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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.
"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...
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
Probably not, but you can always do a free FTP install.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I'm so glad Linux has gotten to the point where we can say "Do we really need another office suite?" :-)
Dude, the personal version is going to be priced at $29.95 (at least according to an earlier post). That's a more than reasonable price for a fully featured OS suite. Just buy it from CompUSA or order it online.
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.
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
Maybe you posted the wrong link?
'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux'."
What you have to remember is that Novell has traditionally been a server-oriented business. Novell is interested in Mono primarily as a server offering -- the Ximian desktop connection is purely incidental. It would make perfect sense for them to bundle Mono to provide ASP.NET support in Apache 2, even if they've decided not ship a single Ximian Gnome library.
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.
I don't remember where I found this script, I think it posted on the SuSE mailing list a few years ago. Anyway, it's a bash program that allows you to create your own SuSE DVD iso from an FTP.
I could never get it to work properly, and I'm not the original author, but I'll post it here anyway.
SuSE deserves our money for the work they do, so please only use this for testing purposes, and plan on paying for the box set, as I did.
(I had to encode it base64 to get past the lameness filter. Released under GPL, YMMV, don't yell at me if it breaks your box, etc.)
begin-base64 644 mksuse.sh
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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
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.
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.
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.