Allow me to introduce you to what the welcome package of the DeveloperNet professional looks like:



I knew it! It is a cool collection of CDs and DVDs that include every Novell product they have. And like the MSDN, it too has a Web site that can give you access to early releases and any other piece of software that is important to Novell that may have not been included in the media that is shipped to you.

For instance, I got the preview DVDs for both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop over at BrainShare. These were both Beta 8. I am now downloading SLED 10 Beta 9 and was surprised to see that DeveloperNet gives you access to SUSE 10.1 betas as well. Don't confuse SUSE 10.1 with openSUSE.

I like openSUSE and the VMware mono:: appliance that I am building will be based on openSUSE. However if you are not a developer and rather want a distribution with good "out of the box" integration that you can give your family and friends,
consider SUSE. That is the version that comes with things like Macromedia's Flash player, RealPlayer's Helix, Sun's Java JRE and SDK, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and many other non open source packages.

I have a suggestion for the folks responsible for the content in the DevelolperNet media set.

Include mono!

The Novell Developer Kit DVD has only one directory called mono in it. When you open it, it has a couple of links to the mono-project website. This is insufficient. If I lived in a location without decent Internet access, I would have paid three hundred bucks just to realize I did not get the award winning software development framework project that Novell employees lead. I was told by some folks at Novell that they can't favor anyone development technology over another. Yet, omitting mono, one of Novell's best and brightest stars, is unacceptable. There should be a disk that has all of the things that mono has to offer in mono-project.com/downloads (including those that are links to Novell Forge projects) as well as important documentation sources like monkey guide.

If you are a corporate developer or IT staff member I would recommend that you talk your boss into buying you a subscription. At $299, you get a great bargain.