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Friday, August 05, 2005 12:54 // Portland, Oregon, OR // href
Miguel de Icaza about Linux on the Desktop
Novel (5500 people) is moving itself away from Windows. The first stage with a move from MS Office to OpenOffice is already complete. The OS migration has progressed to 50% and should be at 80% by November. This dog food approach gives them a lot of insight into the linux on the desktop problem.
Major tasks are: Making Hardware work and implementing missing functionality in the OS.
All the new Applications Novel does for Linux are implemented in MONO this makes porting from Windows much simpler. MONO currently supports the following CPUs Itanium, Sparc, StringARM, x86-64, s390 and runs on Linux, Solaris, OS X.
Gnome is being migrated to Cairo based vector rendering and to further accelerate things, the X11 display is moved into running on top of OpenGL meaning all rendering is becoming hardware accelerated.
Miguel shows a number of neat demos of the new desktop. Like for example a mplayer windows wrapping around the edge of a 3d box shaped desktop (each side of the box is a desktop) as the mplayer window is moved from one desktop to another. The new desktop stuff will debut in SuSE 10 due in October.
Novell will start something called OpenSuSE in the next few weeks where you can download ISOs of the running system as it is being developed.
Content © by Tobias Oetiker