The competitor to Windows Vista now in India

Imagine a desktop operating system (OS) in Marathi, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Gujarati (among other languages) and equipped with some of the richest visual effects, transparency and animation graphics available in the market to date.

It's time to stop imagining and start downloading the all new SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 that was released by Novell during a roadshow in Mumbai on Thursday. The new features are booming with innovation and inter-operability that promises to give it an edge over others, reports Moneycontrol.com.

Whoever said that Linux is only for geeks better think again. Novell reports a download every six minutes. The brand new features on this desktop (designed collectively by development groups worldwide-including India) make it much more user and hardware friendly, as compared to any other desktop OS in the market.

What's new?

One of the most innovative changes includes the 3D desktop views, in which multiple Linux desktops are treated as a revolving cube. The taskbar at the bottom of each cube face is identical to the taskbars on all the other cubes, so no matter what cube face you view, you can tell what applications you have open.

Click on any taskbar application and the cube rotates to show the correct face-nice feature instead of having to spend time to minimse current Windows applications.

Linux Practice Head at Novell, Prakash Advani told moneycontrol, "The SUSE Linux Desktop 10 makes sure that along with being user-friendly and having better features, it provides complete  inter-operability to its users. So, never again would you face a problem when operating on 10 different applications or windows at the same time."

There is also the option of alt tabbing, which includes thumbnail views of open applications.

Crash proof

The other striking feature includes 'plug and play.' So any external device like an i-Pod, USB thumb drives or a digital camera is automatically detected without loading any additional software. The system associates the appropriate application, when you plug in the device and launches the F-Spot picture browser so you can download and organize your images or songs.

"No matter how many times you plug in or out of your system, the OS will not crash," claims Advani.

Security

Novell AppArmor technology integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, allows systems administrators to specify the files that a programme may access, and the operations that that programme may perform on the files. Any other behaviour beyond that scope is denied and logged.

As an open source offering from Novell, AppArmor Linux application security has no licensing fees. 

The technology provides enterprise-class, host-intrusion prevention and protects the operating system and applications from the harmful side effects of internal or external attacks, malicious applications and viruses.

It even supports Microsoft Outlook but without the associated virus problems.

Sakshi Sharma & Kishore Butani