Slashdot Mirror

As this picture shows it would be good for Suse users

Anything that uses a pineapple as an icon for "Misc" is alright in my book.

SuSE is also the most proprietary of Linuxes, and there's not alot of support for it online ...

I agree with the first part of the sentence, but the second isn't entirely correct:

1. the SuSE support database is a really comprehensive knowledge base about all SuSE versions. In about 90 per cent of all questions I've had about configuring my system, I found the answer there.
2. rpmseek.com is your friend :)

You can take it one step further by using a control file to partition, install and configure numerous machines without user intervention.

wget --http-user= --http-passwd= wget http://linuxupdate.sco.com/scolinux/update/RPMS.up dates/kernel-source-2.4.21-138.i586.rpm

I went to the directory itself and there I found the yast2 files as well. Yast is owned by SuSE (Now Novell) and does not fall under the GPL. The licence is online. Look at Point 3.It is forbidden to reproduce or distribute data carriers which have been reproduced without authorisation for payment without the prior written consent of SUSE LINUX AG or SUSE LINUX.

So eiter have a licence wich could probably be revoced or they could be sued by Novell over copyrights of YAST.

> But how does this tie in with current European Union licitation(right english word?) rules?

The tendering procedure (word?) of a govermental project within the EU has to open to any EU company. Neglecting a better bid from another European company is as much a crime as neglecting a better bid from another German company. (And is as hard to prove)

> [...] millions of euro's to an American company when [...]

They do. SuSE has been bought by Novell.

Oh but it is on their press release regarding the latest version of SuSE.

I'm seriously surprised you got past the sysinstall phase on FreeBSD.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/howtobuy/ default.asp

Windows XP 64-bit is already made -- for the Itanium. You either get to wait for them to port it to the Athlon64, or you get to find another one.

Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?

you think thats bad?
SuSe just released a Service Pack hehe

Where do you find this clearly stated?

• Section 1 of the YaST license basically says you can use it if you follow the licesne.

• Section 2 covers modifications to YaST.

• Section 3, first paragraph says no distribution for a charge without written consent.

• Section 3, second paragraph, first part, covers licensing of modifications. Second part of that paragraph allows distribution by FTP or "mailboxes".

• Section 4 is a disclaimer of warranty.

• Section 5 says you don't have any rights other than those granted by this license.

• Section 6 deals with patents or interface copyrights.

That is a very shakey argument, and not the kind of risk I'm going to take at work. As far as I can see, I need to track SuSE licensing just as meticulously as I need to track Microsoft and Apple licensing.

No thanks. I'll use free Linux distributions, or *BSD, and avoid that hassle.

Yep, you're right, my bad. I had to re-read the license a few times to get the full gist of it here. If I'm reading this right, you can ONLY redistribute Yast free of charge, and even then, not on any kinda of physical media. This pisses me off to say the least since I really like the SuSE distro. Since Mandrake is finally offering their DVD based distro at a reasonable price, it might be time to revisit them.

Actually, as some people say, "What makes GNU so great is that there are so many distros I can choose Debian from." I think it makes sense. From every GNU distro (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera---you name it) Debian is the only one which is truely kernel-independent, the only one with social contract making it free as in freedom and the only one not Intel-centric, so in other words, if there is any single distro which is better than any one else, it can be only Debian. I'm proud to say that once again I can fully agree which Bruce Perens.

There is lots of competition on the desktop right now, with:

Mandrake
Lindows
Xandros
Lycoris
Gentoo Games
Debian

And of course Slackware and Suse

Maybe they decided the market was already full. Turning it over the the community makes pretty good sense. Enterprise has always been their primary market.

The last I heard, SuSE wasn't making YaST publically available. I suppose I should have checked their current license before opening my mouth, though - this one isn't technically open source (since it only allows you to redistribute free of charge), but it's pretty close.

It's a shame you can't moderate your own posts down. I still think the other half of my point (that it's hardly an "evil empire" activity for Red Hat to reduce the amount of free support they give to the older versions of free software) stands, at least.

Just wondering, if the suse folks do sell their company voluntarily.

They've some venture capitalists on board. From their press release (german): "Main investors of Suse are e-Millenium 1, Ad Astra Erste Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH and APAX Partners &Co."

Not that it makes any difference...

Also, $120M sounds a very cheap for a company of this size. Red Hat, not quite twice the size by employees, is valued at over 2$ billion.

Well, buying a system from the "Gesellschaft fur Software- und System-Entwicklung" is certainly better for the German economy than sending money to Redmond, thankyouverymuch.
Plus, all our CS students are trained on Linux, so there are plenty of Linux-savvy folks around here. Who will get paid for _developing_ stuff (on the Linux platform), instead of making money by holding companies hostage.

SUSE has already successfully filed a suit against SCO Germany a long time ago, with the result that SCO Germany is not allowed to say that Linux includes code that infringes on SCO's copyrights.

Here's Suse's press release (german).

People license their code under the GPL because it protects their code from being commercialized. Nobody sells GPL code,

In short, nobody can improve on your property and use those improvements to their exclusive benefit.

SuSE wrote an open letter [german] today. Translation is here.
They are of course against software patents...

"Aside from the CPU and northbridge, the chips involved are standard components, and should be familiar to anyone who knows PCs. This is an early revision, not sporting evidence of Firewire (though there are some mysterious pin-headers lurking about) or RAID, but you can see a Via 686B handling sound and legacy ports, and the usual surface-mounts backing up the Ethernet and perhaps USB 2.0. What's that big one marked 'Radeon?' :-D (Speculation says it may be a Mobility Edition, which would bode well for both power consumption and board size -- those pack their own RAM in the package.) Everything else is definitely wait-and-see; I have to wonder if they really meant 'Cardbus' instead of 'CF.'

"Obviously it's no alternative if Windows is your thing, but Linux is available -- in fact, it's the only option until AmigaOS 4 ships. Debian, SuSE, and Yellow Dog are known to run and have accepted patches for the platform (outdated product pages to the contrary; AmigaOnes have no relation to last-generation APUS hardware), and Gentoo is at least in-progress. Users who like their penguins cool *and* fast take note; benchmarks are thin on the ice right now, and RC5 numbers are by no means a good comparison, but the G3s were cranking those without an unfair boost from Altivec.

Yast is Open Source, but not GPL. You can view the licence here
You can get a full version of SuSE (equivilent of Pro edition) from the ftp site.
The only thing you don't get is commercial applications like Mainactor. Yast is a pretty good tool, allowing central administration of the system from one place. Yes it has some bugs, but current versions work very well.

A couple of years ago someone on the KDE team posted a nice analysis of the performance bottlenecks associated with dynamic linking, C++, and gcc, particularly as regards Qt use.

So I have to wonder, with Qt 4, KDE 3, gcc 3.3, how many of the performance problems remain?

But Suse's future depended entirely on a success of UnitedLinux.

Suse is in many respects like SCO: they don't really believe in open source, but only in closed source pay-ware.

Thus, the suse administration program YaST is closed source.

All programmes derived from YaST and all works derived from it in full or parts thereof are to be filled on the opening screen with the clear information "Modified Version". Moreover the operator give his name on the opening screen, stating that SuSE Linux AG is not providing any support for the "Modified Version" and is excluded from any liability whatsoever. Every amendment to the sources which are not conducted by SuSE Linux AG are deemed to be a "Modified Version". The Licensee is entitled to change his copy from the sources of YaST, whereby a work based on the YaST programme is created, provided that the following conditions are satisfied.

1. Every amendment must have a note in the source with date and operator. The amended sources must be made available for the user in accordance with section 3) together with the unamended licence.

2. The Licensee is obliged to make all work distributed by him which is derived as a whole or in part from YaST or parts of YaST to third parties as a whole under the terms of this licence without royalties.

3. The amendment of this licence by a Licensee, even in part, is forbidden.

SuSE Linux AG reserves the right to accept parts or all amendments of a modified version of YaST into the official version of YaST free of charge. The Licensee has no bearing on this.

Ok, it's not GPL, it's similar to the Sun license but it's not closed source.

In the end, they will sink with their partner SCO.

I must stop feeding the trolls, I must stop feeding the trolls, I must...

How many times does it have to be said that RPM is not comparable to apt?

RPM is the package format, like dpkg (.deb). You should compare apt on Debian to up2date, Red Carpet, YaST, URPMI or even apt for RPM.

I am tired or Debian or (help us) Gentoo users raving about "RPM hell" out of ignorance. Debian with apt has some nice things going for it, including the amount of software available in "testing" and "unstable" (as compared to what is offered by RedHat through up2date or Ximian through Red Carpet). The same is true of Gentoo and portage. But please, people, give up this tired "RPM hell" argument.

> it's hard not to see that SuSE stuff as largely influenced by nationalism.

Why should it be a nationalistic decision? Because they are from the same country? I hope, the management doesn't drive Mercedes, or BMW.

IBM works close with both RedHat and SuSE. For what reasons chose IBM both? IBM achieved with SuSE the Common Criteria.

No, I don't want to say that SuSE is superior to RedHat. The point is some people might consider it that way, on purely technical reasons. It is beyond my judgement to say, whether they are right or wrong. As for me, I prefer RedHat.

All that SuSE is that it was certified EAL2+. While this is a measure of how deeply something was tested (and EAL2 is not the best on the list), it does not define the threat. As in: "What security target was used ?". A security target will tell us (among other things) information about the skill of the attacker and the environment. "Can be hacked by the NSA in their offices in one year" as opposeded to "Can be hacked by the cleaning lady in two minutes."

One example?

What about the whole friggin' Wall Street companies?

RedHat + Oracle are running many critical parts of Merryl-Lynch, First Boston-Credit Swisse...

Also, the German Parliament runs with Linux servers.

And Banco do Brasil as well.

And many, may others, including the US Army and the Hong Kong's HSBC

What else do you need?

Peace

For starters, you could try looking for feedback forms on the distributions' web sites, such as these forms for SuSE. Forms like these are often intended to bring suggestions to the attention of the distribution developers.

According to their web site the copy of VMware included in SuSE Personal and Professional is a time limited demo and not the full version.

I like the idea of VMware but not for $300 a shot. $100 per copy is more like it.

Some time this spring there was a press release on SuSE homepage saying to the effect that they had no idea what SCO is talking about, and that they strive to honour all copyright/licencse obligations.

Since the deal was about Windows XP vs SuSE/IBM Linux. A comparison of the system requirements. Microsoft Windows XP Pro vs SuSE Linux 8.2. Let's see you run Windows XP/IE on a Pentium II 233 without it being absurdly slow. A Pentium II 233 is the absolute lowest that can be run on XP.

Anyone upgrading an existing old Windows installation to Linux is likely going to have to upgrade tons of hardware.

Not neccessarily. If you are using those computers for email and internet kiosks (like in a library) why would you need a Pentium 4 2.4GHz with a 256MB Radeon 9600 and a Sound Blater Audigy 2? With 14,000 computers, some computer might need to be replaced with newer ones as in all normal upgrade cycles, but the system requirements for Linux are tied to actual system use and can be customized to the computer. If a computer can't be used for high-end computing, it can be moved to a lower function like an information kiosk or even used in grid computing. Let's see you do that with Windows.

What you are requesting is avaible here, by the way.

What is not possible, though, is freely downloading any of the Enterprise" variants, be is SLES or SLED or any of the derived products. But then, nobody offers that. Nobody actually can offer that because that would jeopardize the entire business model of offering and supporting a stable distro over 3-5 years. TANSTAAFL, folks.

So don't spread false or misleading statements, OK?

What you are requesting is avaible here, by the way.

What is not possible, though, is freely downloading any of the Enterprise" variants, be is SLES or SLED or any of the derived products. But then, nobody offers that. Nobody actually can offer that because that would jeopardize the entire business model of offering and supporting a stable distro over 3-5 years. TANSTAAFL, folks.

So don't spread false or misleading statements, OK?

Here...

Europe would be OK if this just involve those pesky software patents, but I don't think anyone is sure just what is intailed here. Europe recognises copyrights, and I'm not sure but probably trade secrets also.

Just remember if you want to run Linux on an IBM system 390, you get it from SuSE, a German company It must have taken a lot of close cooperation between SuSE and IBM to do this and I'm sure if IBM gets burned for a billion, then SuSE would be next on the hit list.

Suse does however provide Bootable CD demo's, called liveeval, which basically gives you everything but doesnt install it, similar to the knoppix CD's but slower to boot. Get it here.

They also provide an ftp installer CD that you can use to build a complete Suse system that seems to be identical to the purchased desktop version.

To find these involved going to www.suse.com, clicking on "downloads". I'm sure the kids can handle this fine.

it's somewhat close to the redhat trick of replacing the rpm module redhat_release.
A quick googling brought me this and this.
looks like you can just change the version number in /etc/SuSE-release to "8.2"
(the better way would probably be to install a new suse-release RPM, though I can't seem to find one)

As not all of us can read German, I thought a link to the
English version of the press release on SuSE's website would not go astray.

CLI is obviously easier to scrape well.
The Blinux Project(not a distro.)
A SuSE Linux article on Blinux(Writen by a blind SuSE Developer)

The SCO® Group (SCO)(Nasdaq: SCOX), a leading provider of Linux and UNIX business software solutions, ...

SuSE does not provide iso images of their distros.

There are iso's available for their Live Eval distros though, but that's not quite the same thing, as they are run directly from the bootable CD, and not installed on the harddrive.

I personally always make an ftp installation, as that options fits me best.

You can read about the installation options here: SuSE Linux Download

You might try looking here or here or maybe even here.
On second thought, you're right. No "corporate" distributions even support any sort of scripted / unattended install.
I'm going to sleep now. Check my journal.

SuSE has had this for a while, what they call the Live CD. I believe they had them with the all the 7.x distros. And yes, it's available over at their site.

Yea, I know SuSE isnt availble free to d/l anymore, but I still like the distro quite a bit...

Can't get to the original article either, anyone have a mirror? I would like to read it ;oP

I do like the fact that Knoppix can deal with 2GB
of data due to on-the-fly-compression...and since it's running off a cd anyway, I'm sure it won't make a big performance difference...

caino

Don't touch my .sig there!

1. Free Redistribution

The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

UnitedLinux has completed beta testing of the first release of its open source Linux operating system
(emphasis mine)

Given that United Linux uses YaST as it's installer, the operating system is dependant up on that non-free (and hence non Open Source) program, which renders the whole thing non-free.

United Linux, like SuSE, is not Free Softwae, so it is not Open Source.

It's really a shame SuSE wouldn't wait for this release before shipping their product a couple weeks before.

As others have noted, there are too many major projects with unsynced release schedules that waiting to include all the great updates will imply waiting forever.

SuSE usually makes update packages available when a new version of KDE is released, check out LinuKS: SuSE Linux KDE Service (this is the german page). You should have no problems installing KDE 3.1 from there once it is released.

Alex

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

11 comments, and most of them are people grumbling about how Red Hat is squeezing choice out of the hands of the user. But really, is this true? What RH has done (from what I hear, I don't chase bleeding-edge distros, usually) is just change the way things look. They've provided a different default appearance. How is this worse from the default appearances provided by the GNOME and KDE teams? (RH's arguments for why it's better are in the article, you should read it :3 )

It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance; then, only then, would the complaints about choice be founded. The people who really care about the difference between GNOME and KDE probably do so on reasons deeper than 'the default theme looks cool'. (Personally, I don't really like either of the default appearances that much ^^; ) So, when nagora asks "If RH doesn't like this, why don't they drop the one they don't want people to use?" the answer is: they don't care what you use, but they want the defaults to look reasonably similar, because they know that people who really don't *want* their default theme either know how to change it or probably have settings that they'll import anyway.

Remember who Red Hat's intended market share is: the corporate environment. A lot of people I've talked to recently agree that RH's biggest 'ins' are (or should be) for office workstations. Lots of places implement a baseline standard that they want to look the same, but that people can customize if they want to (as long as they don't spend hours tweaking it). This is the mentality that RH seems to target. Yes, this isn't for everyone, but that's the point ... there are plenty of good distributions out there, and many more choices out there if you really really don't like it. But no-one said you have to use Red Hat. (Although I could understand concerns about RH-isms creeping into LSB, but nobody's brought that up.)

Remember, RH == vendor for corporate enviroments. Corporate environments like standard desktops, so this move makes sense in Red Hat's perspective.

The screen shots were posted by Stefan Hundhammer and aren't part of the offical SuSE web site. This was just a single developer putting up some stuff on YaST2 with screenshots from his personal working environment.