SuSE's Next Release Will Come With 2.4 Kernel - Updated

Several people wrote in to point out that SuSE appears to be the first big Linux vendor to have announced a distro to be shipped with the still-cute 2.4 Linux kernel as default. Here's their announcment in English, and in German. Since they'll also be including a 2.2 kernel "in parallel," this isn't totally earthshaking (some other distros have been shipping 2.2 stock and 2.4 optional for a little while), but it certainly is welcome news that SuSE is willing to reverse that order. Update: 01/26 05:04 PM by T : SuSE's Lenz Grimmer wrote to correct this, saying "Even though we ship with the 2.4 kernel, it is _not_ the default kernel, the user has to explicitly select the kernel during the installation." Thanks for the correction, Lenz.

Comments

Re:still-cute?

[fantom_winter]

Well, its sorta like a baby. After a while, a young kernel grows up and stops being cute. If your little 3 month old 2.4 angel dumps its core all over your kitchen floor, you probably won't be too angry, but if your teenage rebellious 2.4 does it, you're probably going to kick its ass.

Something like that.

Re:Congratulations and a question

[RPoet]

SuSE pays several of the key KDE developers to work full-time on Open Source, as well as some XFree86 developers, and possibly others too. I think that's charity enough :)

--

Debian GNU/Linux and 2.4

[Netsnipe]

For those of you wondering how Debian GNU/Linux is coping with 2.4, then rest assured that the unstable branch (so called because of unrestricted version numbering related updates, not purely in stability terms), 'Sid' has suddenly received a lot of 2.4 compatibility testing. Though I'm not speaking as an official Debian developer yet (still waiting for my application to go through!), my friend (or friendly rival = P) from Debian Weekly News and Debian developer, Joey Hess has said publicly that the main source of problem with the 2.4 kernel for unstable at the moment "is devfs, and a number of bug reports have been filed on packages that need devfs support." The testing and the stable branches, on the other hand, will consequently need to have their modutils and related tools patched for better compatibility as indicated by this bug report. Even though the unstable tree isn't an official release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, be rest assured that many people do use it on a day-to-day basis on their own personal machines to keep up with the bleeding edge of Linux.

DebianPlanet

Re:Suse Distro

[kiwaiti]

As a German who has had exposure to SuSE, I agree only in part.

Yes, it is extremely poular, to the point that if a linux distro is included with a book, mag, etc. it usually means SuSE.

Yes, there is some great effort towards localization (mostly docs, but ISDN support was a very strong point for them for some time).

But they use that ugly proprietary yast thing the impact of which is not to be underestimated - a central configuration file is just plain wrong, for example. This is a M$-like abomination. I prefer Linux over the M$-crap for its continuous/steady learning curve ("steep" leads to misunderstandings), meaning there isnt such a great gap in configuration between "clickable" and "arcane". Yast is the opposite. Either it knows about what you want to to, or it will break it, unless you disable it, leaving the SuSE-documented paths, entering normal use ("hey, is this still a SuSE? I disabled yast..."). Every time I recommend it to one of my friends (because they do not understand enough english to RTFM in it) I hate myself for it.

Kiwaiti

Wot no 2.4 distros ?

[maroberts]

I'm slightly puzzled at the conservatism in the take-up of 2.4.0 IIRC, the whole point of having even numbered versions is to indicate to the world and his wife that the 2.4 kernel is stable.

So why the slow take up ?

Obviously there may be a couple of problems with package incompatibility with the new kernel, for example with the rearrangement of /dev, but I would have expected these to shake out in the 2+ year development of the 2.3.x series of kernels. Also presumably major distros such as RedHat keep track of changes to the kernel [they do pay/support Alan Cox and others don't they?], so any problems with such distros again should IMO have been foreseen and dealt with. One of our advantages, I thought, was that because all development is visible at all times to everyone, that problems in other packages could be foreseen and dealt with in parellel with development of 2.3.x, until it became 2.4.0.

I think that in some respects developers and distributers are not really taking full advantage of the openness of kernel development.

2.4 is not the default

[LenZ]

SuSE appears to be the first big Linux vendor to have announced a distro to be shipped with the still-cute 2.4 Linux kernel as default.

This is not correct, 2.2 will still be the default. However, the user can select 2.4 during the initial installation, and can choose the kernel version on bootup.