Anyone Know Novell's History Before Buying Suse?

[cousinlucky]

I am old, cynical and a computer illiterate. That being stated,up front, I seek the opinions of the young, open minds of the LinuxForums community for their heartfelt input about the company history of Novell before they bought Suse.

Because Novell had their Suse 10.0 OS for sale at my nearby Best Buy store I have the good fortune to now be a very limited Linux user. I was not happy with Novell's customer support after my purchase; but that is to be completely expected in today's unfriendly customer/corporate climate.

What I am interested in learning is from where did Novell come from to purchase Suse Linux?

[techieMoe]

My first encounter with Novell was their NetWare product. Here's a Wikipedia article on the company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell

And NetWare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netware

[jpenney]

i've been in the computer industry for about 20 years, since around 1990, not long after the introduction of desktop PC's into U.S. corporations. Novell was around back then and was one of the big "Network Operating Systems" companies. Windows did not seriously network at that time, NT was just becoming robust enough for our company, and most networking was done as an add-on to mainframes and Unix boxes.

NetWare was what ran your file servers and print servers, and it was how you "logged in" to your company's network. Windows or DOS was what was on the desktop PC's. NetWare was for a while a big recipient of Military Welfare as well, so they had a lot of our cash to burn, and they built a pretty sophisticated set of systems.

They were never (AFAIK) a consumer-level vendor for any reason, so it's not surprising their customer service is spotty.

That's all the history I know of. Good luck.

[cousinlucky]

My heartfelt thanks for both of your input. An Internet friend has described Novell as a dysfunctional company; involved in an internal conflict between its money managers and software developers as well as many personality problems. Is that an accurate description?

[deanlinkous]

I am not sure anymore but YES novell went thru growing pains years ago and probably still do to some degree since it is a public company. Great technical minds, poor money management, then it swings back the other way with management killing innovation and so forth... IIRC they had to sell the office furniture at one time just to have some funds to pay everyone. They sold the furniture out front of the office building.

Redhat had sort of the same problem for a while - great technical minds, horrible service and no management to speak of but now they seem to have a fairly good focus.

Heck, look at mandrake...

So the same thing could probably be said for any company.

[xxqq]

Several years ago, Novell bought digital research with its famous DR-DOS. They released it free of charge as OpenDOS.

On Dr-DOS 5.X there is a problem in running Windows 3.1.
Novell sue Microsoft because of the problems.

They also buy Unix license from AT&T and created Unixware. At one time they have Netware, Dr-DOS and Unixware and the only company who can challenge MS domination. Unfortunately according to an expert, Mr Ray Noorda (CEO) did not have any gut to compete with MS.

Later they sold Unixware to SCO.

[fingal]

Several years ago, Novell bought digital research with its famous DR-DOS. They released it free of charge as OpenDOS.

I didn't know that! I was once an enthusiastic DR-DOS user, until one sad day I accidentally deleted it. I never did manage to get hold of a new copy, but what stood out for me was the undelete function, predating a similar feature in MS DOS version 6.

Happy days, when a computer was something which now seems more like a toy. Actually mine looked like this. It was a 386 with a whacking 16MB of memory and a CPU with a huge 25MHz clock speed ... and believe it or not we all thought that was really cool.

I also found this, suggesting that DR-DOS is still available that that it supports an app. allowing us run Linux on top of it? So apparently I could get a low spec. machine, run a cheap DR-DOS on it and a distro like DSL ... Hmmmm .... Thanks for the idea.

[bigtomrodney]

That's a crazy amount of RAM for a 386. My first x86 PC was an Acer, it was a 20MNz Pentium MMX. And that only had 16MB RAM! All of my buddies were jealous, so I can only imagine that your 386 was like having an Alienware with 4GB RAM nowadays

[fingal]

That's a crazy amount of RAM for a 386. My first x86 PC was an Acer, it was a 20MNz Pentium MMX. And that only had 16MB RAM! All of my buddies were jealous, so I can only imagine that your 386 was like having an Alienware with 4GB RAM nowadays

It's possible that I haven't remembered the specs correctly ... My memory tends to exaggerate things. Strange but true. I seem to remember though, that it was capable of supporting that much RAM with a few upgrades!

[bigtomrodney]

Ah no don't get me wrong, I wasn't doubting you, I was impressed!