marten wrote:And the icons are really nice to look at
They should look much better under Linux that what we had before.
How about the our new VAST web site?
marten wrote:I get errors, that the license file could not be found (when trying to download) - but that will be solved
That should be solved now.
marten wrote:Ok, then we have now better Linux support. For SuSE Enterprise Linux ? Nice - but the situation has not changed very much. No free Linux distribution is supported and this is really bad ! No support for OpenSuse, no support for Fedora and no support for Ubuntu or Debian.
Don't confuse "no official support" for "won't run". Officially supported means that we have fully tested the product (and ENVY) on that platform and are willing to make reasonable gauarantees that the product will run there. As we have shown with Fedora (and you have demonstarted with Ubuntu), the product can be made to run on just about any Linux distrubution with very little effort.
The disjoint, fractured nature of the Linux world itself makes it impossible to officially support every possible Linux distribution. There are, in fact, dozens of different Linux distributions that are subtly and/or significantly incompatible with one another. This is even true within versions of the same Linux distribution. You simply can't write a program that targets Linux and expect it to work on the next release of that same distribution or any other distribution. As a result, you are forced to pick and choose a couple of distributions that you will officially support and pray that you get lucky elsewhere. IBM chose the versions of Linux that it would support based on what their large customers requested. We inherited those supported platforms and have been moving to increase the number of supported Linux platforms since (SuSE now being a supported platforms with 7.5, for example). Each new Linux platforms that we add requires a week or more of engineering time to run all of the various tests that we have (for both the base image and for ENVY). For each major or minor VAST release that we do, each additional Linux platform adds several days to our release testing.
BTW, the Eclipse platform and SWT engineering teams have the same problem with Linux that we and everyone else does. If you look at the list of Linux platforms officially supported by Eclipse, you will see that it is pretty short (Red Hat and SUSE). Eclipse does in fact run on other Linux distributions (just as VAST does), but no one has the time to test it on every possible combination and track down every minor incompatibility.
