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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."
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.
"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
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?" :-)
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.
You can get the SUSE Upgrade version for $59.95 It only comes with the Admin Book, but it's a full blown release without the extra books. I've been using it for years.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
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.
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
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.
No. Legally they only have to distribute the source code to the applications covered under the GPL.
It does not have to be available via download, they could make it available via CD and snail mail, when you ask for it. And they can charge you for the cost of the CD and the cost of shipping.
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.)
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
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
Your paying for the manuals, media and support (for installation for the first 30 days with SuSE IIRC) but not for the GPL'ed software. Also you don't have to buy, you can do a network based install if you have the bandwidth!
SuSE is what RedHat could have been and what Mandrake should aspire to be.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
It's properly pronounced Zoo-zuh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
While it's true that the software is written already, no one collects it and puts it together for you. And even once you collect it, it needs to integrate into the system - this is what a distro does. I used RedHat for years and was too often fustrated it. Once I got bitten by 7.3 support death, hated 8, and wasn't impressed by 9, so I was looking for a new distro. After a few tries with other distros, I gave SuSE a shot on a test machine at work. I liked it so much, that I dumped Win2k on my home machine and now use Linux full time there as well =)
Now how is it that one distributor can make a distro that can have such a difference in experience? Someone packaged it right. SuSE is very easy to use, and most of it works perfectly out of the box. My only problems being with them Crippling DVD support, and issues with playing movies. Where it really shines is Yast. Finally everything comes together in a control panel that makes sense, works, and is integrated with the KDE control panel (maybe Gnome too?). Yast isn't proprietary btw, you can get the source; it's just that only SuSE can charge money for it (if I remember correctly).
The GPL says nothing about cost. I can charge you $800 for Samba and that's fine under the GPL, BUT I am required to make the source code available to you. You can download SuSE via FTP for free, but they don't give out ISO's, yet STILL everyone complains.
SuSE professional is a bit pricey (although still worth it IMHO), but putting all that together for the home edition at $30 is certainly worth it.
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
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.