Novell still running Windows

Novell today admitted that despite Company's efforts to internally migrate to Suse & OpenOffice.org, more than half of its workers still have dual-boot installations with Microsoft Windows.

At a press event, Novell's president Ron Hovsepian told the project to migrate the remaining employees shall be completed over the next year or so. Hovsepian’s remarks indicate Novell will have only a few months’ experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor’s predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream.

The Novell executive said in Australia the Suse Linux implementation had been missing some of the pieces enterprises needed, but said version 10 of the software would help the market for desktop Linux pick up.

Regarding his company's own Linux migration, Hovsepian said Novell had learnt a lot from the implementation, and overcome challenges involving, for example, porting macros from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

"We've had actually very good success with it," he said. "We learned a lot about migration tools, learned a lot about what the usability pieces are."

Developers' POV : Novell developers say that they need Windows machines to develop/migrate/test their softwares to run on Windows Platform, so running a dual-boot installation with Microsoft Windows should not be taken as a surprise, but as any other business requirement.