First is Beagle, the indexing daemon. It has been integrated into browser, mail everywhere so that it can keep track of all information. It has now got a good frontend, including a Google desktop search like applet in the taskbar. This is a direct competitor of searching-indexing tools in OS X and the upcoming Vista.
Second is a new system called Rug to manage system and software updates. Its a higher level service that can have different types of services like online updates below it. It also shows up in the taskbar.
Third is offcourse XGL. All you need is a driver for your graphics card(which should support 3D acceleration) up and running. After that running XGL is a matter of some configuration changes. Novell has even made a XGL control panel nicely placed inside Gnome control panel(and probably KDE too, but i haven't installed KDE). So now i have fading, wobbling, transparent windows and rotating desktops with some rain drops too ! Aero who?
All good, Suse seems to fail where it comes to snappiness of applications. Everything feels a bit sluggish. Booting time is still considerably long, and so is halt time. Yast2 continues to be THE control panel an OS can have but is still slow in doing things.
Novell is also working on some breakthrough technology that can install drivers without the user needing to compile it on his machine. This is required for kernel drivers as the module's and kernel's compiler version, kernel version and architure has to match. With this new technology all versioning information is conveyed to the remote repository which will then provide the required kernel module. This will very much ease out things for both users and hardware providers, at the cost of some irritation to purists, as this scheme allows and advocates binary only drivers.
Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]
2 comments:
Did you had chance to use latest FC? FC5 is around. I've been stuck with SuSE for my desktop for a while now. But for development staying rather simple makes sense and you don't really need fancy things, but at the same time, you'd want to have the feel of an eyecandy desktop. At work I'm using FC5 (or I have to ;)) for all my activities and its really neat, especially boot and shutdown times are noticeably less than SuSE even when active services are comparatively more.
Also FYI, other distros are also working (and at pace and in more sane way) towards the device driver isolation thingie that SuSE announced recently, and is really cool.
yes i have tried FC5 and its in pretty good shape...
why do i see a pro-RH-ness in your comments already :)
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