Novell is clearly excited about what it’s cooking up for desktop Linux. Next year the company will release Desktop Linux 10, a substantial upgrade to the desktop OS and application suite that will be ready to take on Microsoft Windows, Novell executives said this week.Novell has been diligently working to establish Linux in corporate data centers, workgroups, and ultimately on the desktop, said David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Linux and open source platforms for Novell. “Linux’s strength started from the server market and worked down to the desktop. Microsoft is a desktop player working up into server based workloads,” he said. Today Linux is ready for desktop usage, but it has not yet been presented as a general purpose environment. All that will change with Linux Desktop 10, Patrick said.“There will be huge strides in the next release. The platform will be much more robust, [with] more applications and more compatibility with applications,” Patrick said.Novell’s Linux Desktop offering includes a desktop operating system, Novell’s edition of OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, Mozilla Firefox, a multi-network IM client, Novell Evolution open source collaboration client, and support. The major missing ingredient for Linux to thrive on the desktop is application support, according to Patrick and other executives at Novell. “We need more applications, and we are working aggressively with the ISV community to port applications to support Linux Desktop,” he said.Now that large, well-known enterprise vendors are standing behind Linux, companies like Delta Airlines subsidiary Comair appear to be ready to embrace Linux throughout the stack. Comair is in the process of migrating about 20 servers from NetWare to Novell’s Open Enterprise Server, which combines NetWare and Linux. “For me it wasn’t even remotely risky going with Linux. I’ve been using Linux since 1998,” said Roger Fenner, infrastructure services manager at Comair.“The original concern at Comair was support for Linux. Once Novell acquired Suse Linux we knew we could count on Novell for quality support,” Fenner said. Technology Industry