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SuSE CTO & President Steps Down

Posted by Hemos on from the where-are-you-now-pussywillow? dept.

peterprior writes: "According to this press release, Dirk Hohndel, SuSE CTO and president has left SuSE. The article simply says that 'Dirk steps away from SuSE to pursue his personal and professional interests.' It goes on to say that 'His departure from SuSE comes at a time when SuSE gathers its forces and resources to strengthen SuSE as a business positioning itself to lead the world towards what is the most powerful and acknowledged alternative to the dominance of one proprietary operating system.'"

17 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by FortKnox · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...If you haven't tried 7.2 professional, I found it mindnumbingly simple to install and get everything running quite nicely. I am very impressed with its newest release. Hopefully, it can continue on with the new CTO.

    And a little </I> would be nice :-P

    --
    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
    1. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by Whyte+Wolf · · Score: 2

      I have to agree. A couple of years ago we installed SuSE (I think it was a 5.x or something) and YaST just wasn't up to my installation needs (that I be able to teach some kid network admins how to do it too). Red Hat was the way to go then, but now...

      I like the increased useability in the install on all distro's these days. makes it as simple to install Linux as to format a Windows NT 4.0 box...

      That said, i still do all my admin on the command line.

      --

      Beware the Whyte Wolf.

      With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...

    2. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by cloudmaster · · Score: 2

      Yes, you have to use Yast2 to automatically upgrade, and click a few buttons. So, you've gotta connect to the machine using "ssh -X" instead of just ssh. :) All it takes is "Yast2" as root, click "online update", select "automatic update", and cliek "next" a couple of times.


      If you're a die-hard command-line person with some bandwidth to spare, then you can do something like rpm -Fvh ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/suse/*/*. rpm. That will update only the packages that are already on your system and have updates. The downside is that it'll download all of the packages first, which kinda sucks. It might be good to wrap that in a shell script that takes the output of "rpm -a" and just downloads those files. I won't write that here, though, because then Debian people wound't have anything to rant about anymore - and I kinda like to hear Debian people always talking about apt-get. It's cute. ;)

    3. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by ReelOddeeo · · Score: 2

      Did you know that YaST2 runs in TEXT mode?

      <BR>
      Yes. I routinely ssh into a remote box, and run Yast2 and do online updates -- all in text mode.

      --

      Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
    4. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by cloudmaster · · Score: 2

      I'll be damned. I thought that original YaST was the text-mode version. Now that I've tried it, though, I guess I have seen that before (when I've forgotten to do an xhost +localhost before su'ing). Good point, even though it changes my rant a little. :)

      Just run yast2 online_update. That's almost the same thing as "apt-get update". Ignore my earlier crap about ssh -X and whatnot.

    5. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by jfunk · · Score: 2

      There's a lot more to YaST2 than the cool graphic/text UI abstraction.

      All of those YaST2 modules are scripts. Yup, you can make your own YaST2 modules. It's Perl-based, too. Check out the devel packages sometime.

      Also, for running X programs as root in SuSE, use 'sux -' instead of 'su -' so that the X stuff is handled for you. I always use sux now.

    6. Re:SuSE 7.2 kicks butt... by ReelOddeeo · · Score: 2

      Cool. Both the "sux" and the "yast2 online_upate" (from parent post). Thanks.

      Here is another cool thing I routinely do to a SuSE 7.2 box. Sometimes (at work) I need to X into it from a Win 98 or Win 2000 box. I installed Cygwin on the Windoze box, and also install XFree86 ported to cygwin. Use the latest Test44. It works fantastic! I get a KDM login. I can then remotely run KDE, Gnome, IceWM, and other WM's that SuSE installs. Performance is quite decent. So I may end up running Yast2 in graphical mode to do online updates, instead of text via. ssh.

      --

      Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
  2. I hope SuSe can make it! by cansecofan22 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am living in Germnay right now with the US Air Force and SuSE is very big here. Just about every computer store and almost all department store computer sections sell SuSE Pro. or Personal. I use suse on my desktop and the DVD install of Pro. is great. I wish other distros would do the same. SuSE has a very polished YaST online update that works excellent and the distro is very good. It would be a shame if this distro went belly up.

    --
    "If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
  3. jump/push by csbruce · · Score: 2

    Dirk steps away from SuSE to pursue his personal and professional interests.

    Reads to me more like he was pushed than he jumped.

  4. Re:Sounds like... by volsung · · Score: 2
    Or maybe he just got tired of his job. People get bored sometimes, and even CTO's are people. Not everything is an ugly conflict or a conspiracy.

    The PR garbage at the end is designed to assure investors that SuSE will not collapse with the loss of their CTO. It is empty language, and doesn't say anything meaningful about SuSE's future.

  5. This is not k5 by wiredog · · Score: 2
    Guess what, slashdot is MLP. Always has been. MLP, at k5, is the slashdot of k5.

    One other thing. K5 isn't slashdot either.

    --

    Best Slashdot Co
  6. Re:Scary by ldopa1 · · Score: 2, Funny
    Do they know something we don't?

    Yep, they sure do. They have access to information before it goes public, and while they can't talk about it, they sure can do something about it. If you're wondering what that information is, just take a look at CNNfn.com to get an idea...

    On another front though, it does sound like he was pushed. If he "stepped down", that first step is a doozy. Hope he had a golden parachute.

    On yet another front - CTO's, CFO's, CEO's, CIO's and all the rest of the acronymati leave all the time.

    • Why should we care?

    ( Acronymati - You heard it here first.. watch for it on your buzzword bingo cards soon!)

    Main Entry: acronymati
    Pronunciation: a-kr&-'ni-mä-tE
    Function: noun plural
    Etymology: First coined by ldopa1 on http://www.slashdot.org. An amalgamation of the two words "Acronym" and "Illuminati".
    Date: 2001
    1 capitalized : any of various groups claiming special professional enlightenment
    2 : persons who are or who claim to be unusually promoted
    3 : persons who are bolstered in their employment by complex employment agreements guaranteeing an obscene payscale

    --
    The Dopester
    "Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
  7. Dirk Hohndel by alistair · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dirk used to work at Deutsche Bank where he was head of Unix Strategy. You can see a short biography of him at the main SuSe site.

    He was heavily involved in the XFree86 project, which SuSE have supported for a number of years, in addition to their support for KDE, OpenLDAP etc.. There is an interview with him at Changelog.

    I think he will be missed at SuSE but they employ over 220 people worldwide and support many more development effors, while making a profit, so don't write them off on the basis of this announcement.

    I am currently running SuSE 7.2 on both my PC and Laptop. It is the best distribution I have used to date and the Support for XFree86 and KDE2.x is useful and appreciated.
    One interesting observation concerns a recent install I did on my IBM X21 Laptop, when SuSE was installed from DVD it installed completely in under an hour and correctly recognised network card and video Driver. Installing Windows 2000 on the other partition failed to recognise network or video card, it took 5 hours of downloads to fix this. Power management also works a treat on the laptop by defaut, credit and thanks to SuSE for this, and good luck for the future.

  8. Good Grief. by Kasreyn · · Score: 2

    'Dirk steps away from SuSE to pursue his personal and professional interests.' It goes on to say that 'His departure from SuSE comes at a time when SuSE gathers its forces and resources to strengthen SuSE as a business positioning itself to lead the world towards what is the most powerful and acknowledged alternative to the dominance of one proprietary operating system.'"

    (sigh) When an Open Source company starts speaking in corporatese, it's time to say goodbye. Was nice knowing ya SuSe, I guess the ride's over.

    This one reminded me of a Dilbert strip:

    "I'd like to dialogue with you about utilizing resources..."

    Disgusting.

    -Kasreyn

    --
    Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger /. flamers since 1999.
  9. Re:Scary by teg · · Score: 2

    Is Suse in financial trouble? I haven't heard news indicating that they are.



    They're not a public company, so there's no reason to tell anyone either (not that I know they are, I just know that there is a reason for shortage of public information on them)

  10. Re:SuSE is an excellent linux choice by ncc74656 · · Score: 2
    "And Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake etc. don't feature proprietary configuration tools?"
    Absolutely not - that's a big difference.
    ...and what, exactly, are RPM, apt-get, linuxconf, etc.? Those are package managers and system configurators tied to other Linux distros. YaST just rolls all of the same functionality into one program. As noted earlier, RPM is also included since SuSE packages are RPM-based. Personally, I would prefer if SuSE used tarballs as I find them easier to deal with at the command line than proprietary formats such as RPM and DEB. SuSE works well enough for other people's systems that I need to be able to keep going without too much fuss, though I prefer LFS these days for my personal systems.
    --
    20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
  11. Re:SuSE is an excellent linux choice by crucini · · Score: 2
    ...and what, exactly, are RPM, apt-get, linuxconf, etc.? Those are package managers and system configurators tied to other Linux distros.

    1. RPM is licensed under the GPL.
    2. Apt-get is part of the Debian Operating System, which is licensed under the GPL.
    3. Linuxconf is licensed under the GPL.
    4. YaST is not free software.
    Tools 1-3 are free software. They are not "tied" to any distro, contrary to your assertion.