All Client for OES requests are consolidated under www1.v1ideas.com/.../15373 and this being marked as completed, as the only alternative is inappropriate, which is clearly not the case.
An NCP client for Linux would allow more flexible server and desktop deployment and configuration options in corporate environments. It would be very beneficial to have the option to deploy Linux to certain user desktops while still providing the same file system services that our Windows users get.
I would prefer a more flexible development approach to be able to quickly align with ANY platform. Having a platform-independent client or having API's to help community creating such a client would help serving Linux and Mac client needs in an easier way.
I would counter that to point out that the market for the linux client is infinitesimal compared to even the OSX market which itself tiny compared to Windows.
While it would be wonderful to have both OSX and Linux clients, Novell needs to decide if it is going to support a small underserved market or better align with the large well served market.
I believe there does need to be a Linux NCP client, but I do not think it has to so slavishly imitate the Windows client as the previous iteration did (i.e. no auto-mapping to drive letters in the users home, providing a task bar icon, etc.). What it SHOULD do is provide authentication and user information integrated with the OS (i.e. like namcd but better -- not using LDAP and able to provide a richer attribute set, group info, etc.) and it should allow generalized NCP access at the CLI level as well as the ability to see and map NCP volumes as if they were NFS or other remote parts of the Linux file system. It is very sad that SLES and SLED have much better AD/SMB integration out of the box than they have OES/NCP/eDirectory integration.