After many months (in some ways, well over a year) of work, I’m happy to announce to my readers (aka, planet.gnome, since no one else reads this ;) that the Novell Linux Desktop is released. I wanted to write a classic release announcement, but hell, I’m tired :)
NLD is based on SUSE 9.1, with the addition of GNOME 2.6 (plus 9.1’s KDE 3.1), red carpet, and some Novell bits like iFolder and the Groupwise Instant Messenger code that is now in GAIM and Kopete. It also has what feels like a zillion bug fixes and some features that my team put together. SUSE also did a ton of work for us, losing even more sleep (thanks to the time difference), working with us on some KDE changes, and all kinds of other bits about teaching us the ins and outs of how a distro works :)
If you’d like to play with our toy, you can- preview downloads are available through this page. You have to do some registration, and then download three isos. It says ‘eval’ all over, but it’s the complete product. Go grab it, show Novell what a real successful launch is ;)
We also have source available. You’re welcome to poke through it; some of the changes have already gone upstream and more will get into 2.9, we hope.
There is a lot of other stuff around novell.com– novell’s ‘cool solutions’ folks, for example, have a page of stuff up. I’m totally psyched about this, but it’s a little weird- when we were Ximian, I knew everything that was going on; now half the links on this entry I’ve actually found out about in the past 45 minutes :)
Some thanks: I’d like to thank my team for putting up with me as long as they did, and losing some nights, and some weekends, and lots of hair. For tons of people from all over Novell (including the nuremberg office) who pulled together to get this thing shipped- I talk about it as if it is a monkey product, but it really has involved a huge number of people from all over the company and could not have happened with just us.
And of course big thanks to everyone in all the free software communities that we take code from, particularly (for me) from GNOME- we couldn’t do this without you, and we can only hope we give back as much as we take. Thanks to all of you.