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SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available
twener writes "The SUSE 9.1 FTP version is now available on SUSE's ftp mirrors for free installation via FTP/HTTP (installation instruction). It's almost identical to SUSE 9.1 Professional except some few packages which are missing due to licence reasons. Also don't miss "SUSE 9.1: The Complete Review" recently published by DesktopOS.com."
so is it Suse, silent 'e'? Or SusEE or SusAY? or what??
That would explain why last week i downloaded their FTP install boot disk and was unable to get it to work.
In the meantime I've installed Slackware instead...and much more atisfied with that then I was with SuSE 8.2.
My experience so far has been that RPM-based distros like SuSE and Red Hat that attempt to simplify dependency problems with propreitary upgrade tools inevitably just end up causing me much more frustration. SuSE had NO provision for getting software other than what was in the version I'd installed(8.2) and wouldn't even install apt4rpm due to dependency hell. I've found installing and upgrading new software in Slackware a 1000x simpler than any RPM.
I will attest to Yast being a nice tool, that was easy to use, and did a pretty good job of detecting my hardware. But the complications in upgrading individual packages in a registered copy of their distro proved too frustrating to justify sticking with it.
I would only reccomend SuSE to a newbie who has no desire for messing around with things once its installed, and just wants it to work reasonably well from the beginning.
once you go slack, you never go back
This raises an interesting question. Can unofficial ISOs now be distributed since YaST is no longer encumbered? I remember that vendors like Cheapbytes and other CD burning houses were not able to sell SuSE as an unoffical CD since ironically enough the license on YaST forbid anyone but SuSE for charging for the software. Now with this restriction gone couldn't vendors just master there own unoffical CD's from the FTP packages. I believe that Cheapbytes has already done this with OpenBSD since they can't use his copyrighted ISO layout.
I work for the Fulton school of engineering at Arizona State University. There are several hundred Linux systems here, and I support almost all of them in one way or another. I've had people try to tell me that we should be using Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Sometimes this advice is based upon some genuine technical reason but all too often it is based upon ideology, especially where Debian is concerned. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to use a distro just because it follows the FSF/GNU flavor of political correctness. The day the unix world chooses ideology over technology is the day we are doomed.
The distributions we encourage our customers to use are Redhat/Fedora because this distro family is easy to support. Those other distros may or may not have real (technical) advantages over Redhat, but none of them scale as well as Redhat does. SuSE may scale equally well but due to Redhat's popularity we simply haven't had much call to try and work on SuSE systems. If Fedora proves to be unstable we may switch to SuSE, especially if it becomes more popular than Fedora.
The reason why we push Redhat/Fedora and not some other distro is because we don't want to have to install packages by hand or compile stuff from source all the time. Hand installs and compiles are great when you've got one system to support, but that just doesn't work when you're trying to support several hundred systems.
We have to look at what is the best solution for ALL of the systems at the same time, not just what solution would work best for one particular system.
Lee
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