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Novell Announces SUSE Linux 9.1
ravydavygravy writes "Novell today released details of the next incarnation of its linux products, Suse 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel. It will come in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and includes a LiveCD version, to help people convince their Windows-loving friends to make the switch. It'll ship with Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1, as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?). Samba 3 will also feature in the default setup."
The hardest part is figuring out what you want.
You are given a choice of a dozen text editors, several office suites, and about 8 or so window managers. Takes a full day to figure out which of the 5000 odd software packages to install, an hour or less to actually do it.
My rights don't need management.
I just bought SuSE 9.0! Is there some way to upgrade without shelling out another eighty bucks for a box set?
I wonder whether corporations as big as Novell can survive in a "world without information boundaries". I'd expect that in such a world, networks of smaller (much more nible) companies will rule.
I'm not sure what that phrase means other than being marketing fluff. No information boundries would me no infomation security, right?
Considering that Novell also owns Ximian, it would be interesting to find out if the SuSE Mono packages are provided/installed.
most folks haven't moved over to SATA yet, and there's lots of folks who aren't using raid. that said, most distros build all drivers they can as modules. most distros will include non-vanilla drivers too. do the latest releases of SUSE/Mandrake not provide these drivers?
Nice one, also promoting other packages, like that litle office suite. I like that.
Wel i'm e EURO, what did you expect LOL
Part of the SuSE experiance that it is a "complete linux distribution in the box". Unlike just ISO distributed distros, such as Debian, it comes with so much more. The wonderful box artwork, the thick printed manuals, the fun stickers, the support, the propreitery software and drivers (full flash and java support out off the box) and more.
SuSE demands only the best, and thats why they don't offer ISOs. If you don't understand this, then you proably won't like SuSE.
I love the live CDs and I love the fact that they're starting now to have an option to automatically install on a partition for you.
However my primary day-use machine is a work provided Dell laptop. I would love to use Linux on it. I have Linux on all of my other desktop workstations. But the laptop came set up with an NTFS partition that consumes 100% of the drive. I can't just blow it away because I need the usual office apps, VS and Outlook.
Later versions (> 6 which is what I have) of Partition magic seem to be the only thing on the planet that can non-destructively resize this for me. Does anyone else know of another way?
For me the uncertainty when resizing a drive or partition is a major holdup.
I hope they'll also release a PPC Version again. I always preferred SuSE to any other Distro unter x86. PPC Distros are rather rare and not as good as PC ones. Maybe Gentoo is quite good but it takes way too long to compile on my iBook.
SCO is gonna jump on this one so fast...Trouble is, they don't know what they're talking about. Doesn't stop their FUD campaign though...
Suse is the one distribution SCO would have the hardest time tackling. It was acquired by NOVELL. SCO can always claim some bs about how RedHat stole their code. But SCO's code was NOVELL's to begin with. That hasn't all shaken out yet. But in my humble opinion, the only thing SCO can do about Suse Linux is sit on their hands and like it.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
SoftMaker's products are quite exelent and TextMaker was worth buying, for me. There are a number of times when OO just doesn't render a document right while TM does. Ideaily I like to have at least OO, TM & Abiword installed on any desktop I use. I used to include Applix (the best office suite there was) in this but since the company killed it it's not worth running anymore.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I would not put much faith in Novell leaving SuSE alone. Recently in an employee meeting attended by:
Jack Messman CEO
Chris Stone Vice Chairman Office of the CEO
Gary Schuster Senior VP Communications
Bob Couture VP Worldwide Services
Joe Forgione VP Net Solutions
Ron Hovsepian President Novell North America
Mark Hardardt VP Worldwide Sales
the following question was asked.
Linux is really just a piece that fit the kernel shaped hole in the GNU system. Most of what we think of as Linux is really GNU.
The stated goal of GNU is the elimination of proprietary software.
Will you speak to our alliance with and reliance upon a community whose stated goal is the elimination of the need for our software.
Chris Stone:Here's an interesting one.
Linux is really just a piece that fit the kernel shaped into the GNU system. Most of what we think of Linux is really GNU.
For those of you out there just, to try to translate for you I think what he's trying to say is that the original sorta open source or free software movement was called GNU invented by a guy named Richard Stallman at MIT it has grown up over the years to be much more than just GNU. One of the points he's trying to make here is that the stated goal of GNU is to eliminate proprietary software, how will that effect us.
Lets be clear here, just open source does not equal free and that the open source community has shall we say 'grown up' considerable over the past fifteen odd years and that the folks who write software in the open source community are just as interested in making money as anybody else is. The model of how open source works where the code is shared and then it must go back in the community does not prevent you from building a commercial product and that is in essence what we intend to do; provide both a commercial version of our software and in some cases open source versions of our software so I don't see GNU as the elimination of proprietary software, the world has changed considerably since that time frame and that's really not an issue.
Jack Messman: yeah, I'd say to that the ya know the code is free and we don't try to sell free code I mean that's sort of an oxymoron idnut. What we do is we sell a service that makes it easy to use free code and if you look at it that way I think you get a better feel for it then that free services are proprietary tools and services that sit on top of the operating system.
The question could have been better worded but the answer shows, IMHO severe violence to both the concepts of GNU and open source. I don't think they 'get it'. If there is a need for it, in time there will be a free or open source product. Soon people won't buy software. Those that have software for sale will be stuck with niche software or software nobody wants. Windows will be replaced, but so will Netware, eDirectory, Groupwise, ZENworks, etc. Instead of addressing this issue they answered 'can we make money in an open source world.' Perhaps next time someone should ask a more direct and dumbed down version of the question.
Hmmm... I'd define "world without information boundaries" as "a world in which no-one has an economic incentive to deny you access to any information that would be useful to you for some legitimate purpose".
This doesn't rule out securing computer systems against crackers, and it doesn't rule out using cryptography for protecting the privacy of truly personal matters.
However I'd say that business practices of selling a GNU/Linux distro which contains demo versions (and no full-featured versions) of some programs are clearly in violation of this "world without information boundaries" vision. Shipping any programs without making the source code available is even worse.
Dependency on Windows is overrated. Our office manager, a retired woman working part time, uses SuSE 9.0 as her primary desktop (OpenOffice and Kmail) on K6-3 450 MHz box. I rarely have any questions from her, and the box hasn't been rebooted for many months. She does not know how to turn it off, and never needed to ask :-)
A question for those who have used SuSE recently / are using it now:
Is it possible to boot a live CD, install it to your hard drive, and then use Yast Online Update to pull packages not provided on the CD?
The same way one could download Knoppix and use it as a Debian installer.
Would be a cool halfway solution between buying a full-set distro and having to bootstrap a netinstall from floppies.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I'm thinking of migrating my family (actually my father) to GNU/Linux, but I'd require a distribution that is at _least_ as userfriendly and GUI-oriented as Win98 - that is, he'll never need to touch the command line after initial installation. I had originally planned on trying out the new Mandrake 10 (run Gentoo myself, but I doubt he'd like having to wait hours for applications to compile :-) ), but now I'm thinking of giving SuSE a go.
He's not really that computer-savvy (he doesn't want to be, he was quite proficient back in the DOS days), so I want to secure him a distribution that's easy to use with all the odd peripherals (cameras, USB-disks, scanners, etc.). Would SuSE GNU/Linux fill this role?
Gnusay -- for all your talking gnu needs.
I bought SuSE 9.0 and tried it a few months ago, and must say I didn't particularly care for it.
While they are definately producing one of the most polished distro's available, it deviates from most linux distributions somewhat dramatically; I still don't know how exactly the init system works. (It's not exactly SysV, it's not exactly BSD).
When I used it I had a problem in which it repeatedly would launch the X configurator if I had dual-head enabled. I don't know if that was just me or not.
Everything is tightly integrated in SuSE -- the KDE desktop is pretty amazing, but GNOME support is almost non-existant. Unfortunately, I found the KDE desktop to be pretty slow on my machine (P3 800mhz machine. Slackware with KDE3.1 runs great on it).
I also found that you HAD to do things SuSE's way -- if there wasn't a button for it in YaST, the SuSE configurator (and generally, there was.. YaST is probably the most comprehensive config tool for Linux), or YaST didn't give you all the options you needed, you couldn't do it yourself because YaST would stomp all over your changes.
SuSE is also the most proprietary of Linuxes, and there's not alot of support for it online (again, you can't just update say, package X from a source tarball because SuSE will throw a fit).
It's probably not bad for novice and intermediate computer users; I'd reccomend that experienced users who want a pretty desktop with little hassle use Mandrake.
A new office suite? Cool. Will it work? Even cooler.
:P *maker.
Most importantly, however, is will it be standards-compliant? Will it have a proprietary file format, or will it be able to talk with OOo flawlessly?
From the screenshots on their site, I'm fairly impressed so far - it looks to be able to edit things somewhat more complex than OOo can, at least. Time will tell.
Anyone use this product yet? They have goofy naming conventions.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I can't be the only one who has noticed that major product version numbers are a) inflated, and b) the same (+- 1) as the competetors. For example, this is Suse 9.1, Mandrake has some 9.x stuff and even a 10.0, RedHat had a version 9. RedHat even stripped the .X like Solaris, which is at version 9 and a 10 is coming. Slackware is hovering around 9.1 as well. Of course more pure distros like Debian does not participate. Nor do the current owners of all things UNIX. Hell, even Apple's OS is in the 9/10 range.
This happened when there was competition with word processors (Word vs. WordPerfect), also this happened when there was competition with Web Browsers (Netscape vs IE). etc. Microsoft has surpassed the whole version number thing by appending 2 random letters at the end of their products, so I guess that is next for everyone else to do.
Just an observation.
One of the things that got me started on Caldera oh-so-long ago (whenever COL 1.3 was out) was their Netware integration and tools (having an NDS client when ncpfs was just bindery) and a KDE version of Netware Admin.
I'm wondering if there's anything Novell-y in this, or if it's Just Another Distro.
As for giving away stuff: reiserfs, lots of kernel modifications, lots of support for Xfree86 (Dirk Hohndel was a SuSE employee for a long time).
I don't expect SuSE will licence it under the GPL, so the best thing is for someone else to reimplement it's features and release it under the GPL. This would be preferable to taking YaST and modifying it, with the restrictions that its licence imposes on you.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
The last SuSE install I purchased (I'm on number three because they deserve the cash) automatically detected and correctly configured a three-panel display using two different types of video cards (one AGP ATi, two PCI NVidias), to say nothing of getting the network config right etc. etc.
It's funny, a couple years back I'd mention I was favoring SuSE and people would respond aghast, "but you don't use RedHat?!? BSD? Debian? What crap is this 'SuSE' you speak of?"
Pfffft.
It's funny...I remember a time (not so long ago, either) when diversity was encouraged in the Linux community. I'm assuming that the reason why unity has become the Holy Grail is because of the desire to convert Windows users to Linux.
I read a good article on madpenguin.org the other day though about how if a reasonably consistent, unified *interface* is maintained, it doesn't matter how many actual programs there are out there.
Also, methinks peeps need to keep in mind that the whole reason why Outlook Express and IE are now the target of so many viruses is precisely because nearly everyone and their dog uses just those two programs. Only having a single set of apps which everyone uses makes life a lot easier for the crackers, script kiddies, and virus writers, and a lot harder for everyone else.
If we want unity and consistency, I think we should aim for it primarily in the UI space. If we follow ESR's paradigm of creating the core program and UI as modules connected by protocols anywayz, we can have a boatload of different programs all doing different things, (diversity being a GOOD thing) but the UI can be consistent enough that Joe Sixpack will have absolutely no trouble using them. The bazaar lives on.
I just bought a copy of Xandros 2.0 the other day, and from what I've seen so far it's fantastic...I'm extremely happy with it. Installation is a breeze, and my jaw dropped when I saw how it automatically detected/configured my wretched WinModem. (which I feared would require a kernel recompile to get working, and although I'm definitely not a complete UNIX newb, I'm sufficiently non-programmatically oriented that that would have been somewhat daunting)
.debs, it's true...but I've been able to get an rpm to work with minimal tinkering, and I'm used to doing manual .configure/compiles with tarballs anywayz, to a degree.
Xandros also doesn't seem to have the problem you mentioned about SuSE not allowing other apps. It does prefer
My only real grizzle with Xandros is KDE, because last time I had Linux installed I was using Enlightenment, which is a lot prettier than KDE, if less user-friendly. Everything else though is fine...File Explorer works like a charm, and I'm currently in the process of installing the alphaware monstrosity that is WINE, in order to use a few of my beloved windows apps. Incidentally, if anyone feels like having a crack at getting RealDraw (http://www.mediachance.com/) working with WINE and posting the results, (I will be myself as well) I'd be much obliged. It's a truly fantastic little vector graphics app too, so you'd be doing yourself a favour at the same time.
Also, you are not allowed to charge someone for distributing a copy to them, not even the cost of the medium.
Incidentally, the GPL explicitly allows you to charge money for the act of distributing.