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Snagging the Gnome Live CD here: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/iso/torrent/openSUSE-11.0-GNOME-LiveCD-i386.torrent and my upload is going twice as fast as my download. Rather slowly at that. Mediocre DSL but never been this bad on torrent before. Seeds please.

Folks, please download it via BitTorrent:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/iso/torrent/openSUSE-11.0-DVD-i386.torrent

I think most of the downloads are being done selfishly via HTTP or FTP, as I've been in the swarm for almost 1h and the speeds are quite low, there are only 60 peers.

(1) is not as difficult as you might think - consider using the OpenSUSE Build Service, which can also build packages for bunch of other distributions for you (even .debs!) - http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/cross_distribution_package_how_to Granted, it does require some extra setup at your side to adjust the specfiles etc., but that shouldn't be too much work, and you don't need personal access to all the distributions. Just submit a new version and watch built packages fall out of the machinery.

Novells SLES and SLED are released every 18 months. openSUSE is released every 8 months.
Also SLES and SLED are maintained 7 years.

Does this mean manpower? Yes, especialy for the parts of the distribution where no updates are provided anymore. e.g. where the production has completely halted. This has to be maintained by Novell themselves. Just download the source if you so desire and you can copy and paste it into your own code.

How do they do it, except for editing the code? https://build.opensuse.org/. Hey Mark, if you like, you can download it and put your distributions on it, letting the community handle the security updates. It is able to build complete distributions, so you can then build them as often as you desire. Yes, it handles Ubuntu as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/ http://www.opensuse.org/

Is there something I'm missing completely here, or are the comments above complete non-sequiturs?

If a piece of software is overlooked by a distribution and the author wants to package it themselves, they can. They can provide a package and it will be just as easy to install as any other package on the targeted distribution. If they provide a repository, then it will be automatically kept up to date along with the rest of the system.

Yeah and we need some thing like "template sandboxes" on top of something like AppArmor.

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2007-09/msg02994.html

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

There already exist Windows software to maintain Linux systems from Windows:
putty.

Also there are several solutions to maintaing things remotely like openSUSE's solution.

If you download the KDE4 LiveCD and want to install it on any system or VM, don't bother! The LiveCD installer is broken. To install the test system, you have to download the DVD.

Somewhere down this page it lists it as a "most annoying bug."

Damn right... :-\

This one:

"To make a long story short: KDE 4.0 is not and never was meant to replace 3.5.x for regular users. The main goals were porting to Qt4 and creating the frameworks to create all the things announced for KDE 4. Frameworks are unfortunately hardly visible to the user, so most things that use them, like plasmoids, panel-functionality etc., will only appear after the frameworks are in place, i.e. starting with 4.1." (see http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/announcing-opensuse-110-beta-1/)

Now that's a useful comment for an end-user like me. It honestly tells me what's not in the package and what not to expect, and it does so in an up-front manner in three short sentences. As such it's a relief from the way you have to dig for this sort of information on the KDE webpage (see http://www.kde.org/).

Don't get me wrong, I like the KDE desktop ... but I just don't want to know about (or have to dig through) the details of how the desktop is evolving. Let alone the vagaries of all those applets starting with a K. This announcement is end-user friendly in that it gets to the heart of the matter (i.e. I can try KDE 4 in SuSE 11.0 if I want to beta-test it, but it won't give me anything new) without me having to wade through pages of details ... or worse an install. My compliments.

>> whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.

... but this has the inherent assumption that torrent files for Linux would be hosted on TPB - which isn't necessarily the case.

Certainly if I wanted a linux distribution I'd be more inclined to visit the site of the distributor (e.g. the OpenSuse site) rather than trust to the beneficience of TPB...

"Linux and Unix had a great approach from their beginnings"

Great? What's so great about their approach in their beginnings? Sorry, I expect far better than the early crappy Linux/Unix approach. How many decades have passed already?

When Joe Average runs a downloaded app why should it have full access to Joe's documents and email?

Why should Joe Average have to solve a version of the halting problem without being able to read the program's source code? "Is this program going to halt when I run it" is similar to "Is this program going to hurt me badly when I run it". The last I checked, the halting problem is still unsolvable.

I hope the future Linux/Unix approach would involve better sandboxing, in a way most users can manage, understand and most importantly, be happy with.

My proposal is:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2007-09/msg02994.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

Ubuntu is mainly a packaging and marketing distribution (packaging Debian's package snapshots), and not really a big contributor to new technologies or upstream free software so much like Red Hat or SUSE. So I don't think they employ any kernel developers at all. And no, it's not like Ubuntu has many desktop developers rather than low-level developers (as the comments below suggest) -- I think they only employ three desktop developers (who mainly work on packaging anyway as I recall), in contrast to SUSE's very many desktop developers in OO.o (something like 15 there alone), KDE, GNOME, etc.

In fact, the reality is also that Canonical's only other big flagship product, Launchpad, is completely proprietary.

Forget about the CD. Boot from USB and use something like this or any other distribution. And for USB sticks, there are so many types available, including ones that look like Lego, Micro-SD cards or Other things so that unless they storm your house when the device is plugged in, they realy would have no idea what to look for.

openSUSE is 73MB for network installation.

The fact that after it is done, it coult be several tens of GB large means nothing, I asume.

Very similar to Open suse's webpage called Idea Pool: http://idea.opensuse.org/. Last June opensuse and Novell stopped their normal work for a week to work on their favorite ideas from the idea pool. I hope they do it again as My idea was not selected :(.

Very similar to Open suse's webpage called Idea Pool: http://idea.opensuse.org/. Last June opensuse and Novell stopped their normal work for a week to work on their favorite ideas from the idea pool. I hope they do it again as My idea was not selected :(.

If you arer talking about Belgium, you can even read what is stored on the card. Software : http://www.belgium.be/zip/eid_datacapture_nl.html

On person who read her own card saw that she was born in 1682. You can buy a reader and write your own application, if you so desire.
The source is available, so go ahead and play with it. :-D

You can also download it from Here: http://software.opensuse.org/search?baseproject=ALL&p=1&q=eid if you run openSUSE

Useful new features

Have you seen gOS?
It has the option to install just about anything you want with one command, yet as an OS it has a market because most people just use it to play with the internet and the apps available on websites. Mail, Calendar, Documents, Picasa all provided by Google. Facebook Myspace and iTunes are all right there on the desktop with Blogging sites too.
I'm not saying everyone should use these, I certainly don't, but this is what a lot of people think computers are these days.
WinXP came with a whole heap of sub-par applications (CD burning, IE, Wordpad, Defrag, Paint, Sound Recorder, WMP, Compressed Folders, (list goes on)) that people replaced with ful-featured packages if they wanted to use the functionality of the program.

Compatibility

I posted here on that one and got some comments, but I also posted here on Linux making life hard too.
When you bear in mind that WinModems and GFX cards were specifically designed to run fast under Windows it is a wonder that the OSS world can use them at all, and to be fair, I still can't run Compiz (or KDE4's compositing features) on my 9600XT 256MB. But I can sit here and type this message, I can run a VM for Photoshop, and I can browse my photo collection at the maximum resolution my monitor supports. I think that qualifies as usage requirements. I do keep Vista and XP partitions. Vista is pretty but I can't access my games, XP is insecure so I can't use the web, Linux won't play games and I haven't yet missed the prettiness because of Domino (which openSUSE is including in the distro now).
Upshot is, I haven't yet found anything I can't make work with openSUSE, my distro of choice, that upsets me.

Third option

Sheesh, I couldn't even go there without a link to Sinulate,which I found for a post I just made =)

Unless you have a decent distro what a big software repository, it is hard to install/uninstall software that integrates nicely into your OS (and in this case I count the windowmaganager/desktop to the OS

KDE partially addresses the issue you complain about. See this screenshot of Kickoff, for instance. The apps all have generic names, and the actual application name is displayed in a paler font.

Looks like Kubuntu already released a CD to install KDE 4.0 alongside your KDE 3.0. There are releases for openSUSE and Debian also, but it looks like other distributions are still working on it (including Fedora/Red Hat and Madriva).

Becuase I have bittorrent installed to download Mandrake, I *MUST* have illegal things on my machine?

• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.iso [1180675963]
• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-2.iso [402297137]
• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-3.iso [24379392]
• debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso [0]
• debian-update-4.0r1-i386-DVD-1.iso [3342336]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-Addon-Lang-i386-iso [917504]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-Addon-Lang-x86_64-iso [1261568]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386-iso [180797440]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-x86_64-iso [819200]
• StealThisFilm.Part1.mov [428353952]
• strip_souffle_high.wmv [0]

of course, most people using OpenSUSE actually use KDE as has been shown by surveys of their own user base. you can see the results for yourself right here.

i'd also not turn my nose up at successes like the EEE PC which ships with KDE software by default and is well on its way to making the sales targets of 3-5 million units in its first year.

it's also great to see gnome centric companies, such as Canonical, Red Hat, or even smaller ones like Userful, have so much commercial success with KDE. Userful is interesting: they had their booth with GNOME desktops, but the big vertical banner showing their highlight installation was KDE (on SUSE =). it's also substantial new installations, such as the French parliament or the school districts in the country of Georgia or....

trying to measure market viability and realities via distrowatch is a lot like trying to predict the weather by consulting the water in your bathtub.

*shrug*

I think many, if not most, openSuSE users use KDE. SuSE was a KDE distribution for a long time, and most of the SuSE GUI tools are still KDE-centric.

Also, the official position of the openSuSE Community is that there is no "default" desktop environment:

What is the default desktop of openSUSE - GNOME or KDE?
openSUSE supports a number of popular desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. During installation, the user is asked to choose between GNOME and KDE but no default is given. Both desktop environments are mature and feature-rich, which one a user chooses is a question of personal taste.

AFAIK, Novell/Commercial SuSE (influence of Ximian) trends towards GNOME, but openSuSE trends towards KDE. Both are pretty definitely "dual-desktop"

openSUSE still uses it in their meetings

It is a pretty effective way to have meetings between several people.

Also a lot of support is done there, as well as a lot of other things

openSUSE still uses it in their meetings

It is a pretty effective way to have meetings between several people.

Also a lot of support is done there, as well as a lot of other things

And, no "upgrade" is really necessary, Vista comes preinstalled on all new PC's!
At the cost of "upgrading" your old PC, you can get a new box with much more power than you need!
(now, where is that Open SuSE installation CD...)
Got to hand it to those Novell people, that's a nice OS!
Anyone here manage to get Vista and Open SuSE to "dual boot", and if so, any issues?

By the by - RedHat has had the same stance: you trademark the name and logos, no problem. That protects your name.

By the by - RedHat has had the same stance: you trademark the name and logos, no problem. That protects your name.

Is there some inherent limitation in UNIX's runlevel system that makes booting markedly slower than other systems?

No. The latest openSuSE's have gotten much, much faster (comparable to OS X or Windows).

The real issue, however, is not having to boot at all. Linux is getting there, but OS X has it spot-on. The new Intel mac's simultaneously suspend to ram and disk, so even if your battery dies, the resume only takes 10 or so seconds, at most (compared to 1-2 seconds for a ram resume).

10 seconds is not bad to wait for your system; particularly if you very rarely have to reboot.

Take a look at http://news.opensuse.org/?p=104 . SuSE is really working on this, and has seen great improvement, and will see greater improvements in the near future.

hmm. what exactly are you missing ?
have you seen this page ? http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Repositories

you should have added packman and guru (though only packman will be needed soon).

also, if you want newer version of some package, chances are, buildservice will have one for your version at http://software.opensuse.org/search.

i hardly ever encounter something that is missing from suse packages - as opposed to slackware where installing some things can be highly intimidating because they pull another 10 packages in that all have to be compiled from source :)

hmm. what exactly are you missing ?
have you seen this page ? http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Repositories

you should have added packman and guru (though only packman will be needed soon).

also, if you want newer version of some package, chances are, buildservice will have one for your version at http://software.opensuse.org/search.

i hardly ever encounter something that is missing from suse packages - as opposed to slackware where installing some things can be highly intimidating because they pull another 10 packages in that all have to be compiled from source :)

Actually the MS-Novell deal does not prevent microsoft from suing novell, nor vice versa. This is a common misconception. Please see http://en.opensuse.org/FAQ:Novell-MS#But_this_agreement_means_that_Microsoft_won.27t_sue_Novell.2C_but_it_can_sue_others

I consider not running things as root a more significant risk then the possibility of "users" breaking a nologin user account. On any "important" system, the only users would be administrators anyway, wouldn't it?

I don't think so, said machine would be utterly useless.... If there is a lesson of the last 30 years, it's that if you are supplying any sort of input data, you are a 'user' of the application. If you send an email to a host, you are using that host's MTA, if you are visiting a website, you are a user of apache. It needn't matter that you aren't a user with your own account on the system. Vulnerabilities are real - format string, buffer overflow, lack of validation, injection...

Really, it's security in layers. I think AppArmor is the type of solution that lets you do what you really want --- limit the syscalls that the application can execute with root privilege -- and then there's yet another layer of security.

Since then, the iFolder project has struggled, with people leaving, some wanting to rewrite the whole thing in C again (mono had some scalability issues), etc. Finally when they've managed to put in some of the features people have been wanting (multiple ifolder-servers, encryption etc), Novell in all its wisdom has decided again to make iFolder exclusive to OES2.

That's right: if you want to setup an iFolder server with the new 3.6 features, you need to buy OES2 at the premium price Novell is asking (and besides OES2 is full of other stuff many people don't want). So for Red Hat and any other distro, 3.4 is the latest version..

That's not entirely correct. You can download the iFolder 3.6 server from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dl9pf/. That is linked to from the iFolder site (www.ifolder.com). Now admittedly, I don't think there has been a whole lot of community involvement with iFolder 3, Novell has mostly been doing their own thing with it. But you can get source RPM's for iFolder 3.6 from the link above, along with RPM's for Fedora and OpenSuSE/SLES. They do need to do a better job of giving information to the community about what's going on with iFolder though. The website doesn't really have much on the new version - it seems like there are just occasional announcements out of the blue. There are also several different versions of iFolder mentioned on the site (3.2 - which came with OES 1, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). Hopefully Novell will do a little bit better job managing iFolder now that OES 2 was released. I love iFolder and use it a lot. It's great for people with laptops that need to have access to their files while off the network, but still want to have all of their files stored on a server to share with other people or run centralized backups, etc.

I briefly played around with OES 2 in VMware last night, and it doesn't seem too bad. I haven't been able to try out too many of the new features, but the installation was pretty smooth (especially in comparison to OES v1).

The good thing about what Novell is doing is that they are making Linux a viable option for a lot of midsized companies. RH or other distros work fine for small companies or large companies that have the technical people to make the glue to put everything together. But midsized companies need something more than RHEL/Fedora would provide out of the box, and may not have the expertise to put together a home built/3rd party solutions for directory services/groupware/web based file access/etc. You can certainly do those things with RHEL/Fedora, but not out of the box. With Novell (and MS, and maybe IBM & Sun too) you can get software to do all of that that works together without having to spend a lot of time putting together bits and pieces of software from different places.

They keep throwing Novell's name around. Novell has publicly denounced MS' claims about this. http://en.opensuse.org/FAQ:Novell-MS

I know, don't feed the trolls, I'm sorry but someone might actually believe this idiot and it's not going to take much effort to prove them wrong.

Look at this image: http://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/yast-list_thumb.png that is YaST giving the user the option to install whatever desktop environment they like, under the cursor is XFCE whos tagline is '...and everything goes faster'. It's very lightweight, ideal for older computers and does not include any of the things you're complaining about.

Welcome to the GNU/Linux world, where you get the choice of what software to run. That's rather the point with Vista, Microsoft will force people to upgrade to it even if they have to buy a new computer to do so. My apologies if that offends your sensibilities as an MS fanboy, but I'm afraid we don't support bullying in the form of forced upgrades 'round these parts.

One of the things I really like the look of is: Giver. It automatically sees other Giver users on the local network and allows sending and recieving files to and from them. It also integrates with many desktop apps, so you can drag and drop from F-Spot, Tomboy etc.

This really is a blessing for those of us who use GNU/Linux at home (or home office) but don't have the time/inclination to setup a proper network with LDAP/Kerberos.

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger