat buttons and .NET combobox. [miik.com.ua]
      Windows Media Player 10 theme. [microsoft.com]
      And here's Luna. Note the distinctive Luna-style buttons and tabbar. [winsupersite.com]

      Now, this doesn't count any non-Microsoft apps! Yes, all this schizo-osity is from a single company! Throw iTunes in there, or ephpod, or musicmatch, or AOL (all common apps), and you get even more schizo-osity. Just having GTK+ and Qt is looking pretty good right now, isn't it?
    • Just like how IE uses its own toolkit, separate from other Windows apps? Just like how Office uses its own toolkit, separate from not only other Windows apps but from other versions of Office, as well?

      Windows UI consistency is a myth.

      Mac OS X is a little more consistent, but there are separate Aqua and Brushed Metal styles, with some apps using one style and other apps using the other style. Plus, there are X11 apps that use neither.

      • Re:Too Many Toolkits (Score:5, Insightful)

        by M. Baranczak ( 726671 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @02:34PM (#10462208)
        Mac OS X is a little more consistent, but there are separate Aqua and Brushed Metal styles, with some apps using one style and other apps using the other style.

        The differences between Aqua and Brushed Metal are purely cosmetic. The behavior of widgets is the same in both. And the placement of common items is consistent: undo, cut, and paste will always be under the Edit menu, cmd-Q will always quit the application, etc. Which brings me to my next point:

        The biggest issue here is not GUI libraries, but application design. For Mac OS, there are well-established standards for interface design, and most developers actually stick to those standards. This is not the case with Linux (Linux is catching up, but it's not quite there.)
        • Apple broke its own guidelines with the QuickTime player a few years back and hasn't gotten much better. I love it how the slightest variation on linux desktops gets berated but the fact that OSX will soon sport THREE skins at the same tie (pinstripe, metal, platinum), is just shrugged off.

          Just admit it! Apple is no more consistent than anyone else.

          • Apple is more consistent than anyone else. They're just not perfectly consistent. And as I said before, changing the appearance of the GUI doesn't matter too much if the behavior remains predictable.

    • Re:Too Many Toolkits (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @02:12PM (#10461905) Homepage Journal
      One of the more insistant and vocal themes heard in the desktop debate
      is that that Unix desktop needs to be like Windows. It is said that
      multiple widget toolkits, inconsistant dialogs, and other evidences of
      a decentralized development model must be removed before the masses
      will accept a Unix destkop. This cry for uniformity can be especially
      shrill, almost as if the very survival of a certain free operating
      system depended upon it. But is the underlying premise true? Is
      Windows really a consistant and uniform desktop?

      The answer is resoundingly negative.

      While conducting a quick survey of configuration dialogs under
      Windows, in an attempt to understand what a newbie user of my software
      would be familiar with, I discovered that there was no standard
      procedure for these dialogs. Even configuration dialogs from the same
      manufacturer varied wildly. By all Slashdot accounts, Windows users
      must certainly be mentally damaged from their constant exposure to
      such inconsistant interfaces.

      Where is the configuration dialog located for a Windows application?
      Using the Windows system I use every day at work, I discovered that
      even this simple item was highly variable. Microsoft Word had two
      configuration dialogs, "Tools->Customize" and "Tools->Options",
      while Microsoft Outlook added an additional
      "Tools->Services". Microsoft WordPad had only one under a completely
      different menu "View->Options". Moving on to non-Microsoft products, I
      see that Adobe Reader and Quicktime Player have
      "Edit->Preferences". But lest you think those are consistant, Adobe Reader
      has a single dialog, while Quicktime Player has a submenu of three
      dialogs. Firefox and Roxio Creator Classic follow the WordPad model of
      placement.

      What about the dialog contents themselves? Microsoft Word has modal
      tabbed dialogs, while Microsoft Outlook has a modeless tabbed dialog without
      a help button. Adobe Reader and Firefox have modal dialogs using a listbox
      instead of tabs to separate the pages. Quicktime Player is similar,
      but uses a combobox instead of a listbox. Some of these dialogs had
      help buttons while the rest lacked them.

      Okay, what about the look and feel? Certainly the Windows platform has
      a consistant widget set? Sadly, no. Adobe Reader has an
      almost-but-not-quite Win2K look, that matches neither the Windows
      Classic nor Luna themes that comes with Windows XP. Roxio Creator
      Classic has a "brushed plastic" look with odd splitter
      controls. Quicktime player has, of course, a look and feel straight
      out of another operating system! Comparing native Microsoft
      applications only improves matters slightly. Microsoft Word has a
      completely different toolbar style than Microsoft WordPad! I could
      continue on to some truly egregious examples of inconsistancy, but
      I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

      I think by now that I have thoroughly debunked the notion that the
      Windows desktop is uniform and consistant. The question remains
      though, is the Unix desktop better? The answer is similarly, "no". But
      since Windows isn't consistant, the urgency of the question is clearly
      lessoned. Newbies aren't going to be rendered insane by seeing
      Evolution running alongside Konqueror. They aren't going to go running
      back to Windows when their distro forgot to include Plastik icons with
      Mozilla.
      • Outlook is the single worst UI in all of the world.

        Not only do you have tools.services, tools.options and tools.customize but you can also make changes from the control panel!

        Virtually every tab in the options dialog has buttons on it that open up other dialogs and even some of those have "advanced" options which open up yet another dialog.

  • Interview's not coming up when I open in a new tab in Safari.

  • Summary of next 100 posts (Score:4, Funny)

    by Swamii ( 594522 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:20PM (#10460549) Homepage
    1. Kewl I Kan't Wait!
    2. Kough Kough Ahem this kough is killing me
    3. Stop spelling everying with K's you douche bags
    4. What's that green thing in the background?
    5. Imagine a beowulf cluster of Chris Schlaegers.
    6. Does it run on Linux?
    7. Does SUSE run on Linux?
    8. Does Chris Schlaeger run on Linux?
    9. Is Chris Schlaeger running a beowulf cluster of GNU/Linux boxes in Soviet Russia?

    which eventually leads to...

    10. Profit!

  • Site's slow (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE

    Interviews Posted by Fabrice Mous on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @23:05
    from the where-less-toolkits-are-needed dept.

    At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE (a Dutch translation can be found at Bart&David).

    Kolab logo
    Chris and Fabrice

    Please introduce yourself and explain your role within the KD

  • Dual desktop approach for Novell is silly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:38PM (#10460757)
    New adopters of linux in the business world have likely never heard of KDE and GNOME and certainly are not privy to the endless flame wars on tech gab sites...they just want something that works. For a community distro like Fedora or Debian, choice is key as these distros tend to attract developers as a group...but for a product you are pushing at business, it has to "just work". No, the receptionist at FooBar corp does not have a strong opinion on Gecko v KHTML.

    I continue to be confused as to where Novell is going here, and I suspect they are confused too. To simplify, if businesses wanted a vendor-supported "kitchen sink", they would already be using ClubMandrake.

    Novell needs to make a choice and go forward with one desktop. Some people will express disappointment in the short term but they are likely already Debian or Fedora users anyway who are not actually in the Novell target market.

    • Re:Dual desktop approach for Novell is silly (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:45PM (#10460838)
      Reading the interview I got the impression they simply want to have all the options available until the Linux desktop market consolidates. Keep in mind that we are only beginning to see corporate adoption of Linux on the desktop and it is far from clear what changes that will bring and which desktop will come out on top, or even if one desktop will come out on top eventually.

      In this situation keeping your options open does seem like a reasonable idea to me.
    • I disagree. Some customers will pick GNOME, others will pick KDE, and others (like us) will let the users decide. We're a technical company with a base of strong Linux users who have a strong preference for their desktop; we believe the users are more productive with what they know.

      Certainly there should be a default, but at this point I have to agree with the interviewee that having both is a good idea.

      Having just recently installed SuSe 9.1 Pro for evaluation (we've been a RedHat shop for several year
      • I disagree. Some customers will pick GNOME, others will pick KDE

        No, they will use what comes up after a boot. They have not heard of GNOME and KDE and probably don't even care. These people are not enthusiasts, they are just trying to save money. If they want unlimited choice, they are already using one of the dozen or so stable distros that focus on that.

        We're a technical company with a base of strong Linux users who have a strong preference for their desktop; we believe the users are more productive wit

    • Re:Dual desktop approach for Novell is silly (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @02:07PM (#10461849) Homepage Journal
      What's the big deal? The receptionist as FooBar Corp isn't going to deciding this stuff, the trained sysadmins at FooBar Corp will. And if your sysadmins are too dumb to make a decision like this, you have bigger problems facing you to worry about this.

      What's next? Do we remove the choice between vi and emacs because some sysadmin panicked during the install?
      • What's the big deal? The receptionist as FooBar Corp isn't going to deciding this stuff, the trained sysadmins at FooBar Corp will. And if your sysadmins are too dumb to make a decision like this, you have bigger problems facing you to worry about this.

        You are assuming the admins or their employers want to do this or can do this.

        What's next? Do we remove the choice between vi and emacs because some sysadmin panicked during the install?

        This comment shows how in tune with the target market you are. If you

        • You are going to ask a sysadmin that does not know the difference between emacs and vi to install and maintain linux?

          Wow talk about a recipe for disaster. If your sysadmin can not fire up vi or emacs don't install linux. Just don't do it.
        • Remember, these people run Windows.

          If that's all they can handle, then don't bother with anything else. Just give them Windows and forget about them. Sheesh.
        • This comment shows how in tune with the target market you are. If you say "vi" or "emacs" to these people you are going to get a "huh???". Remember, these people run Windows.

          That would make sense, except he's posting a comment on Slashdot, where people know what vi and emacs are, and that part of his comment was an attempt at humor, not a serious business proposal to the 'target market.'
    • Novell needs to make a choice and go forward with one desktop.

      Nah, any single choice is demonstrably wrong.
      Between Gnome and KDE, some will prefer one. Some will prefer the other. Some will keep changing their minds. Some people even like to wear more than one color of shirt.

      To simplify, if businesses wanted a vendor-supported "kitchen sink", they would already be using ClubMandrake.
      Some yes, Others will somehow or another have a different set of priorities as to being attracted to the cutting edge whi
  • What have you done with the real Kris Schlaeger ??

  • No more Suse? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john@lamar.gmail@com> on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:42PM (#10460794) Homepage Journal
    We are working on our next generation Enterprise Desktop currently called Novell Linux Desktop which will feature a KDE desktop as well as a GNOME desktop.

    Novell Linux Desktop heh? Good, I'm all for more distributions which I know how to pronounce. Being that I only see these names on the Internet and no one around to talk about Linux I'm often at a loss when trying to come up with fancy ways to say the names when I do encounter a user.

    At school we did have one "Linux" class, although it should have been called "The VI Editor", where the teacher refered to Red Hat and Linux as one in the same. His pronunciation of Suse bothered me as he said it like 'Sue-say', where I prefered 'Suzy'.

    You don't even want to know about the d-bee-ann vs deb-e-an fights we got into.
    • This begs the question, will we end up with N prefixes.. Doesn't work as well as the KMail.

      Maybe they'll just drop Konqueror for Nautalis, and drop the 'g' off of gnome.

      By the way, I pronounce it Soos, mainly to piss off everyone.
    • I always pronounced it "Soose". But then again, I don't talk to any of my linux friends IRL either.

      On a related note, since I had only seen it in print, I used to pronounce "melee" as ME-LEE instead of using the more common/correct may-lay.
    • Have you been to www.ximian.com lately? Not even a decent announcement of Evolution anywhere. Even on GnomeDesktop.org the cold reception and reaction to the new Evolution was puzzling.
    • If you seriously got into arguments over pronuciation, I have to ask why you were in school, and why the professor or teacher didn't have control of the classroom. That's just a really stupid thing to waste time on. Either whoever's in charge mandats a pronunciation (hopefully after finding out the correct one 8^), or you agree to let people pronounce it however they like, so long as everyone knows what they mean, and move on.

      If nothing else, you'll understand vi much better. 8^/
    • I pronounce it "Zoo-Zuh" I think it would be a very wise idea for Novell to either create their own standard theme that makes GTK and Qt look the same by default, or standardize on theme that already has GTK and Qt versions, such as Keramik/Geramik, Thin-Keramik/Thin-Geramik, or Qinx/QNX. But Novell, I'm begging you, don't create Bluecurve ][. Making them look the same is fine, but making them feel and work the same totally defeats the purpose of supporting two environments. Rather, what I would fully s
    • sue-ess-ee, or sue second edition :)

    • Re:No more Suse? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Proteus ( 1926 )

      the teacher refered to Red Hat and Linux as one in the same.

      And *that* is part of the reason Linux isn't more popular. Teachers and PHBs who find that RedHat doesn't fit with their business model suddenly discount all distributions. We need to educate these people that part of the benefit of Linux is choice between niche distributions.

      His pronunciation of Suse bothered me as he said it like 'Sue-say', where I prefered 'Suzy'.

      'SOO-zuh'. If you're following the pronunciation rules of German, that's mos

      • Actually, there is a right way for that. IIRC, the people who first created the distribution named it after Deborah and Ian -- thus Deb-Ian or Debian. Ian is pronounced "ee-an", so it's "deb-ee-an". This is (was?) buried on the Debian website.

        http://www.debian.org/intro/about#history [debian.org]

        Ian Murdock created Debian, and named it after himself and his wife, Debra. Thus, Debian.

    • Pronunciation of SuSe

      Zoo-sa.

      IPA (International Spelling Alphabet): zu:z[e rotated mathematically positively by 180 deg.]

      Me is a native German speaker.

      No need to remember this anyway, the distro will disappear.

      CC.
  • Is SuSE really going to be waiting for KDE4, which is still a long way off, before starting to move to DBUS & HAL? It seem a bit strange, considering that we're starting to see this tech being included in most distros right now. It's a major feature of Fedora Core 3 which is about a month away, Mandrake 10.1's got it, Gentoo's had it for a long time in testing, Debian spinoff Ubuntu should have it etc.

    I think they should coordinate timetables more with other projects, like Red Hat does, in this case wi
  • Anyone noticed the ad for Primerventures.com? It seems to be a PR stunt for ThinkFilm. =)

  • KHTML will be obsolete (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dulimano ( 686806 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @01:10PM (#10461131)
    Important quote:

    "Customers that do web application development heavily use DHTML and other special features that Konqueror doesn't handle very well and it is a lot of work to implement this. Although I like KHTML and the architecture quite a bit I am sad to say that probably the Gecko rendering engine will be the dominant one used in the enterprise arena, and as KDE developers we've got to make sure that we can integrate Gecko fairly well into KDE.

    So Lars Knoll and Zack Rusin started working on this at aKademy and I was delighted when they put me aside and showed me what they have done in just three days. It is amazing! I think it is the right way to go! It is a bit sad for KHTML and I hope that despite this people will still maintain it as it is a nice lightweight browser. If it would be a purely technical decision, KHTML has the better architecture, but sometimes you need to go the shortest way to get to your target."
    • KHTML will be obsolete

      Bullshit! Every professional web developer I hang out with uses Safari, a KHTML based browser.
    • No, KHTML will be used in Safari and it'll mature through Safari. All Safari development will roll back into khtml, so the engine will (at a certain point in time) be on par with gecko.

      Thus, Khtml won't be obsolete. In fact, if a windows part could be made, it'd be quite beneficial to web development.

      • Re:KHTML will be obsolete (Score:5, Informative)

        by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) * on Thursday October 07, 2004 @03:07PM (#10462595) Homepage Journal
        No, KHTML will be used in Safari and it'll mature through Safari.

        I wouldn't be too sure about this. Think of Apple's WebCore as a fork of KHTML; they are no longer one and the same.

        Once the slashdotting subsides, go to the linked article [kde.org] and search for "So what is happening with Safari Patches?" (can't expand the discussion right now; they've gone static to face the /. horde).

        Apple has already changed WebCore enough that backporting changes to KHTML is very non-trivial. As usual, we are starved for developers, especially when the task is simply porting someone else's code, rather than solving problems for yourself. Many devs would much rather do the latter, even if "results" come more slowly.
  • Where do you plan to go with your new investment in the near short term and long term future? What improvements would you like to make to it?

    How does this affect Novell's strategy with Netware?

    What do you plan in SuSE that will be different from the other distro's?

    Last do you plan to put NDS into Linux? Samba gave Microsoft quite alot of lead away with its Active Directoy. How do you plan to counter this? What about Novell's other system administration tools and services?

  • I am not kidding. It would be great for Novell to buy out Trolltech and LGPL all versions of QT.

    Of course the other project I would like to see is a windows version of Evlolution. It would nice to have such an outlook like mail client that I could migrate some of my windows users on to.

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