Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
"SUSE LINUX 9.1 will be available at http://store.suse.com and from bookstores and software suppliers on May 6. The recommended retail price of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal (two CDs, installation guide, 30 days of installation support) is $29.95. SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional (five CDs, two double-sided DVDs, user guide and administration guide, 90 days of installation support) is $89.95. The update edition of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional is $59.95."
libertarianswag.com
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?
You can follow news leading up to the release, as well as blogs of members of the SuSE community as 9.1 approaches at Planet SuSE
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Considering that Novell also owns Ximian, it would be interesting to find out if the SuSE Mono packages are provided/installed.
Are they allowing you to download the ISOs yet? That's what it'll take for me to use it. I've wanted to try it for a long time, but could never get it.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The other day I installed SuSE on my machine I'm building for my four year old. I bought the professional version of it for $80 at Best Buy, and was blown away. It was the easiet install of any OS period.
The two manuals are beautiful. It comes with six cd's and a DVD with everything the six dics have. Talk about going out of your way for the customer.
Josh
I'm so glad Linux has gotten to the point where we can say "Do we really need another office suite?" :-)
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?
"...providing the only significant retail Linux products on the market. " Really? I thought I saw others floating around my local CompUSA...
If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate
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.
Sure they can survive in a world without information boundaries. Where they can't survive is in a world without buzzwords and marketing bs. "world without information boundaries" my ass.
Pedro
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.
The press release says that it will be available May 6. amazon is claiming an April 15 availability date.
Of course we need another office suite - as long as it supports compatible formats, who cares how many we have? Choice is good, and, more importantly a bit of competition is good. Right now everything is largely locked into the MS Office paradigm of how to do things, but there are other ways of doing these sorts of applications. The GoBe Productive suite, for instance, while not a direct MS Office offers a different and very nice style of doing some of these things. The more innovative and new thinking we can bring to the party the better we will be.
I really do fail to believe that the basic MS Office style word processor and spreadsheet are the pinnacle of design for such applications.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Ok, folks. Now that MS is going to drop out of the 1st league in a measurable amount of time (estimate: ~2 years) I think it's time to declare SuSE enemy and honor it with the title 'prime slashdot target numero uno', moving MS to position two. /. And lengthy rant.. err... reviews of even the slightes bug in YaST that the /. editors can come up with.
I for my part want a borg cameleon and an automatic +3 insightfull for every rant about SuSE lock-in behaviour plus an extra 'SuSE sucks, Debian rulez' subject on
I'll make a start on the comenting side:
SuSE sucks because they use RPM and only look at the money that comes from sleek boxing of products. Debian apt-get is much more superior. How long will customers put up with this SuSE crap?
(The joke been made, I'd like to add that SuSE migrated me and that they're my fist recomendation for every Linux n00b)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yes, we need as many competing office suites as the market and programming talent pool will support. But in order for it to work, the file formats need to be completely open. Competition is goooooood.
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.
Jeez, Pedro. Unless you disenfranchise your information boundries, how can you ever hope to leverage your knowledge resources in a dynamic way to effect optimal... uh...
(shit. let me find my brochure. oh - here it is.)
spoken like a true AC.
many large corporations continue to use Novell. Although their market share has not grown in the last few years, their base has been stable. Products like the NDS, NDPS, and ZenWorks have made the life of a sysadmin bearable.
Their move to Linux in the corporate world, means that servers will continue to host Novell, and not be taken over by Windows Based servers.
In this light, Novell is nice to see. As for competition with other Linuces...we'll see what pans out.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
It is free. The only ISO they ever release for gtheir distros is a live CD. You can try a live CD for SuSE 9.0 right now if you'd like: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-9.0
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.
But Suse isn't Open Source. At least not in the way that matters. The very core and most important part of Suse YAST is closed source and comes with restrictions. If you "need" to push Open Source push Fedora, Mandrake, Knoppix, Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo.
If Red Hat can give away the source for its most expensive products why can't Suse Open Source Yast?
In the end Suse is free to do what they want with their code and I don't think they are "evil" but they are not an open source distro any more than somthing like Lindows. Once Novell starts integrating their proprietary technologies into Suse it will become even more closed source. And Yes that is their plan. It may end up being a really good distro but it will always be far from Open Source.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Jeez, Pedro. Unless you disenfranchise your information boundries, how can you ever hope to leverage your knowledge resources in a dynamic way to effect optimal... uh... (shit. let me find my brochure. oh - here it is.) ...to effect optimal return on your brain-market capitalization?
Whoa... that's a verbatim quote of what my boss said during my last performance appraisal... are you secretly my boss?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
SuSE is what RedHat could have been and what Mandrake should aspire to be.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
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 :-)
It's properly pronounced Zoo-zuh.
Me is German. As suggested by Bambi Dee, "ZOO-Ze. Kinda." is correct.
No creamcheese, 'Suzy' is NOT correct.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
SuSE 9.0 installed without a hiccup on my onboard Hightpoint 374 SATA RAID controller drive without a fuss. So how long is about -8 months.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Sigh. Have you EVER bothered to read the licensing for YaST? It is open, you can take it, reuse it. modify and redistribute it. You just have to credit SuSE and print "modified Version" on the menu screen and in the code. Read the YaST license for once instead of harping on Internet misconceptions. http://www.suse.com/us/private/support/licenses/ya st.html
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.
Ok, I think you're legit so ...
- Yep, you need to get your hands on DeCSS (not easy for the uninitiated) but playback shouldn't be choppy. You video output was probably set to software renderer. I use directfb or sdl (depends on the driver caps) and it works fine.
- Which scanner? There are a few cheap Lexmark ones that don't work but most high end scanners work with Sane.
- Did you check the MTU size? I'd try disabling it since I've seen that be a source of problems.
- Ok, the only explaination here is that you don't have an nVIDIA or ATI based vid card. I run UT, Quake, NWN, RTCW, ET, etc under Lin with no problems.
- Granted. There's the web based TurboTax that works but for a real native solution (at least in the US) there's nothing like this at the individual level.
Ok, all that aside, if you're a hard core gamer, don't bother trying to switch to Linux (yet at least). Yeah, there are solutions like WineX but it's far from perfect. The rest of the items on your list should all be workable. I use Win4Lin for Windows only ware that I am forced to contend with (anybody from WebEx reading this!) and I'm sure you can run window Tax software under it.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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).
True enough, but certain distributions are configured for different purposes, making them either more or less valuable to you.
I was a pretty diehard Redhat user before I switched to SUSE 9. I gotta say, on the desktop side, I'd gladly pay money to SUSE because of the care given to the desktop experience. Java's completely configured, Mpeg files play properly, just to name two big desktop features. Neither come configured (or, in the casee of Mpeg - installed) on Redhat.
Bottom line, you pay the company/organization/individual that provides what you want.
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.
Fedora and Mandrake community are not commercial.
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.
That's not entirely true. You are right about YOU, but you can add additional install sources (Change Source of Installation) which can be used by the Install and Remove Software module in YaST.
Try to add ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse /i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.0/ to the sources (replace with your closest mirror and correct distribution), and YaST will update your KDE install.
The source directory must contain extra information sources for YaST (like a yast-source directory), so it does not work for all software updates provided by SUSE. AFAIK, it works for KDE; but not for GNOME or projects like Mozilla, unfortunately. You might try to use apt4rpm instead.
The answer to the orginal question: No, if they have not changed something for the new 9.1 Live CD's, it should not be possible to do a Knoppix-like upgrade from a Live CD.
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.
Umm, how about directory services? You may have heard of NDS - y'know, the architecture MS ripped off when they came up with ADS? I'm not a novell fanboy, but this is a matter of giving credit where it's due.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Novell is doing what FOSS has wanted proprietary OS vendors to do for some time, and all you want to do is flame them for it.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Samba 3 is already available for SuSE 9. If you follow the download links from SuSE's website you are redirected a few times and wind up here. These are the RPMs specifically for SuSE 9.0.