SUSE 9.2 Released

peterprior writes "Novell have issued a press release announcing SUSE Linux 9.2. The new version comes with kernel 2.6, KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.6 and features (amongst other things) enhanced wireless support as well as Evolution 2.0 with Groupwise / Exchange connectivity. The WYSIWYG web development tool Nvu is also included. The new release is expected to hit the retail shelves in early November."

Comments

Wireless

[jeffkjo1]

But will it work natively (read: no ndiswrapper) with my Linksys WMPP54G wireless card (stinkin Broadcom chipset.)???

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Wireless

[hufnmouth]

Actually yes, But you have to recompile the kernel. Note: It doesn't install with less than 256 MB RAM and doesn't work well with less than 512 MB RAM.

Re:Wireless

[blowdart]

512Mb of RAM to make it useful? That's taking being a Windows replacement a bit too far.

Re:Wireless

[drwho]

Won't install with less than 256MB of ram? This is ridiculous! Someone needs to come out with a distribution that doesn't try to sell new hardware, but has the user in mind, who was perfectly fine with his old system but doesn't feel comfortable running an OS that isn't actively maintained. I used to feel that Debian was that, but they can't manage to get Atheros and Prism2 wireless support in their mainstream releases that will install in 32mb of ram (yea, I want to turn old machines into access points. Yeah, I know I can use pebble. But there are reasons I don't want to). Maybe slackware does this, I don't know...bute S.u.S.E. certainly is too fat for me to love. Babe, you need to go on a diet...

Re:Wireless

[epohs]

I certainly hope they have figured out some way to enhance support for wireless network cards.

I've got a WMP54GS card that i've been completely unable to get working with ndiswrapper.

I absolutely love gentoo, but if SuSE can get this working I'll move back. (haven't used SuSE since 8.2)

P.S. if anyone has info on getting a Linksys WMP54GS wireless network card working with gentoo, i'd really appreciate a nudge in the right direction.

Re:Wireless

[Homology]

I used to feel that Debian was that, but they can't manage to get Atheros and Prism2 wireless support in their mainstream releases that will install in 32mb of ram (yea, I want to turn old machines into access points. Yeah, I know I can use pebble. But there are reasons I don't want to).

Then install OpenBSD. If the card is Prism2 based, you can easily turn your shiny new OpenBSD gateway to an access point. No support for Atheros based card due to the propertiary and binary HAL component needed to make them work. OpenBSD does not accept unfree drivers.

For wireless security the authpf - authenticating gateway user shell is quite handy. Or you can just use VPN that is part of base install.

Re:Wireless

[ultrabot]

but has the user in mind, who was perfectly fine with his old system but doesn't feel comfortable running an OS that isn't actively maintained.

Well then, the optimal route might be to learn to get comfortable with a system that isn't actively maintained.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't checked yet since I'm still hard-wired. But I imagine there is at least one wireless card that Linux will support. So why don't you get a card that is on the supported list?

Re:Wireless

[spoonyfork]

I have SuSE 9.1 (2.6 kernel) running on boxes with 128 MB RAM. What do you mean won't install? The installer pukes out or coded to stop?

Re:Wireless

[DickBreath]

Won't install with less than 256MB of ram? This is ridiculous! Someone needs to come out with a distribution that doesn't try to sell new hardware,

Yeah! I agree!

In the year 2050, when computers have artificial intelligence, speech recognition, computer vision, applications that learn to adapt to the user, virtual reality user interfaces, and other advanced features that are standard fare....

....I want it all to work on my 286 with 4 MB of RAM Darnit!

Those stupid developers need to learn to make all that advanced software not try to sell new hardware.


(then Joe speaks up from the corner...)

Yeah! I want all that advanced software to run on my Commodore 64! Why should I have to buy the new hardware?

Yeah, I know that Dell sells a Quad Processor, 512 GIGabytes of RAM, with 40 Terrabyte disk system for about $399, but why should I need new hardware?

Someone needs to think of the users. Obviously the software developers aren't thinking of the users when they added all those advanced features.

One man's bloat is another man's features. You can keep your old hardware and old software. I for one welcome our new resource hungry AI software overlords.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually a lot harder than you think. I was able to get my Netgear WG311 working with ndiswrapper but from what I understand there are no guarantees with any wireless card on Linux right now.

Re:Wireless

[foobsr]

But will it work natively (read: no ndiswrapper)

Its more like "will it work at all". After having had 9.0 successfully installed via the net I bought 9.1 professional for an upgrade. It was not even able to detect my monitor which 9.0 (and also gentoo) have no problem with. GIMP and MOZILLA do not work out of the box, in short: it sucked and still does.

I said it earlier and still do: NOVELL will screw Suse.

CC.

Re:Wireless

[INT 21h]

You're saying you *don't* specifically only shop for hardware that you *know* will work in your favorite opensource OS? Can one even do that? :)

Re:Wireless

[jdray]

When I was getting ready to buy a new laptop earlier this year, I decided that it would be a Linux-only machine (a leap I hadn't made yet at the time). I didn't know what sort of laptop I wanted, and didn't even know which distribution of Linux I would use. I started some research, and in the end selected SUSE for a variety of reasons, though it was a close race for sure. Having that choice out of the way, I browsed their web site and found that IBM laptops, among others, were certified for SUSE 9.0 (9.1 wasn't out yet), and the list of supported IBM machines was long. The one non-certified part was the internal wireless card, but I found by doing some research that the Atheros chipset had drivers, and the generic ones would work (this is actually documented on the IBM site).

So I found a ThinkPad model (R40) that was within my budget, bought it, installed SUSE 9.0 Personal (which I had bought as well), and tried to upgrade to the then-new KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. The KDE part failed because of some SUSE integration dependencies. I grumbled about it a while, then just decided to wait for 9.1, due out within weeks. I bought the Pro version of that, and have been happy ever since, except that watching DVDs, which worked in 9.0, no longer seems to work. :-\

Anyhow, I happily surf the net on my wireless laptop, which has all its hardware automagically recognized by SUSE, without troubles. A little up front research made that possible, and I'm glad I did it.

Re:Wireless

[norite]

Bollocks. Read the effing article first, my friend. SuSE 9.2 requires 128Mb of main memory. 256Mb is recommended.

Here you are:
http://www.suse.com/en/private/products/suse_linux /preview/sysreqs.html

Re:Wireless

[dankney]

This is simply not true. I have it running on an older machine with 128 megs. It works fine out of the box.

It is unbearably slow in KDE with less than 256, but since I'm using Windowmaker, it's just fine.

Amazing how many knee-jerk reactions to the parent post without checking the actual requirements.

And as a side note, I've installed 9.1 on 2 different laptops and 5 different laptops. The only driver that didn't work "out of the box" was a VIA chipset's sound card (don't remember the chipset number -- I'm across town from the system right now). It was a lousy soundcard that needed upgrading anyway (working great with my Audigy II).

Re:Wireless

[beejhuff]

I'd like to echo on this point. I was literally amazed when I completed my first OpenBSD 3.5 install on an old Compaq Presario 1920 laptop. It recognized and configured my NetGear wireless pcmcia adapter and also a REALLY old linksys 10/100 ethernet card I had difficulties with even on previous Linux installations.

I was so impressed I took a plunge and attempted the 3.5 install on a new Averatec laptop with a built-in Intel wireless adapter. It properly detected and auto-configured the wireless adapter AND the crappy Realtek based 10/100 interface.

Really, I think MAJOR kudos should go out to the OpenBSD team for the 3.5 release. The latest failover utilities (carp and pfsynch) and driver support have really made it easier for me to setup and maintain WAPs on my ever-growing collection of used laptops. I've always been a bit paranoid about setting up wireless networks for friends and family but it's becoming much easier for me to do so with this latest release.

If you also consider the latest kernel support for the VPN Accelerator products from soekris (obligatory link - www.soekris.com) they've also come a LONG way to providing a platform for incredibly secure enterprise firewall and wireless access point systems. Given the cost of the soekris hardware (even their high end stuff) comes in at about HALF of what you'd pay for comparable cisco gear EVEN ON EBAY, I can't but help to throw some props their way.

Give the latest 3.5 release a shot. And order the CD if you like it. If for no other reason buy it for the HILARIOUS audio track of their Python-tribute. You'll piss yourself laughing...or at least I heard that some people did that....

Re:Wireless

[drwho]

Yes, OpenBSD does some things nice. I am very familiar with it. But I don't want it on my laptop! There are specific applications and purposes for which OpenBSD is not well suited.

I see some other comments picking on me for wanting to use old hardware. How about, you go spend $1000 upgrading your laptop every year, just so you can be current, and ship me your old one? I'll even pay shipping. The same with your car: I am sure that the one you have is probably approaching its 30,000 mile mark and is practically worn out. I'll tell you what, I'll take that year 2002 model off your hands for free. I mean, cars weren't meant to have their batteries changed or shock absorbers replaced, any look inside the hood will tell you that. And the manual for your car does say "No user servicable parts inside". And isn't the ashtray full anyhow?

Exchange ?

[mirko]

I guess this one very feature might begin to frighten Microsoft : it's remained their most private app for a long time...

Re:Exchange ?

[stratjakt]

Why? I'm sure they love OSS exchange clients. They don't have to support it, and the per-seat licensing revenue for Exchange server comes in either way. Businesses can superficially "switch" to linux on all the desktops, and they can still charge per-seat in the backend.

Why is this so? Because "IT" dopes are ass backwards. They put linux on the desktop and MS in the server room.

Re:Exchange ?

[michael path]

If I remember correctly, the Exchange compatibility is only there if Outlook Web Access is turned on.

It's still an amazing feature, and could be an Outlook replacement - but it doesn't make use of the more closely guarded RPCs/caching/etc. that an Outlook/Exchange combo uses.

Re:Exchange ?

[Timesprout]

It is indeed. I think many here overlook the influence exchange servers have had on the desktop. The Outlook - Exchange combo makes a formidable partnership. I know Outlook gets a lot of grief here but it is an excellent email client and PIM, and capable of almost infinite extension, its easy to start building workflow and management systems on top of them, a feature which proved extremely attractive to the enterprise.

Re:Exchange ?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This is an interesting point because while most people say the Office (word, excel, access, and so on) are M$'s cash cow, truth is the only real reason that Enterprise stays with M$ is Exchange.

Re:Exchange ?

[afidel]

Give me a replacement for Exchange that has group calandering, shared folders, works seemlessly with Outlook as well as an open client and doesn't have an ugly front end like Groupwise or Notes and I'll be sure to check it out. The truth is there isn't one out there that doesn't cost at least as much as Exchange does. So there is little incentive to go through the expense, pain, and risk of migrating.

Re:Exchange ?

[gilesjuk]

Try finding a free (and working) open source plugin to connect Outlook to an Open Source Exchange replacement. Give me the URL if you ever do.

Re:Exchange ?

[julesh]

I worked for a while at a bank that used HP OpenMail as their back end, and that worked well. I believe the per-seat licensing is substantially lower than Exchange.

Re:Exchange ?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Take a look at this. Wanted to replace my company's Exchange box with this but Kerio doesn't support Blackberries.

Re:Exchange ?

[MikeBabcock]

A lot of people give me a hard time because I sell people Dell servers with Red Hat Enterprise 3 on them as their back-end and Dell desktops running Windows as the clients.

My clients love it -- they get a desktop they recognize and the stability of a Linux server while not paying licensing to Microsoft for anything beyond the Dell MS tax.

For what its worth, yes, some of them even run Open Office on Windows.

Re:Exchange ?

[tokul]

Businesses can superficially "switch" to linux on all the desktops, and they can still charge per-seat in the backend.

But then Microsoft charges 200 and 400 USD less.

Re:Exchange ?

[T-Ranger]

While true, you miss the point.

Outlook runs on Microsoft Windows. You have to pay Microsoft for Windows. Outlook is sold as both a standalone product, and as a component of Office. You have to pay Microsoft for both of those.

If Linux - anything that is not Microsoft - replaces a Microsoft product, they loose twice. First, they loose money from not having the next upgrade, and far more importantly their strangle hold gaurenteeing lots of money from future upgrades is loosened. The later (long term revenue) is so important that they have often given away the former (quick money from a license today). Think IE. Think all the features of Windows, that they could have charged for, that they give away -- things that prevously could be had by 3rd party vendors.

If any non-Microsoft product replaces a Microsoft product then the whole system starts to fall apart.

Re:Exchange ?

[afidel]

Unfortunatly OpenMail went EOL at HP and the company that bought it doesn't have the resources to really support it. It's unfortunatly a legacy product at this point. You're right though if HP had held onto it I would be using it at quite a few places right now.

Re:Exchange ?

[Zemran]

I think Evolution is better than Outlook because it has all the benefits of Outlook without the drawbacks. I do not agree that it is an 'Excellent' email client although I do think that it could be. I think it is far to vulnerable to abuse to be 'excellent'. SuSE (read Novell if you want) are also dedicated to enterprise systems so I doubt that Evolution will wait in the wings.

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Could someone make a decent argument why Exchange is so damned "important" in the private sector? I'm serious here. Managerial groupthink does not count.

I was once an admin for a M$ shop, and ran the Exchange Server 5.5. The higher-ups would get so damned pissed at me 'cause I simply refused to use the entire calendar/planner/contact-list crap that was part of LookOut. I just couldn't (and still can't) stomach that stuff. Yet I somehow managed to get the important shit done.

Please, will someone tell me what's so useful about the Exchange/Outlook combo (or either half, for that matter) that a business will spend the money on the MS Server, the Exchange Server, CALs, and the Windows/Outlook licesnes?

In an age of such fierce competition and cost-cutting measurse to increase the bottom line, I fail to see how a business can justify canning decent employees and cutting benefits, yet they're still willing to pay the MS crack dealer the annual licensing fees. Providing pet features for management doesn't seem like a good reason to me.

In all honesty, I continue to be stumped by this practice. The open source solutions we have available today are light years ahead of the commercial offerings we had ten years ago. Yet, we somehow managed with the tools back then. This isn't about not enjoying progress -- I'm no software Luddite -- it's about freedom (in the RMS sense). Isn't a little growing pain and inconvenience worth not having to worry about the BSA and the annual software audit?

Re:Exchange ?

[JacquesItch]

Doesn't it work the other way as well? Get everyone on an open source client. Users are happy with it, then switch the backend later. Wouldn't it be easier to convince the boss that you should go with an open source backend when he's happily running an open source front end?

Re:Exchange ?

[SlowMovingTarget]

...and they can still charge per-seat in the backend.

back end indeed. Well said.

Re:Exchange ?

[aldoman]

Totally. So many people have built really really complex systems, integrating VB (and other languages, but it's mainly VB), Palm + PocketPC all to make a seamless system (for example, a consultancy firm I was at had a custom Palm app, which when you sync'ed updated the outlook calander with all the events and checked off all the jobs that he had done on the custom VB event management software.

I think people forget that MS products really ain't designed for what most of us see them. They are designed to have huge APIs so enterprise customers standardize so much on them they just can't go back.

Just like Web Browsers I suppose, most of the effort isn't spent on the front end and UI. It's really the rendering core that counts for so much. A lot of people couldn't see one difference between IE5 and IE5.5, apart from the fact that the CSS support was so much better.

Re:Exchange ?

[hawkbug]

Don't you have to pay yearly to use RHE3? I was under the assumption that it costs a little over an assload each year to just run that. I don't get why anybody in their right mind would switch to a linux distro that cost more than a windows box. Atleast with a windows server, you pay just once up front. With RHE3 it's a "subscription" for the updates, and without that, you can't even download the updates and install them manually. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong - I'd love to be told I'm wrong because I used to love RH.

Re:Exchange ?

[richie2000]

Unfortunatly OpenMail went EOL at HP and the company that bought it doesn't have the resources to really support it.

I actually do believe Samsung has the resources.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another "I don't have a use for it so nobody must have a use for it" post. When you work in a department with 160 people and you have schedule meetings for say 20 of those people it is extremely difficult without Outlook/Exchange. With a click of the button I can find the optimal time to have the meeting so that everybody can attend.

Assistants can also maintain their boss's calendar, managers can assign tasks for their staff, storing everything on the server makes upgrading to new machines easy, and having everything together in one app just makes sense.

Now the benefit for a 40 person small business is pretty much zero but for once you get over 100 people the per person cost really isn't that much considering the savings in time and aggravation. You can piss on a lot of things from Microsoft but Outlook/Exchange (especially Outlook 2003) and Excel are two areas I will defend to the death (ok maybe not literally).

Re:Exchange ?

[AJWM]

Could someone make a decent argument why Exchange is so damned "important" in the private sector? I'm serious here. Managerial groupthink does not count.

Unfortunately, managerial groupthink does count. It's the managers that authorize the POs and sign the checks.

And I imagine mostly it's just historical reasons -- the client software came with the desktop boxes they were buying anyway, the server software with the print and file servers they were buying, and the next thing you know, it's entrenched. The exceptions would be places that already had some sort of corporate email/conferencing/groupware thingy in place (probably mainframe based) before it came bundled with Windows.

Since then it's just been inertia and resistance to change. Heck, I know companies that deal with the virus/spam/etc problems by sandwiching Linux/Postfix based filters between their Exchange servers and the firewall. (And then defeating a lot of that to pass through ActiveSync and webclient and etc. traffic so it can all be accessed from laptops and Pocket PCs by the employees in the field.)

-- Alastair

Re:Exchange ?

[pyros]

You can download all the updates as source RPMs, build them, and install them. You can even download RHE (any version) in it's entirety as source RPMs and build it. Have a look a whitebox linux (it's RHE built from the publically available source RPMs). I don't know about the yearly subscription for updates.

Re:Exchange ?

[brainee28]

Samsung Contact is the name of the new product. They started out selling small licenses, but now their focusing on selling to larger enterprise customers. Interface is Outlook, and has the same tree that Exchange server uses. The biggest feature my users complain to me about the product is the grouping feature isn't available. Also, it doesn't run yet on Outlook 2003. But I don't use that so it's not a big deal.

Re:Exchange ?

[cwiegand]

Simple. Shared calendars.

No open-source solution has shared calendars on the desktop. Oh, sure, if you want a separate web app, you can go to lots of apps. And email? IMAP allows sharing folders, no problem. LDAP takes care of contacts (so long as you're willing to hear your users complain that they can't update the LDAP directory themselves, or don't care to use umpteen billion tools which are badly UI designed in order to do so). But iCal/vCal, for whatever reason, just hasn't (yet) taken off as the protocol to store shared calendars on a common server. That's the only argument my CEO was able to give me that actually had water when he wanted to switch from Cyrus IMAP to Exchange 2000. And so he won.

Even these days, Evolution still doesn't seem to support having a calendar folder that's also stored on the server, although it does appear to at least support reading iCals (I think). And we do still run Windows, for the most part, here. I'm seriously looking to GroupWise as we are slowly migrating to Linux, and it'd be nice to have something cross-platform.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not agree with the email client being all that excellent.

But I have to agree that the PIM components are very well done - on a network with exchange as the backend.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

open xchange (free) or suse open exchange (same tecnology diffeent prize licence ....) are very fine,it support calnendar share between clients using webdav (supported mozilla sunbird,kontact,evolution 2.X anf apple's ical),standard imap and smtp server and address book with ldap and pheraps the best webmail interface I've ever seen .

The only not so beatiful thing is speed (it's written in java) .

for suse's version there is a free (as beer,cost nothing but closed) outlook connector .

try it :-)

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Yet another "I don't have a use for it so nobody must have a use for it" post. When you work in a department with 160 people and you have schedule meetings for say 20 of those people it is extremely difficult without Outlook/Exchange.

Oh, gimme a break. It's not just me -- thousands of people plan stuff w/o Exchange just fine. I submit the many cases where hundreds of people planned on USENET, IRC, IM, or email. Look at flash mobs -- you think they have an aan Exchange server managing this stuff?

Damn, I'd love some of the cozy features of the expensive luxury cars, but I can't justify the cost to my family. So I am pretty content to "settle" on our current car (by no means a luxury car).

My point isn't that "if I don't need it, why does anyone else?". It's closer to, if we made due without all of those fancy features a few years ago, why do companies feel the need to spend so much on those features now?

This calendar stuff is much like people refusing to buy a car without cup holders. Oh, the horror! How will I even drink my latte on the way to work! People manage just fine, thanks. ;-)

I still don't get it. Why are these silly (IMO) features such deal breakers for some people when the cost and freedom benefits of the alternatives are far superior? Isn't the goal of business to be fiscally efficient? Is there really a positive ROI for you to have Exchange in your office?

Re:Exchange ?

[big_groo]

First, they loose money from not having the next upgrade, and far more importantly their strangle hold gaurenteeing lots of money from future upgrades is loosened.

Dude, that's just sloppy. At least you got one right.

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

We have a desired feature:

Simple. Shared calendars.

But is there a solution?

Oh, sure, if you want a separate web app, you can go to lots of apps.

Bingo!

If we assume that shared calendars are a necessity (which I can't see as being true), then what's wrong with another application? What's this one-integrated-application-fits-all fettish all about?

Re:Exchange ?

[alexborges]

Evolution.... And you dont need Exchange.

Great, virus free email, Group calendaring, central addressbook (ldap), shared folders (use courier, you dope).

Sadly, Outlook does not support any of the open standards that provide this functionality. But evolution does!

Ah, i see outlook runs on windows, perhaps thats why your ass is LOCKED IN to exchange.

Dump windows AND dump exchange.

Or even better, most of this functionality, compatible with the same standards as evolution, can be given in firefox+mozcal+thunderbird (actually all of it runs on windows).
So no need to dump windows, just exchange AND outlook.

Re:Exchange ?

[EastCoastSurfer]

if we made due without all of those fancy features a few years ago

Group scheduling is a key feature in todays corporate environment because it's different than it was a few years ago. Many people now work in distributed locations and are not always able to respond to a possible meeting request. Having their calendars searchable by anyone who may need to meet with them is a huge time saver.

I submit the many cases where hundreds of people planned on USENET, IRC, IM, or email.

It's possible and even easy to plan events this way, but what about a meeting where I need to see 5, 10, even 20 people at tomorrow? Joe might be travelling today, Jill is out sick, and Bob's inet is crapped out.


Isn't the goal of business to be fiscally efficient? Is there really a positive ROI for you to have Exchange in your office?

I would argue having shared calendars are fiscally efficient. Take the situation where you want to schedule 10 people to meet. It takes a lot less time to check their calandars than for you to contact each person individually or even group email and see who might or might not be busy.

Re:Exchange ?

[ckaminski]

Or worse, take a perfectly working sendmail/Netscape based email system and a 3rd party calendaring system that was distributed throughout the world on 8 boxes, and replacing each site with a clustered exchange host, burning a million+ $$$$ in the process...

Yeah, who's kid works at Microsoft and needed to make quota?

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Again. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And the more applicable comparison would be automatic vs standard transmission not cup-holders. And I am sorry but I have used the alternatives and they are NOT superior. Most of them try very hard to be exactly like Outlook and fail at that.

And to use your argument why use computers at all? Surely it is cheaper to just do everything by hand. Who cares that it isn't as efficient?

You make a very good point as to why techies don't make business decisions. You wouldn't know an ROI if it bit you in the ass.

Re:Exchange ?

[lp_bugman]

RHEL its just a collection of GNU software. (Including all redhat-config-* tools).
The only thing with copyright protected is the logos. Redhat restricts you from using they logos. That's it.
You can legaly install RHEL3 in any desktop/server. No problem as long as you don't ask for support.

Re:Exchange ?

[William Baric]

You pay an employe $50,000 a year. If you pay $100 for a license, your employee will be happy. If not, your employee will think you're cheap. Now... guess how people react when they think their boss is cheap...

You are right in saying that most features are not that important. But since the cost is so low, who cares?

Also, the alternatives are not far "superior". Take the Mozilla suite for example. I tested it with one of my clients who was using OE. I thought, "hey, OE! This guy is perfect for a switch"! It was catastrophic. Mozilla's address book regularly lose contacts. I even saw it once mixing addresses (deleted a contact, and the address of the deleted contact replaced the e-mail address of the previous one - it's a chance I caught that one, otherwise I would have been in big trouble). I mean, it's a very simple database, but it's buggy as hell. I checked Thunderbird and it does the same thing. I switched back to outlook express in no time.

I know here on slashdot everyone say OSS are great. But the fact is most OSS are extremely buggy. Some are ok (Linux, OpenOffice, Firebird...), some, like mozilla mail, are unusable in a business place.

Sure, from a philosophical point of view, freedom is kind of nice. But in practice, no one cares. And since license costs are low, using free alternatives is kind of dumb for a company.

Re:Exchange ?

[Bruj0]

Theres no need to recompile Red Hat Enterprise, all the GPL binaries can be used without paying nothing to RedHat. They dont have the copyright on it.
Only the parts the are NOT under the GPL (dont know if any) needs to be paid for.

Re:Exchange ?

[LnxAddct]

Your very wrong :) The subscription is for support for the server and clients (in certain instances), and its, as far as I know, unlimited for the entire subscription period? If something breaks or just doesn't even run how you'd like it to, you call Red Hat tell them whats up and they will take care of it. Red Hat's support is one of the best in the industry, up there with Dell and Veritas. Also, the cheapest RH server is $350 and is capable of doing everything that the cheapest Exchange server can do (typically goes for around $1200). You can run your RH server for nearly 3 and a half years before it cost as much as an Exchange Server. Keep in mind that the RH server has unlimited support for that whole time. If you call Microsoft 5 times over that 3.5 year period (assuming you go with the 5-call pack option they have to save money) because of an issue or two, it will cost you $1225, you've more then doubled the cost of your server. Keep in mind that with RH if you don't want the support after the first year, you don't have to resubscribe to keep your software or be able to install updates (although it becomes slightly more difficult). Also, exchange doesn't scale well. If you run a large shop, Red Hat will save you thousands, if not tens of thousands, a year. I could go on for much longer explaining reasons why it is cheaper, but I have to cut it short. Red Hat is cheaper comparing price to price with Microsoft, Microsoft admits this. That is why they try to claim other things like Exchange has a lower total cost of ownership, because Exchange admins typically get paid less and over time it saves you more, they use a number of other excuses also, most of which are highly arguable, oppinionated, and biased. Then again, what else is the marketing department for? Microsoft I don't believe has ever tried to argue that the cost of Red Hat vs. Exchange exlcuding other associated costs is cheaper. It just blatantly isn't. It is also very nice for sysadmins to just be able to call someone else whenever the shit hits the fan, or you just have a question or curiosity. Companies need support like that, they need to know that if something goes wrong and their own IT department can't fix it, that someone will. In this case, both MS and RH will help you, but RH in most cases is significantly cheaper.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Exchange ?

[12357bd]

Just to be realistic.

What's the confidence factor of a shared calendar between 100 or more people?

If the answer is below 90%, you better not try to relay on that information for critical work.

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Again. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I never said the value didn't exist. I asked for someone to give a decent example which would show that it did exist. That's all. All I've seen thus far is hand-waving and a varied incantation "it's quicker this way" without even some rough guesses on how that quicker way saves more money than the software and the manpower to keep the licenses paid for and avoid a BSA audit.

Scaling up goes both ways. Scheduling by hand is easier to do for 10 people than 100. But It also takes more money to enable those 100 people with the software and remain compliant. Is there, in fact, a financial arguent to be made to support the necessties of features like this? Is the salary of a good secratary, who could serve the same function, more expensive than the cost of software and a good admin's time to maintain it?

Really, I'd like to know. A case study or rough numbers based on a real office situation would suffice. Something.

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Good point.

It's like the people who go postal when some important document got lost/delayed in the email ether. I just shake my head and say, if it's that important, hand-deliver it, fax it, or mail/Fed-Ex it.

Some people just can't see the forest for the trees.

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

You pay an employe $50,000 a year. If you pay $100 for a license, your employee will be happy. If not, your employee will think you're cheap. Now... guess how people react when they think their boss is cheap.

I'd love a $1000 chair and a $100 stapler, but I don't think my boss is cheap because he won't get me those items. What a sad argument.

Also, the alternatives are not far "superior".

You're the 2nd person to twist that out of context.

No, I said they were superior price-wise and in terms of freedom. A lack of financial risk might be a good way to put it, too.

I said, in several ways, that the alternatives may not have all of the features, and that it may be a little inconvenient. I was arguing that "good enough" was a reasonable price to pay for "free" and "Free" software for a business. And I haven't read a reasonably objective refutation of that assertion yet in this thread.

Re:Exchange ?

[PierceLabs]

Because if you have 10s of thousands of employees you tend to want a solution that's easy to maintain/administer. As nasty as Exchange can be at times, from an administration perspective - have a single source for this does actually make sense.

Re:Exchange ?

[Morbid_Angel666]

Well there are several reasons. Tons of applications that serve sales people critical sales tools are built around Exchange and it's services, contacts and resource management. I'm no huge fan of Exchange and would love to see something that can do everything that Exchange can with MS and non-MS clients. I don't have a multitude of examples but I'll give one here: http://www.saleslogix.com/home/default.php3

Re:Exchange ?

[hawkbug]

Ok, so my question is - where can I get the binary update files for RHEL3? Or, if I went to their site and downloaded the source rpms, how do I build and install them? Thanks for the info, it's been enlightening.

Re:Exchange ?

[jdray]

Um... Take a look at what? Is there a link?

Re:Exchange ?

[runderwo]

Is submitting to a BSA audit really that much worse than submitting to a GPL audit?

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Touche! You're the first person to provide a somewhat decent defense of Exchange: We need product X in order to use product Y.

It's somewhere between "I need Windows because I rely on Quickbooks" and "I need Photoshop because I rely on the transmogrification filter".

I'm torn, myself. However, I'd tend to hold an application that stands on its own 2 feet before one that requires another full-blown application as a foundation. But I concede that 3rd party apps are a decent justification.

But CRM?!? That's about as useful as the "groupware" that was all the rage in the mid-90s. :)

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What planet do you live on?

I don't follow Evolution, but Kontact handles shared calendars just fine, thank you. ON THE DESKTOP.

Why do you dismiss other people's work when you haven't even *tried*?

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Another reason why people stay with Outlook is because that's what works with whatever gear they end up with in the store.

The US might be behind in mobile tech, I don't know, but here everyone uses PDAs and/or smartphones and most of them work with Outlook only.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out kolab, http://www.kolab.org/
The website is a little outdated, but the
2nd release is around the corner and should
provide much of what exchange offers. Kolab
supports outlook as well as open source
clients such as kde's contact.

Re:Exchange ?

[ebooher]

Since this happens to be an article about SUSE, I thought it might be on topic to point to their OpenExchange Mail Server. I haven't used it personally, but the site claims you can use Outlook against it. http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/openexcha nge/index.html

SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server 4.1 is the trend-setting groupware and communication solution that helps your company to progress - with superior technical features, far-reaching hardware independence, smooth migration, and a wide range of supported clients including Outlook clients from Outlook 98 and various web browsers. For All Requirements On the basis of standardized protocols and Open Source components, SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server offers everything modern enterprises and organizations need for communication: e-mail server, web server, groupware, collaboration, and messaging. Thanks to its modular architecture, SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server can be customized for diverse needs. Depending on the customer requirements (number of users, way of utilization, deployed hardware, etc.), SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server can be deployed in environments ranging from 10 to 2,500 users. ... and All Budgets A fair license policy is a hallmark of SUSE LINUX. Thus, the e-mail core functions of Openexchange Server are free of license fees, and the license fee for the groupware is lower than that of most competitor products, as numerous independent studies show.

Re:Exchange ?

[talon77]

Exchange is great because it stores all your emails on a central server, and with the proper backup agents you can restore individual messages rather than entire mailboxes when something does get deleted. This saves a lot of time when somthing does need to be restored.

Re:Exchange ?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Are you using an IMAP server for mail? I'm attempting the same with Cyrus and getting all kinds of timeout problems with Outlook. Every other IMAP client works fine, of course.

Re:Exchange ?

[altamira]

Effective immediately, you can use either Evolution as your client application and GroupWise on the server side (that's either on Linux, Netware, or Windows), or run GroupWise on the server side and use Outlook on Windows to connect to it. The latter is something that has been around for quite a while.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man when are you going to start stalking me again?

Re:Exchange ?

[killjoe]

I am sorry but outlook sucks ass. It's slow, bloated, has the single worst UI I have ever seen on any program, it never works the same on two different computers, it's filters are extremely limited yadda yadda. I can go on for days abotu how much I hate outlook and yet I have to use it at work.

I honestly don't get people who like outlook. I think they are either brain damaged or simply don't know any better.

As for building a workflow system out of it. If any corporation does something that dumb they deserve all the vendor lock they get.

Re:Exchange ?

[12357bd]

Now... guess how people react when they think their boss is cheap...

OK, now guess how your boss reacts when they realize that you think s/he is cheap! :)

Re:Exchange ?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Sorry. Try this.

Re:Exchange ?

[Noksagt]

The apps for iCal aren't quite there but Cyrus IMAP is a thousand fold better as an email server, which I would think is more useful than a calendar of the two. (Do I get a poor email server and a moderate calendaring system, or an excellent email server and a less moderate calenaring sysyem?)

iCal IS getting better fast, and I do hope that it starts to replace exhchange. You could use more clients for one.

Evolution 1 doesn't push calendars to the server, but I thought this was supposed to be a feature in 2 (I don't actually use Evolution). You can also scp ~/evolution/ocal/Calendar/calendar.ics host:path/dbs.ics with Evolution 1 to publish the calendars (I was shown this trick by an Evolution fanatic). Put in a cron script, and you will have "poor man's" calendar sharing. I suppose you could also do this as part of an rsync regiment, if you're into that kind of thing.

Re:Exchange ?

[Noksagt]

Take the Mozilla suite for example...Mozilla's address book regularly lose contacts. I even saw it once mixing addresses (deleted a contact, and the address of the deleted contact replaced the e-mail address of the previous one - it's a chance I caught that one, otherwise I would have been in big trouble). I mean, it's a very simple database, but it's buggy as hell. I checked Thunderbird and it does the same thing. I switched back to outlook express in no time.

Nice data point. I've helped people who've had whole INBOXes eaten by an Outlook crash. I'd rather lose a person's address than all of my new mail. The point is that these are ONLY single data points. I know many happy thunderbird users & a few happy Outlook users.

But the fact is most OSS are extremely buggy. Some are ok (Linux, OpenOffice, Firebird...), some, like mozilla mail, are unusable in a business place.

Nice FUD. Please tell me how those who do use Linux get anything done if there is so much that is unusable and buggy. I think the major linux distros do a good job at adding non-buggy software. Many have Firefox and Thunderbird included.

Harking back to your single data point, perhaps you think this is a bad decision, but then how would you counter MS including OE with Windows or Outlook with office, when these can do stupid things too?

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

We managed to do our scheduling without Exchange, using only OSS solutions with more than 300 personnels across the archipelago...

Re:Exchange ?

[pyros]

You can't get free binary updates from RH. But if you look at a distribution like whitebox, you theoretically get the same thing.

If you want to build them yourself, just use `rpmbuild --rebuild `

Re:Exchange ?

[William Baric]

FUD? You may believe whatever you wish, but I have far more problems with my mandrake 10.0 box at home than with Windows 2000. Oh, most of the time it's not big problems and I can find workaround. But I'm to a point where I'm fed up with Linux distros. Why the hell mandrake use totem by default? XMMS works great, but no, they had to use the shiny thing that crash like if there was no tomorrow. And I'm not even talking about their configuration tools. For example, this stupid things can't understand that I have two sound card on my computer. Sure, using vi to edit modules.conf each time their tool rewrite my file is not that hard, but it's certainly annoying to redo the same thing again and again.

Don't get me wrong, I know Linux is fine on servers... I install them. Of course some things are to be avoided (like 2.6.x or LVM) but overall it does the job.

What pisses me off is people who pretend everything is fine. I remember when I first tried 2.6.2 on my home computer. After 15 minutes I had my first hard lockup (guess what chipset I was using). I don't really blame linux for those lockups but I certainly blame all morons who were saying there was no problem with nforce2 and linux. A few weeks ago, I upgraded to 2.6.8. And guess what... yep, no more CD burning. But you can still find people who say this is not true.

Now, you say that you have a lot of problems with Outlook. Sorry, but THIS is FUD. Yes, there is some bugs in Outlook and I believe you when say "you've had whole inboxes eaten". It even happened to me once (although it was a long time ago with Outlook 97/windows 95). But the fact is those kind of problems are very rare.

Now back to mozilla... Single data point? Well, no it's not a single data point. Just test the damn address book for 45 minutes and you'll find errors. When I say Mozilla's address book is unusable it's not because of a single error. I tried (again) thunderbird not long ago and it took me 5 minutes before a contact disappeared. For God's sake, 5 minutes of testing! (BTW, I'm using thunderbird at home, but since my address book has only 10 contacts, everything works fine)

You may think losing a whole inbox is worse than losing a contact... no it's not. All my clients have at least daily backups. The most they can lose is one day of e-mail. If they received anything important, they can ask the person to re-send the e-mail (I know, I had some people who deleted their inbox by mistake). If it happens once in a blue moon, that's annoying but acceptable. (BTW, most of my clients use an IMAP server and every e-mail, incoming or outgoing, is permanently saved on a backup server, so even if their local hard disk crash or if they erased all their mail by mistake, they won't lose anything)

OTOH, when you have to check your address book every time you send an e-mail to a group of person because contacts disappear regularly, that's bad. When you send an e-mail to the WRONG ADDRESS, that's even worse.

You want to think everything that I say is FUD. Fine. But then don't be surprised if management don't want to hear about OSS after a bad experience.

Re:Exchange ?

[12357bd]

Now, you say that you have a lot of problems with Outlook. Sorry, but THIS is FUD.

Humm... excuse me but wasn't email (Outlook) the preferred entry an spread vector of V-I-R-U-S on windows?. Call it FUD if you like it, but the amount of lost hours due to Outlook 'features' is simpky astonishing.

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Kontact handle shared calendars "just fine" with 10s of thousands of people? Didn't think so.

Re:Exchange ?

[Noksagt]

FUD? You may believe whatever you wish,

You said a majority of F/OSS was so buggy that it couldn't be used. Yet others run complete servers, workstations, and desktops with F/OSS. Either they are all wrong or you exagerate to the point of absurdity.

Why the hell mandrake use totem by default?

I thought the same thing of most bundled Windows Media Players. That is an application. Install what you like, uninstall what you don't. Get over it.

Sure, using vi to edit modules.conf each time their tool rewrite my file is not that hard, but it's certainly annoying to redo the same thing again and again.

I don't rub MDK, but surely there is something to retain your config files!

Of course some things are to be avoided (like 2.6.x or LVM) but overall it does the job.

I disagree about 2.6. I find it better than 2.4 in almost every way. The only problem I've encountered is that some software (mostly proprietary) compiled on 2.4 doesn't like it. I've managed to use all of it (LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4 usually works), but having to jump through these hoops is a legitimate complaint.

What pisses me off is people who pretend everything is fine.... I remember when I first tried 2.6.2 on my home computer. A few weeks ago, I upgraded to 2.6.8. And guess what... yep, no more CD burning. But you can still find people who say this is not true.

They don't pretend--they either wait to upgrade until they know it will work, or they figure out what they need to do to make it work. CD Burning can work in 2.6.8 cdrecord and others drop priviliedges after opening the burner. This is bad because the kernel has been fixed such that they can't use the SG_IO interface. There are patches to the kernel that remove this fix and patches for the applications which work with the new kernel. I believe some distros even already apply these to packages in their repositories. So, I bet it was a seamless transition for some. Analagous situation: apps stop working after SP2 (including,I might add, some CD Burning applications such as older versions of Ahead Nero (and, worse, corporate versions of Symantec Antivirus)). No big deal. Don't scream at MS--they are doing what is right. Sometimes an OS-level upgrade requires apps to upgrade too. Get used to it!

Now, you say that you have a lot of problems with Outlook. Sorry, but THIS is FUD.

I disagree--I never said don't use Outlook. I never said most MS products were buggy and couldn't be used. I said we both had single bad data points. I'm not a fan of Outlook, but I don't think I trash-talked it: I don't try to convert people who like using it. I merely said that it wasn't a perfect product & also implied that it would be absurd to extrapolate anything from a few bad experiences). I'm sorry you've had problems with Thunderbird. I know TB users who don't experience this. Is there a bug report you can point me to? If not, why haven't you written one & why aren't more people experiencing this problem?

You may think losing a whole inbox is worse than losing a contact... no it's not. All my clients have at least daily backups. The most they can lose is one day of e-mail. If they received anything important, they can ask the person to re-send the e-mail

So they can recover their address books too! This argument is stupid. The person who lost his inbox most recently (in Outlook 2003, mind you), only lost a dozen or so messages. He could remember a couple senders & had a vague idea of the content. People have a much harder time remembering a hundred word email message than a 3 word email address. The email address can usually be recovered by using a directory.

(BTW, most of my clients use an IMAP server and every e-mail, incoming or outgoing, is permanently saved on a backup server, so even if their local hard disk crash or if th

Re:Exchange ?

[Anonymous Coward]

10s of thousands of people? I would pay money to see the Exchange server that handles that many people "just fine". Thanks for the great laugh.

Re:Exchange ?

[hawkbug]

Yes, I realize I can't get the binaries "from RH" as you say, but I do think I should be able to find them elsewhere, seeing as it's GPL software. I know there is whitebox linux, but I'm not sure how often the red hat patches get converted and then updated that way, seems like it would take a while to strip the word red hat from every file they put out.

Re:Exchange ?

[jdray]

Interesting. Have you tried it? I'm hesitant to believe a lot of the marketing materials put out by companies or projects, particularly in the form of a flashy web page. The proof is in the pudding, as it's said.

For instance, I've been searching for a document management system lately to use as a repository for our company's standards development project. One basic feature we require is that the search engine it provides searches within Word documents. Two OSS projects I looked at, Owl and KnowledgeTree, advertise on their features list that they do this. But if you go try out their online demos, neither product is able to find words embedded in Word documents that exist on their system. In one case, someone had put up a Word document with a single Spanish word in it. I viewed the document, noticed that it was a good candidate for a search (one word, not one likely to be found in another document), then backed out and tried to find the document using that word in the search bar. Nothing.

So, while I'm always interested in OSS projects that can act as replacements for commercial ones, particularly on the server side, I'm reticent to believe their hype before I see their products in action.

Re:Exchange ?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Well, it's not OSS. Other than that, I'm impressed. I don't know about your requirement for Word doc, however if you call them you WILL get in touch with an engineer that will answer your questions. The webmail client is really nice and so is the Exchange migration in my opinion. I would recommend calling them and going from there. What killed the project for me was Blackberry compatibility. Keep me updated, sounds like you and I have the same goals and a simular job.

Re:Exchange ?

[Dick Faze]

What's this one-integrated-application-fits-all fettish all about?

Simple. Disconnected users. 1000 user company, 500 user field force, who login via dialup for two hours a night. They get updated email and Calendars once (maybe twice if they login in the morning) a day, and Outlook/exchange deals with this fine. There is no OSS product that allows you to have an identical interface for connected and disconnected users, that allows for offline creation of meetings, tasks, and email messages with a seamless sync to server when a connection becomes available, that also has millions of users who publicly discuss their problems (one support resource) and hundreds of books (another resource) and thousands of experienced techs in the field.

Don't mistake me for a M$ Rah Rah, but these are the facts, there's nothing out there that does what this combo does, period, much less better, less expensive, or "with more freedom".

Re:Exchange ?

[MikeBabcock]

Red Hat has been pointing out that redistribution of the files within their distributions containing the "Red Hat" logo or other trademarked or copyrighted symbols is not legal -- these files must be removed or replaced.

Fwiw.

Re:Exchange ?

[MikeBabcock]

Outlook has problems.

I use Cyrus-IMAP over qmail. Trace the IMAP connections with ngrep and when you get a timeout form Outlook, check the dump output. One version of Outlook attempts to keep using a connection after sending a 'QUIT'. Recompile with the 'QUIT' command no-opd (bad, but wfm) if that's the case.

Re:Exchange ?

[robhwill]

My former music prof. understood this phenom: "The Human race tolerates what gives it pleasure. What gives it pleasure is what it can do without thinking." --- Prof. Tony King Jazz Theory & Composition Wisconsing College-Conservatory 1970 - 1973 Have A Healthy, Prosperous Day! ---Robert H. Williams robhwill@yahoo.com

SATA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried to use SUSE ?9.2?, as a dual boot I was given a rather dire warning that it needed to wip my SATA drive before it could use it. Some may see this as a benefit of course.

However, does anyone know what the situation is like now?

Hold on, its not released yet

[eGuy]

Articles I've read say that it will be released in November. But it does sound nice :) Here are some of the articles: vnunet tectonic linuxelectrons

Re:Hold on, its not released yet

[dubdays]

That's what I was thinking. I just checked the suse ftp site, and it's not there. Usually, suse releases the boxed version first, and then releases it via ftp a few weeks later.

Re:Hold on, its not released yet

[media_Assassin]

... which everyone would know, if they only RTFA ...

"Novell today announced the November availability of SUSE® LINUX Professional 9.2, providing Linux newcomers and enthusiasts with the latest advancements in open source technology.

Re:Hold on, its not released yet

[Erwos]

Kinda odd, I agree. I was wondering how they managed to get so ahead of everyone else on the release schedule.

Looks like a good release for the KDE fans, but I'll be waiting for Fedora Core 3 myself... gotta love Gnome 2.8.

-Erwos

Re:Hold on, its not released yet

[millermj]

You'll notice that this "news" article is dated 6/10/2004, which is June 10 which is way off... Oh wait. That's the funky European date; they're talking about October 6, aren't they?

Nevertheless, you're right; SUSE themselves told me November so I don't understand why they're issuing the press release now.

Gnome and KDE?

[Xpilot]

I've never tried SuSE Linux after it was acquired by Novell (who also owns Ximian). A lot of people have said SuSE is KDE-centric, but now that Novell has put a KDE team and a GNOME team under one roof, is the Linux desktop experience more "unified"? When Redhat tried to unify the desktops, there was a backlash of sorts... but I haven't heard from SuSE. How does the SuSE desktop feel, in both KDE and GNOME modes?

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[julesh]

How does the SuSE desktop feel, in both KDE and GNOME modes?

From my experience with 9.1, the free downloadable ISO image only includes KDE. You have to install GNOME by ftp from their web site if you want it. Given that this would have been over a modem for me, I didn't bother...

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[b0neDaddy]

AFAIK KDE is still very much the same as in previous versions. There's gnot much of a gnomish feel.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[ceeam]

Wasn't Novell bought out by IBM(?) several weeks ago? I guess they have a roof large enough to cover quite a few beasts.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Jahf]

Gnot yet, but expect that to change when they have Novell Linux 10 completed (probably another quarter or so) and the Ximian products are integrated with the SuSE distribution.

Screenshots of Novell Linux 10 have been primarily using a Ximian-like GNOME desktop. It appears that while KDE will continue to get development, the "face" of Novell Linux will be the Ximian product.

That makes sense given how much influence the Ximian employees have retained in Novell's Linux decision making process.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[AstroDrabb]

IMO SuSE has always favored KDE. I personally like Gnome better. For example, this latest version of SuSE/Novell has the latest version of KDE (3.3), while it has an older version of Gnome (2.6) instead of the newest 2.8. Maybe 2.8 wasn't ready in time for the release? Gnome 2.8 has some really nice new features, so I probably won't be trying this version of SuSE. I have been using Fedora Core since it first came out and have kept my eye on SuSE to try it out. However I don't think that day will come if Novell/SuSE are always a version behind in Gnome.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Redhat tried to unify the desktops, there was a backlash of sorts.

Wow, dude, what drugs are you on? Redhat never gave the support to KDE that it did to Gnome.
It always required a highly informed decision to even get KDE installed from a Redhat distribution.

The dumb-ass default always got you Gnumb-Gnuts-Gnome.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without screenshots, this is such an obvious troll.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[IceFox]

Well although you couldn't tell it here on slashdot
1) The gnome and kde developers arn't arch enemies.
2) Distros that want more users want both desktops.

What does this mean? A lot of colaberation, quite a bit through freedeskop.org. Little things like all my gnome apps now show up in the kde start menu without any effort on my part are a big deal (and vice versa). Everyone understands that the better the two desktops behave together (not code wise, but behavior wise) the more the user wins.

One neat project which I don't think (might be wrong) anyone is working on right now is a common icon set. When gnome or kde load up the icon "cut" it should be the same. Help create an icon set (without a slant to the current gnome or kde) and then get it in freedesktop.org and I bet you that distros would adopt it. If you are interested in helping with this or other colaberation projects head over to freedesktop.org.

Some other ones that would be nice to have:
-A common bookmark and cookie storage standard (way to many browsers these days)
-Along with a common icon set, a standard for the default toolbar format (size, and with or without text and text placement)

Down the road expect distros to be less and less KDE or Gnome only.

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

> but expect that to change

Says who? Somebody who's read many interviews with Nat&Miguel?

> how much influence the Ximian employees have

As least as much as the noticeably larger SUSE?

There's a difference between "I think it will be that way" and "it will be that way".

Just FYI it's said that during the install of Novell Linux Desktop no desktop will be preselected and one will have to choose the desktop.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[christopher240240]

No

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[AvantLegion]

>> Maybe 2.8 wasn't ready in time for the release?

Probably. It hasn't even been moved into "unstable" in oh-so-bleeding-edge Gentoo. :)

KDE 3.3's been out for an extra month, which I'm sure helped.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

One neat project which I don't think (might be wrong) anyone is working on right now is a common icon set.

Indeed, anything but the snot green tinged Gnome icons, please.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Pharmboy]

The Pro version of 9.1 has Gnome 2.4 but I don't care for it (then again, I have always prefered KDE). I checked their website, and their Personal Edition of 9.1 doesn't have Gnome, so I think this would indicate that yes, they have a preference for KDE. This is one reason I have changed from RH to SuSE on my Linux desktops. RH's magically disappearing support options (even if you have PAID for support) being the other reason.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is right on the money. Novell will have a desktop release of Suse that will be marketed as the Novell Linux Desktop or something along those lines... this will have the ximian stuff (Gnome) as the default and of course is really just Suse underneath... probably about a dot release behind the actual shipping Suse (stability) ....which is where KDE will be more prevalant. My $.02 is that the Ximian libraries make it hard to compile anything else becuase they are not the defacto standard that everyone is linking against. OTOH if you want it to just work and be pretty ( a la OS X but not that pretty ) then NLD is something to look into.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try asshole.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[gmuslera]

SuSE also gives in their FTP newer versions of certain packages, i.e. KDE 3.3 is up to date for several earlier SuSE versions, and probably Gnome 2.8 will be there too.

This helps a bit with the policy of SuSE of maintaining package versions related to security updates (if a vulnerability is found in the bundled version of certain program, instead of a new version the update is the same version with the vulnerability fixes) that helps maintaining old configurations, but sometimes you want newer versions of a lot of things. In their FTP you have in certain place newer versions of kde, gnome, and X, in other updated versions of samba, apache/php/modperl/etc, mozilla, etc, but of course, they have not the security ensured like the "stable" version (in debian lingo) with only the security updates applied.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[m50d]

Icons are generally dependent only on the theme, and you can already use one suite's icons in another. (In kde, go control centre, appearance and themes, icons, then select gnome.) The only standardisation that needs to be done is on a default, and I can't see any way to get agreement on which set is better.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[aldoman]

You mean.. check the KDE box at install time and chose KDE instead of Gnome on the login manager? Obviously highly informed...

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[AstroDrabb]

That is not too bad. However I prefer the apt-get system that Fedora has (even yum, but that is slooow compared to apt-get). I like apt-get with synaptic to allow me to get tons of software without compiling. I spent many years compiling with LFS and Gentoo and now like the ability to go into synaptic and click MPlayer and have it and all dependencies downloaded.

Are there a lot of 3rd party apps available for SuSE? What about dependency handling? Does SuSE include things like MPlayer and MP3 support that Red Hat/Fedora lack? If Fedora did not have apt-get, I would probably be using a different distro.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[gmuslera]

You have apt-rpm for SuSE and should be out there some repositories for this specifically, and a lot of people releases RPMs for SuSE in a way or another. And maybe more important, a lot of companies, i.e. nvidia, skype, etc releases their own binaries in rpm for suse specifically.

About mplayer, i think in 9.1 not was included or installed by default (what was good for me because I like to compile it specifically for my system, enabling as much features i can) but in previous versions it was, with certain movie formats (asf, not sure if avi) disabled on code because patent issues. About MP3, it bundles xmms and a lot of others mp3 players and they play mp3 very well, never had a problem with that format.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Fouquet]

I'm running SuSE 9.1 and only use Gnome (2.4). I find that it works just fine for everything I need. I don't know if there are nice features in KDE that don't exist in GNOME because I've never really used a modern version of KDE. I did use a very old version years ago on a RH 6.x machine and didn't like it very much, so I switched to GNOME and have stayed there. As I see it, it's only a window manager. As long as it opens windows, and allows me to easily navigate between them, then what other features might I need that I don't have?

Hell, TWM and FVWM(2) served many people, myself included, just fine for many many years.

From an end user perspective, if everything you've tried to do works, then you have no reason to go looking for new features. In fact, I probably won't upgrade to Suse 9.2 because I'm pretty much happy with everything in 9.1 (unless powersaved has learned to work happily alongside agp modules).

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm and
http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/freshrpms.html #suse 91

SUSE

[stateofmind]

I love SUSE. :) But wow, I've never seen Nvu before, it looks like it could go head-to-head with Dreamweaver?

Has anyone used Nvu in a production enviroment and/or used Dreamweaver as well? I'd like to know how your experience was, versus the two of them.

I already have the majority of the programming team using SUSE for Java development. I'd like to move over our developers. (they build out HTML/JSP/PHP pages for us and the designers)

The only thing stopping them is, is their love of Dreamweaver. (Which I've never liked, it's a resource hog)

Josh

Re:SUSE

[jd142]

While good, Nvu does not have some of the advanced features of DW, such as templating with restricted areas. That being said, most of that advanced stuff probably shouldn't be used by most people since it makes for overly coded pages.

Re:SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest you give quanta a try, it's much more mature than nvu. While nvu is pretty nice for building your personal web page if you don't know html or just want to get it done fast, imho the project is still to young to compete with dreamweaver. But it's certainly getting there.

Btw., just thought I'd mention that Lindows is behind the development of nvu and that the chief developer for it is the guy who developed mozilla composer (on which nvu is based).

Re:SUSE

[16K Ram Pack]

I've used it for a little bit of simple web stuff, but AFAIK, it's not Dreamweaver yet.

However, if you want to just get some pages together to then use to build some pages with PHP in them later, it's not bad.

Anyway, it's free, so who's complaining? ;)

Re:SUSE

[AaronGTurner]

For non-flashy bread-and-butter web pages, assuming you control the server environment, you are better off with something like LAMP and Zope,CMF and Plone on top. Very easy to use, extensible, etc., and you can change content from any architecture machine or browser (pretty much) as a client.

If you want lots of flashy graphics and flash animation, Zope is not the best route, though.

Re:SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

And why exactly do you need Apache, MySQL, and PHP to run Zope, the CMF, and Plone? These are python based, provide their own server, and utilize ZODB for storage.

-Kevin

Re:SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvu is essentially Mozilla Composer with a few improvements. I think, at least for the time being, Quanta is substantially more powerful, especially for server-side stuff. I'd say that would be a better plan. In the 3.3 release of KDE, it has a link checker, mass find and replace tool, and a ton of other things. Nvu seems to be just an HTML editor (like Composer before it), at least for the time being. Quanta is a full-featured XML (and derivatives, like XHTML) editor, and does PHP, as well. (also ColdFusion, I think...). It is a KDE app, so that should be factored in to any consideration, I suppose...

Re:SUSE

[jb.hl.com]

I run Nvu on Windows and it is officially greater than Jesus.

Re:SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

> But wow, I've never seen Nvu before, it looks like it could go head-to-head with Dreamweaver?

Not even close. It's crash-tacular. Slow. Documentation is basically nil. And DW can be totally freeform, while Nvu forces a standard HTML flow model.

And DW has templates. Nvu has nothing like them.

Re:SUSE

[Jester 2.0]

liquidpele: For PHP coding, I would suggest giving ZDE (Zend Developement Environment) a try. It has a free 30 day trial, runs on Linux and Windows, much better code completion/Syntax checking, integrates the php manual, and (IMO, the coolest feature) has a debuging system that can work in real time. It lacks some of the advanced DW features, like the WYSIWYG and remote/test/local copy setup.

Available in November???

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the torrent? I want my copy NOW!!!!

(Novel isn't quite in touch with the Linux crowd, is it?)

X.org

[Anonymous Coward]

"The X.Org Foundation's new X Window System X11R.6.8.1..."

Will this include the new Composite and XDamage extensions?

Re:X.org

[twener]

XDamage is standard part of X.org 6.8.1, and the SUSE 9.1 binary packages of X.org 6.8.1 also contain the Composite extension but not enabled by dfeault.

Re:X.org

[DeckerEgo]

Yes indeedy. They have early RPM packages posted on their FTP server which I've used, and the extensions are present. I haven't tested XDamage, but Composite works.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Personal Edition?

[Anonymous Coward]

German news sites heise and pro-linux are claiming that Suse will not release a personal edition this time.

However, it doesn't seem to be clear yet, if Suse will just not release a boxed version of the personal edition, or if they even stop the distribution of the personal edition iso for free downloads.

Any infos?

Re:Personal Edition?

[Fouquet]

Good question! Hopefully they will still offer the FTP install.

I never understood why some people prefer downloading the personal edition ISO over the FTP install. You've still got to download a whole bunch of stuff, which means that you need a broadband connection. With the ISO version, I assume there are things included that you don't want, and things not included that you do want. So the download is not optimized to the installation you will end up with (after installing extra packages via FTP). Can someone explain why they prefer to use the ISO over the FTP install?

Re:Personal Edition?

[protomala]

Simply: you have to download the ISO just once, so when you have to install a package just place the cd on the drive. You can even get a friend with a good connection to download and burn the cd for you.
By installing throught FTP every time you need to install a package you need to connect and download it.

Re:Personal Edition?

[Fouquet]

Ok, that makes sense. It hadn't occurred to me because I'm pretty much always connected to a fast network (either ethernet or wireless), so it probably takes me longer to find the CD than it would to just download the package.

Does the ISO actually include most of what you need? Last time I did an FTP install, I think I downloaded between 1.5 and 2GB to get all of the packages I wanted. When I was using RH, I remember they released 2 or 3 disks containing binary packages (and another 2 with source rpms). It looks like the SUSE iso distribution is only a single disk!

Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[ceeam]

... when they only mention the desktop features of a release and non of the server-side features. Like - what DBMS's are included and stuff. I guess that either Linux really done it on the desktop, or Win2k(3) completely filled up the server niche, or it's just slashdot.

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because servers is not the emphasis of this release? That's what SLES 9 is for...

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[jojo1835]

If you want server features, SUSE is going to focus you into the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. It's part of the support / cost conversation. You only get support for server side features on a server side distro, and for SUSE that is SLES 9.

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[74nova]

Win2k(3)

youve got to be kidding me. thats significantly more effort than just typing win2003

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[Enucite]

You don't think he meant "Win2000 or Win2003"?

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[74nova]

youre probably right, ill buy that

Re:Well, you know smth is out of sync...

[DashEvil]

$699 please

WTF ? Released ?

[rainer_d]

It's a paper lauch !
Currently, it's as much "released" as Longhorn.

The correct headline would have said "SuSE 9.2 announced", or sometime like that.

Rainer

Re:WTF ? Released ?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE 9.2 went gold. Should they wait to announce the release until after the supply pipeline is full? SuSE 9.2 exists and will be available in November. Longhorn lacks a definition much less a feature set or a release date.

Re:WTF ? Released ?

[Waffle Iron]

Currently, it's as much "released" as Longhorn.

That's comparing apples and oranges. SuSE has been on a 6-month incremental release schedule for a long time. If any major problems crop up in a release, they would most likely drop the specific new features causing the problems and simply push those to the next release. They have a history of shipping versions mostly on time twice per year.

Microsoft, OTOH, goes with a gargantuan monolithic overhaul of the entire OS and userland every several years. Since they tear up so much of the old stuff, they have to get much of the new stuff working together before they ship. And much of the new stuff tends to be based on whatever untested new "paradigm of the week" they're pushing that's going to save the world. (This time for sure. Really!) The uncertainty involved with inventing anything that attempts to save the world inherently has unpredictable development times. They have a history of slipping each release several years past the original target date.

The SuSE release is almost certainly going to happen approximately on schedule. Longhorn is still a big question mark.

NOOO!!!!

[Dante Shamest]

I just installed SUSE 9.1 !!!!!! =O

Re:NOOO!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And as we all know, once 9.2 hits the shelves it will become instantly unusable.

Re:NOOO!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You laugh, but I had to reinstall suse 9.1 last weekend, because UT2004 demo crashes when switching resolutions (twice, second time it hung everything so I had to powercycle and afterwards reiserfx in my crypto partiton segfaulted with a divide by zero :-( I swear you can't make that stuff up...).

And since my /home was encrypted and the repair of the encrypted reiserfs was not only long, but painfully and left me with about 10% less files, I figured it would be better to reinstall completely (I also had included some of the system dirs into the crypt part because I figured nobody needs to see what I have installed - bad idea because they got hosed, too...)

I already joked that 9.2 would be out soon :-(

Now I am back to stock 9.1 plus YOU patches - no KDE 3.3, no new Nvidia etc etc and still tons of software missing/not configured etc. Not to talk about most of my data.

And since 9.2 is looming at the horizon, I probably don't need to bother to install them but can later just upgrade suse entirely.

*sigh*

Tels

Announced, not released

[fstrauss]

The title should read
SUSE 9.2 Announced

It's due for release early November

Re:Announced, not released

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's released now, it's simply not available via retail channels. EU users will probably start seeing supply in a few weeks and US users a week or so later. Stock on shelves isn't artificially held back in order to have a grand release party ala SW:Battlefront. When it gets to the shelves, it gets to the shelves.

Before you start crying about FTP and ISO downloads being available, SUSE has NEVER released to FTP for at least 6-8 weeks after GOLD and 9.1 was the first ISO made available from download and it didnt come for months after FTP download was available.

Re:Announced, not released

[AJWM]

Would you settle for "released to production"?

Give it a few weeks for the CDs and DVDs to be pressed, the manuals and boxes printed, everything assembled and then shipped to distributers and retailers.

They're nice enough to announce that now so that you don't get pissed off when you buy yourself 9.1 as a Halloween present and then see 9.2 in the stores the next week ;-)

Re:Announced, not released

[fstrauss]

Our company sells SUSE boxed sets amongst other linux distributions, which is exactly why i got a fright when i saw that 9.2 has been "released". Reading the article and realising we still have a month helped :)

Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for SuS

[ShatteredDream]

Under Novell's leadership they released the first free version of SuSE on ISO that I can ever recall hearing about. Before that I didn't know anyone who gave SuSE the time of day because they were the only vendor that was remotely popular without free CD images. Now, SuSE has the chance to actually gain marketshare against RedHat and force them to work harder on Fedora.

I hope they've fixed...

[boy_afraid]

1) Software RAID for VIA VT8237 so you can see the Windows partition from Linux while running RAID 0.
2) Getting VMWare and Superkaramba working fine without crashing.

I've switched from Mandrake to Suse and I'm happy. I'm in love with Yast!

Currently, I'm running Suse 9.1 Professional AMD64.

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[fitten]

Just another ++ for SuSE 9.1 Professional AMD64. I run it as well.

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[Entropius]

Out of curiosity, are you or grandparent running it on 64-bit laptops? I'm looking around for a distro for one...

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[fitten]

I am not. I run it on an Athlon 64 3000+ sitting on an MSI Neo FSR K8T800 board.

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[boy_afraid]

I am not. I run it on an Athlon 64 3000+ sitting on an MSI Neo FSR K8T800 board.

FRICKIN' A! I'm also running an Athlon 64 3000+ on an MSI Neo FSR2 K8T800 board!!

I think I've just met my long lost twin!!

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[boy_afraid]

I am not. I run it on an Athlon 64 3000+ sitting on an MSI Neo FSR K8T800 board.

FRICKIN' A! I'm also running an Athlon 64 3000+ on an MSI Neo FSR2 K8T800 board!!

I think I've just met my long lost twin!!

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[eclectro]

I hope that they will have an automount for the floppy.

Being a complete newbie to linux, I was furious to see a "protocol error" when I tried to write to the floppy.

I just do not see the security hazard of writing to a floppy. It's something that I *expect* to be able to do, and able to do with every other OS in the world (including other linux like Xandros).

This problem is not isolated to Suse. Other distros read the floppy (I suppose to see its status) every seven seconds which can be really annoying.

Xandros gets it right -- Suse needs to use the Gnu license and put that code in their distribution.

They need to stop working on eye candy and work on basic functionality.

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[fitten]

Do we look alike? ;)

Re:I hope they've fixed...

[statusbar]

I'm running SUSE 9.1 on a P4, VMWare works fine and I use it all the time to run win2000, mandrake 10, debian, and whiteboxlinux all at once. Maybe VMWare needs to update their drivers for AMD64?

--jeff++

GNOME 2.8?

[codergeek42]

I'm just wondering why, with Evoltuion 2.0, they're shipping GNOME 2.6, rather than GNOME 2.8, which has much better MIME-type handlingand is smoother and more integrated as a DE...

Re:GNOME 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Gnome 2.8 was too late to be extensively tested and debugged. Personally, I think it was even a bad idea to ship with KDE 3.3, I'm experiencing still a lot of bugs in KDEPim with CVS KDE_3_3_BRANCH of two weeks ago...

Re:GNOME 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

> MIME-type handlingand is smoother and more integrated as a DE...

Care to explain how GNOME 2.8 is more integrated than GNOME 2.6 ? The only technical changes that happened were indeed the MIME-type handling and a Spatial/Navigational button on Nautilus. Most of the CVS modules have only seen a version bump from 2.6 to 2.8 (e.g. not being changed for many months except the bumping of version numbers).

Re:GNOME 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

They shipped GNOME 2.6 because GNOME 2.8 was not ready, and in a way it still is not, from an integration point of view. Integrating a destkop environment takes time, and SUSE Linux 9.2 has been in Beta phase since early august or so. Since well before GNOME 2.8 was released, anyway.

Re:GNOME 2.8?

[twener]

SUSE doesn't ship KDE 3.3.0 but some 3.3.x snapshot from this branch.

SuSE was better some time ago...

[fionbio]

I've started using SuSE in 2000 when I was in Germany. My previous distro was RH, which deeply offended me by shipping broken gcc 2.96 (and refusing to adopt KDE for a while before that). I was impressed by SuSE's stability/quality, a nice feature of being able to save a list of selected packages in the middle of installation (IIRC), and also the fact that my old scanning prog kscan was included in Alpha section (I was far from being a good C++ programmer when I wrote it...)

Now I see an unpleasant tendency of including prerelease software in SuSE. As far as I remember, they were shipping a prerelease gcc 3.3, which caused problems with my (in-house) project and some prerelease of X11. Overall quality of the distro degraded. Also, I just don't get why they have Qt compiled with -DQT_NO_STL. As result, C++ programs that use STL have problems with system's Qt/KDE. This doesn't save memory/improve performance/etc., gcc shipped with SuSE has no problems with STL - so why?

I don't know whether SuSE is improving or getting worse now, as I'm currently deeply buried in .NET brain damage stuff. But next time when I'll be able to work under Linux most of time, I think I'll switch to something like Gentoo.

Re:SuSE was better some time ago...

[julesh]

Now I see an unpleasant tendency of including prerelease software in SuSE. As far as I remember, they were shipping a prerelease gcc 3.3, which caused problems with my (in-house) project and some prerelease of X11.

I didn't experience this, cause I upgraded straight from 7.x to 9.1, which has a fairly standard gcc 3.3.3.

Re:SuSE was better some time ago...

[drunkahol]

Deep offense???

Unless they shat in your shoe or pissed in your beer , I find it hard to understand your deep offense.

You may have been pissed off - or even slightly irked. But "deeply offended"??? Give us a break.

I've told you a million times not to exagerate.

Re:SuSE was better some time ago...

[hey]

Its a horse race. Wait until the next RedHat release. It'll be ahead of SuSe in some areas. Eg Gnome.

i hate that novel logo on their box now...

[Anonymous Coward]

.... its too red, too novell and too communistic.

uhm.. well wait then again.... linux and open source was all about communism.

so that logo probably fits all rite.

but take a look at redhat. its even in their name. red communistic software. somebody please call mccarthy _now_

hurry, pleeeze, make them comies go away to guantanamo and abu-gureib.

im sacred.

Re:i hate that novel logo on their box now...

[lanc]

Have you ever heard of the Red Flag distrib?

Go, hide yourself.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[TelevisioSledgicus]

Hopefully SuSE will have patched that during their customization of the kernel. Someone with more motivation than myself might want to double check with them before they go to the presses.

Well done

[jginspace]

Slashdot usually gets knocked for being way behind.

Well done, here http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8& q=suse+9.2&btnG=Search+News this thread is the second of the two results, with the first (group) being "1 hour ago".

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Hockney Twang]

From the press release: "SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 core technology includes the new enhanced Linux kernel 2.6.8"

So, yeah, that version.

No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought 9.2 was supposed to include Ximian as the standard desktop ??

Confused.

Re:No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

> I thought 9.2 was supposed to include Ximian as the standard desktop ??

Stop thinking it seem to confuse you. No company would be so braindead like SUN or RED HAT to offer GNOME for their customers.

Re:No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's simple. You just need to listen to SUSE people and not to Ximian people when you want to know something about SUSE.

Re:No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the point of Novell owning SuSe and Ximian and not integrating them?

Re:No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

> What is the point of Novell owning SuSe and Ximian and not integrating them ?

From internal sources of Novell (employees) it seems that Novell didn't really knew what they bought. It was just a step into the OSS market. Though they bought Ximian for the MONO stuff and not the Desktop. Novell believes that they entirely own MONO but realized they only hold the copyright due to the licensing modell chosen. SuSE was aquired for their enterprise offers and Distribution. SuSE was also more expensive than Ximian when they got bought and many SuSE people direct the Desktop section within Novell nowadays.

Re:No Ximian??

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Ximian has nothing to say here. The project leader for the Novell Desktop solution is someone from SuSE and you can be dead sure that they want to continue supporting and using KDE. Ximian is saying to much and they did so in the past as well until someone from Novell has completely shut the mouth of Miguel and Nat. That was the reason why there weren't any announcements made by them in the recent past. It's not Ximian who lead Novell here. Most keyfunctions are kept bei either Novell or SuSE employees.

Re:No Ximian??

[riggwelter]

Well, Ximian patches for GNOME go into the SuSE builds (reading the RPM changelogs is fascinating).

In any case, most SuSE GNOME users prefer ULB GNOME.

Suse is nice

[BelugaParty]

I found Suse to be a very good mix of windows (profesional grades) and linux. Having tried linux sporadically since '95, it is definitely one of the most polished distributions I have ever seen.
Looks aside, I think YaST is one of the most useful configurator/installers/admin panels I have ever used.
The downsides of 9.1 are its wireless tools (I have a broadcom chip, so I had to use ndiswrapper... switching between networks required admin commandline work.) The other problem, which is a problem with many linux distro's but still hasn't been addressed for my situation, is ACPI. Yes I use a laptop. No, Suse did not pander to me with easy to install packages... meanwhile, it did install at least 4 different packages for bluetooth, which is one thing I don't use.

In general, though, I would tell anyone to give it a try.

Re:Suse is nice

[M1FCJ]

I'm not a big fan or SuSE, I used to use RedHat all around the place... But FC1 and 2 were nothing but dissapointments for me. After screwing my Debian installation and waiting for too long for Gentoo to finish compilation, I switched all of my boxes, including an obsolete Sunsparc box to SuSE. I still hate Yast's limitations but I find its packages at least usable.

Strange though... Two years ago I could reccommend at least five distros to people. These days it is either FC or SuSE. I won't reccommend Gentoo or Debian to a newcomer and although Mandrake 10 was good, I had too many people coming back to me stating "their modem didn't work"...

Re:Suse is nice

[thelexx]

I have to agree with you about Suse. My first kernel was ~.97pl? and in all that time, Suse 9.1 is definitely the best 'out of the box' experience I've had. Just switched from Fedora due to the FC2 install CD not even wanting to boot the kernel and FC3 being a tad flakey still. As long-time Debian fan, Fedora was a nice change in the 'easy-to-use' direction, and Suse is even yet another step along.

Re:Suse is nice

[JanneM]

Ubuntu seems like a very promising alternative/friendly face to Debian. They seem to have a very active community already. We'll see how it shapes up after they release.

Re:Suse is nice

[twener]

Ubuntu will need at least another 6 months (2nd release) to catch-up with SUSE excluding configuration tools. And much more time after to catch up with SUSE's YaST functionality (if they don't start to use it too :-).

Re:Suse is nice

[pyros]

Ubuntu will need at least another 6 months (2nd release) to catch-up with SUSE excluding configuration tools. And much more time after to catch up with SUSE's YaST functionality (if they don't start to use it too :-)./i Ubuntu is actually more usable for me today than Suse 9.1. I tried out 9.1 on my best laptop and wireless had some big problems. I'm using a prism-based card that works just fine with the orinoco_cs driver. Setting the NIC to use DHCP no default route was ever set. Setting it up statically, the wifi network had to use WEP or I would get destination unreachable trying to ping the router (and no it wasn't a problem with me having mismatched WEP settings on the AP and card, I quadruple checked because that's the obvious answer). When I jumped on #suse, someone said dhcp not setting the default route with wifi was a known problem (although apparently not reproducible) Regarding Yast, the popular opinion of it on #ubuntu was not fit for print media, so don't hold your breath to see that show up in Ubuntu.

Re:Suse is nice

[visualight]

Yeah, Suse's a good distro for someone new to linux. I used suse from 7.0 to 8.2 but I quit them for Gentoo about a year ago.

Basically I was buying a suse upgrade too often and it was starting to annoy me. I like having the latest version of any software I use, but with suse, as new OS versions are released the rpm's for older versions become harder to get.

Eventually it just becomes easier to go to Best Buy and buy a new box. I soon realized I was spending more money on Linux then I was on XP.

Hopefully Gentoo will prove easier to stay up to date with.

Re:Suse is nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Fascinating.

I like everything about SuSE _except_ YaST.
I like their balance of up-to-date vs. too-bleeding-edge choice of packages.
I like their Mono/.net support.
I like their NVidia driver and Intel wireless driver support VERY MUCH!

But for upgrading packages, yast does nothing but cause me grief. Try to get a working version of mono through yast and you'll get frustrated. Install the RPMs directly and you'll get Yast's package thingy all confused. Debian's "apt-get install mono" is far far nicer.

Thankfully Novell also has another package manger in Ximian's Red Carpet - which is wonderful. Mono installs cleanly and it even cleans up whatever yast-dependancy-hell I got myself into the first time I tried installing it.

I recomend SuSE to our company's customers (it is in part a .NET app); but for myself Debian with it's huge apt repository is my favorate choice for package managers and for the rest of a management console I prefer 'webmin', but actually just end up using 'vi' instead.

Latest?

[balster neb]

Press release says "SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 comes with latest open source functionality". But it only comes with GNOME 2.6. GNOME 2.8 was out about 3 weeks ago

Anyway, lets hope this release has more than half-hearted GNOME support. The previous version included GNOME, but barely. It's going to be interesting to see how Novell balances KDE and GNOME in the future, given their conflict.

Re:Latest?

[julesh]

Oh, wow, 3 weeks.

I'd rather hope they spend at least that long testing the entire platform they've put together for stability before releasing it.

OTOH, SuSE has been a very KDE-centric distribution for a long time. I don't suspect it'll have changed much with this release.

Re:Latest?

[AaronGTurner]

Three weeks isn't long to test a new release of Gnome enough to be able to offer it in something that may be installed by corporate users.

Re:Latest?

[Too Much Noise]

I'd pick more on this, actually:

GCC 3.3.4 and glibc 2.3.3 provide best performance for a Linux distribution to date.

Huh? the latest gcc is 3.4.2 (a month old), but the 3.4 series have been out for a while now (since April) - and with improvements on ... uh, say C++ side, as it would pertain to KDE. Andit's in use, too - MDK10.1 uses 3.4.1. So how is 3.3.4 going to give "best performance" in November???

Re:Latest?

[pyros]

But Suse 9.2 isn't due out for another month, so that's almost two months to test the final release. And they could have been working with development snapshots in the buildup, too.

Wonder what volume pricing is

[afidel]

The per seat cost at retail is about what you would expect to pay per seat with a large volume purchase from MS. Wonder how much Novell is willing to bargain for volume purchases. I also wonder how strong their support team is. I have to say that it's expensive to call MS, and often time consuming, but I have never had them fail to resolve an issue.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[AaronGTurner]

The per seat cost at retail is about what you would expect to pay per seat with a large volume purchase from MS

For a fairer comparasion, given the number of tools that ship with SuSE, you'd need to add in the volume cost of Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and the like. However some of the tools shipped with SuSE are less fully featured or standards-compatible than the Microsoft/Windows equivalents so you can't necessarily consider Kdevelop and Anjuta to have the same dollar value as Visual Studio (which has some nice features not present in Kdevelop or Anjuta, for example, and shipping both Kdevelop and Anjuta offers a nice choice but not much more functionality than shipping just one, simply very slightly different functionality).

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[gowen]

some of the tools shipped with SuSE are less fully featured or standards-compatible than the Microsoft/Windows equivalents

Fully featured, I'd grant you, but unless you count MS Word files as a "standard", I'd be interested to know which SuSE tools you consider less standards-compatible than the Microsoft/Windows equivalents.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[maxpublic]

The per seat cost at retail is about what you would expect to pay per seat with a large volume purchase from MS.

You might want to clarify that you're talking about the per-cost seat of SUPPORT. The per-cost seat of PURCHASE is the price of one SUSE Professional box, divided by the number of workstations you're going to install it on.

Max

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[AaronGTurner]

Well many Microsoft tool formats are defacto standards, so MS Word files may not be an official standard, but compatibility with them is a requirement. Other MS file formats are also effective standards if you need to communicate with other business users. The ones I had specifically in mind were Microsoft Project and Visio. Whilst SuSE contains tools that cover some of the Project and Visio functionality (although the Microsoft products are superior in these areas, and I say that as someone who runs Linux at work and home) they do it less well and don't (as far as I know) have the ability to save files in the native Microsoft formats. Thus if I want to collaborate on a diagram with someone who is running Visio essentially I have to run Visio as well. I can run Visio under Crossover Office, at least, and it works well.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[gowen]

Oh, fair enough then. I thought thats what you meant.

It's often said that deFacto standards are the only ones that matter, and I tend to agree.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[advocate_one]

which even for me at home with five machines works out to be peanuts... the only way to be cheaper with ms-windows is to use pirated software...

hey, it's even cheaper for me this time... it's my brother's turn to order the boxed set... so we've got some 8 installs for the price of one boxed set... you'd think some of these people moaning about the price would club together to buy a boxed set between them...

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[afidel]

Of course. For almost any business purchasing per seat licensing is more about support than it is about aquiring the software. Heck half the time you double pay for OS licensing with MS agreements but it's part of a larger package which includes support for all of your software.

btw whoever modded my origional post flaimbait is a complete moron, I was seriously inquiring about volume pricing.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[Anonymous Coward]

I also wonder how strong their support team is.

Novell's support team on other products was *excellent* - far better than Oracle, IME. My only interaction with Microsoft support (large customer with mappoint limitations) got the total brushoff leading them to switch away from our company's software and away from microsoft solutions in favor of ESRI's mapping products.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd think some of these people moaning about the price would club together to buy a boxed set between them...

But surely that would be illegal, wouldn't it? Not everything on that disc is licensed with redistribution rights, is it (copyrighted logos, etc)?

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

Make that 5 boxes. This thread mentions the SuSE Boxed Set distro granting Liberty from Microsoft.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[AaronGTurner]

I like open standards, but if I have to send someone something that they will be using with Visio, etc., then I have no choice but to send it in a format that they can manipulate in Visio. For read-only documents there are many more options, of course.

Re:Wonder what volume pricing is

[Anonymous Coward]

According to SuSE it is and was always legal to copy and share their distributions.

there will be no personal any more

[Anonymous Coward]

their official main shop/store in germany is:

www.edv-buchversand.de.

they clearly state on their page:
http://www.edv-buchversand.de/suse/92/index2.html
at the very bottom:

[quote]
Eine Personal-Edition gibt es seit Version 9.2 nicht mehr!
[/quote]

translate that to english or whatever your language is and you will be enlightened

Re:there will be no personal any more

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, but that still doesn't answer my question if they will offer it for download.

As I said, it's clear that they won't have a boxed version of the personal edition.

Re:there will be no personal any more

[TractorBarry]

Well Alta-Vista translated that as

"A personnel edition does not give it since version 9.2 to no more!"

So I'm still in the dark ;)

Das is nix gut !

Re:there will be no personal any more

[PeterPumpkin]

"As of version 9.2, a personal edition is not being offered anymore."

Re:there will be no personal any more

[TractorBarry]

Cheers !

But I did really guess that's what it meant, I just liked the translation (I'm quite a fan of such stuff)

ho ho ho ;)

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Which version of 2.6???

[lanc]

Hey, SuSE always patched the vanilla kernel with tons of patches, enhancements, flavours. And since they belong to Novell, I kind of got interested in SuSE, there could be some efficient result coming out of this merge. Though before their Novell times I always diskliked the distro, but it's kind of getting mature. I wouldn't worry about trivial problems at this release.

I mean I guess so :) Maybe I should just give it a shot again, since my debian-centralization has it's disadvantages as well.

what do u mean? u can install as many times u want

[Anonymous Coward]

pricing is neglectible cos u pay once for example for a company, for the retail box, and u are allowed to install the media to as many boxens servers and shit as you wish.

its your own decision.

thats called gpl and opensource. u dont have to buy a billion times suse 9.2 for a billion boxes (inside your company, home, friends).

only you are not allowed to make copies and sell them, or upload the images/media/iso to public networks cos of the partly commercial shit inside.

but u can go to your friends personally, give them the cd for installing, install it on a trillion boxes and all this.

suse reflections

[uberjoe]

I used suse for two releases (9 and 9.1) and I really liked it. For the most part it just worked, I think even my mom could have used it just fine. But I rarely learn anything about my system by having it work all the time. I've learned more about linux by using slackware, which has very few gui tools, and a lot of cli tools. In suse my wheel mouse was setup automatically, in slackware it worked perfectly AFTER I researched the problem with google and found the lines to add to my xorg.conf file. I guess what I'm trying to say is that suse is great but it's not for everyone, not me anyway.

Re:suse reflections

[wagemonkey]

Not to criticize uberjoe but SuSE can't win here - and neither can anyone else.
Some people (like uberjoe) think SuSE is too easy to use and on the other hand there are always people hammering on about "when will linux be ready for the desktop?".
What's a distro to do?

I use SuSE on my workstation, as I want an OS that *works* - and I like KDE.
I'm starting to set up a server box for the fun/learning factor and I'll probably go for gentoo.
I might even try debian or BSD, even if it is dying...

BTW In older versions of SuSE I had to get my wheelmouse working myself too - give slackware a few years :-)

Re:suse reflections

[rdc_uk]

"But I rarely learn anything about my system by having it work all the time."

It all depends if you have something better than "making it work" that you actually want to get done with your computer.

Personally I firmly moved in to the opposite camp to yours this year; I need and want my computers to be TOOLS now. I have 0 tolerance for them needing tweaking for things like wheel-mice, or more specifically in my case, no time to learn how to recompile the kernel just to install video drivers. (the secret shame of linux...)

Re:suse reflections

[uberjoe]

Well if your computer is a tool to you, that you need to work all the time (like my mom and my wife, pattern??)then great, use suse, as I said *it works*.

But if you are like me and you computer is more of a hobby, then I would recommend slackware or gentoo or debian.

And by the way I recompile my kernel for usb networking with my sharp zaurus, not video drivers:)

Re:suse reflections

[megarich]

its cool you like to learn but can i ask.. why is it when a scrollie thingy works in windows everyone just like yea whatever its suppose to do that. now that linux has that capibility to do that its a disadvantage because it works just as easy as windows so you "can't learn"??? this is just me but i rather not worry about trivial things like that so i can focus my learning elsewhere like setting up server or firewalls or maybe breaking something msyelf just for shiz and giggles.

Re:suse reflections

[uberjoe]

Linux comes in different flavors for different people with different goals and needs. I'm not criticising suse for being easy to use, I'm thrilled that there are distros out there like suse and mandarke and redhat that people like my mom could use. It's just not what I wan't out of a linux box.

Re:suse reflections

[Anonymous Coward]

I can confirm that. A SuSE installation and configuration is easier than the Windows counterpart. I was a total newbie at the time I installed it (the only command I knew was 'ls'), and I am still, because it just works.

It's a great distro. I installed Fedore afterwards, but I was hugely disappointed.

Re:suse reflections

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a distro to do?

Give the user an option at install and/or upgrade time?

Or is that too obvious?

Re:suse reflections

[Anonymous Coward]

I've learned more about linux by using slackware,

I can see a new "enhancement" SuSE can add to educate people like uberjoe.

When you install X, SuSE could randomly break 3 lines in XFree86.conf Xorg.conf one of the drivers, X11.h, or 3 random functions in libX11.so

It'd then pop up a 'vi' window with the message saying "ha ha uberjoe, I broke three random things. use this window to fix them".

More seriously, uberjoe, just because it works doesn't mean you aren't allowed to look and see why it works. In fact, isn't it a better reference point than a broken distro.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[MikeBabcock]

That's just FUD. I use 2.6.8.1 at home right now with Fedora Core 2 and it runs cdrecord and cdrecord-ProDVD fine on my combo DVD/CD burner.

For what its worth, I compile my own kernel with my own options, but no patches applied.

Also, it runs Wine fine, and I play Morrowind regularly with it.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[MKalus]

Up until Version 7 they had ISO images available. They changed their policy because they wanted / needed the revenue, and in essence there is nothing wrong with it, now is there?

I bought 9.1 and I might download the 9.2 iso and upgrade, we'll see when the time comes.

Outlook server?

[Doc Ruby]

Novell offers the Open-Xchange server for SuSE (and other Linux) as their groupware replacement for MS Exchange. But to connect to it with Outlook, you have to install their MAPI store, iSLOX, on the client machine. Yesterday, PalmOne announced they've licensed the Exchange server sync protocol, so they can offer Outlook-type clients, that connect to actual Exchange servers, without the (usually clueless) client user having to add any software at all. Sure, it's criminal for Microsoft to lock down their protocols, locking competitors out of the market they dominate. But at least they're licensing it to competitors now. Novell's got a lot of money; why don't they license it to include an "Exchange stub" in their O-X server?

Re:Outlook server?

[julesh]

Because the license will almost certainly include an NDA, and ISTR they've released openexchange under an open source license now (is that right, or was I imagining it?), so they can't.

Re:Outlook server?

[Doc Ruby]

O-X is GPL. Novell sells SLOX and GroupWare as proprietary, or at least commercially licensed, compatible upgrades. If they licensed the sync protocol, and sold a servlet binary, we could all plug it in and use it. Or maybe just bundle it with the commercial SLOX, and thereby encourage more sales. Marketing by technical feature upgrade - rather than merely submitting PR to Slashdot, for cranks like me to critique.

What's advanced here?

[Bruha]

I paid for 9.1 Professional, Gaim was broke and you couldnt get a new 64bit compile from suse of the fixed version to save your life. They just farmed me out to ask the community for a fixed version. With no true workstation install you have to get all the compilers and such installed. And even then the 64bit version was missing packages that the 32bit version was not. So you couldnt compile a 64bit version if you wanted.

I had high hopes of Novell buying SuSe only to see not much being done with it. Patches to broken applications if made available need to be recompiled in a timely manner and be available to the users. Telling a customer to find it on the web is the wrong answer.

Re:What's advanced here?

[Zenophran]

Wow, Linspire must really be advanced if you've been using it since 2005 :)

Re:What's advanced here?

[acceleriter]

I had high hopes of Novell buying SuSe . . .

Those hopes were pretty misplaced, considering Novell has what appears to be the Midas touch in reverse with anything they get their hands on, WordPerfect being the first example that comes to mind.

Re:What's advanced here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you actually pay for support?

lack of templates == dealkiller

[mckwant]

We've got a relatively disparate group of "web developers," who are, at least partially, retrained admin assistants. I know, I'm not happy about it either, but without the restricted areas, our web page would return to the mishmash of styles that these people think "look good."

Seriously, one of my guys REALLY loves orange text. It's just not gonna happen.

We'd love to move off of DW, as we're getting tired of some of its odd quirks. Anybody got any OSS recommendations? I'm all ears.

Re:lack of templates == dealkiller

[chris_mahan]

Find a jEdit guru, and have him do a demo. I just did one last night to one of our new devs (who just had to have DW) and his jaws just hit the floor when I showed him some of the more esoteric featured.

Re:lack of templates == dealkiller

[puddpunk]

are you able to tell us a little more about this?

What plugins did you use etc...

Thanks,
Chris

Re:lack of templates == dealkiller

[chris_mahan]

I do a standard install, (4.2 final)
then installed plugins:

ftp,
buffertabs
navigator
xmlindenter
gfxvie w
code2html
columnruler
Editor scheme selector
Lineguides
background (eye candy really)

I then configured buffertabs by default, enabled searchbar, demonstrated hybersearch and regular expression search. I then set up emulate tabs as spaces, line numbers in the gutter, vertical cursor indicator, click to open & click to close in file manager

Then, demoed:
ftp access of files
split screens (vertical, horizontal splits)
Automatic tag completion (/)
mutliple file open and close
word-completion (ctrl-b)
vertical block selection (ctrl+mouse)
folds expansion/contraction
text macro color picker
matching tag highlighting, bracketing and line display
Markers

The guy was sold.

Re:lack of templates == dealkiller

[puddpunk]

Sounds awesome :) I use JEdit for my Java development mostly but it comes in handy with c/c++ too. I'll take a look at some of those plugins you pointed out.

Cheers,
Chris.

Crossover Office

[vlad_petric]

Here

Need I say more :) ?

So close! When will we get the perfect SME-server?

[zuse]

While this discussion is mostly about the fantastic new features of some new desktop package, what I'm wondering about is if SuSE has managed to improve SuSEs server setuptools.

I'd been running samba/samba-tng network for the last 4/5 years on different distros but I have yet to see a distro that makes it easy to set up a basic serversetup for a small business network (dhcp,bind,samba and nfs) without having to use the commandline +++.

The shocker is how close SuSE is to achieving this in 9.1 - but that they didn't bother to go the last mile.

This would make it a kickass product for many SMEs.

As of 9.1 the following things are missing:

• Autogeneration of the initial LDAP-database. I know some think ldap sucks but actually most of the other parts of ldapsupport is allready there.
  
• A yast interface for simple Certificate Authorty handling.
  
• Simple configuration of dynamic dhcp/dns updates. I tried to use yast in 9.1 but it just plainly didn't work and was buggy.
  
• A suggested roadmap for how you should use a SuSE server to integrate your Windows, Linux and Mac-boxes. This should include suggested loginscripts, ways to use the same mozilla profile accross OS'es and a simple way to set NFS shares to the same shares as samba uses.
  

The press release says that they have adressed these issues (aehm, it says a redesigned user interface to permit easier setup of SAMBA, DNS and DHCP servers whatever that means), let's hope they have.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[rudolfel]

my 2.6.8 kernel doesn't keep me from using my cdburner ;-)
Maybe yours is broken :-)

Notice They're Using Bleeding-Edge X.Org

[Lethyos]

The X.Org Foundation's new X Window System X11R.6.8.1 also contributes to overall better hardware support.

So does this mean SuSE is going to be one of the first "user-friendly" distros to offer OSX-esque eye-candy like drop-shadows and transparency?

In the meantime...

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE for PowerPC languishes at 7.3.

deep offense

[fionbio]

I said it figurativelly. Shipping a compiler that ICEs is like figurativelly pissing in my beer.

Re:Nvu - wowee

[AaronGTurner]

Surely FrontPage Express rather than Wordpad?

Kontact's Connectivity

[twener]

The poster seems to prefer Evolution, so please note that SUSE's Kontact has also Groupwise and Exchange connectivity besides SLOX, eGroupware and Kolab.

Network mounting netware filesystems natively

[rlgoer]

SUSE 9.2 is all well and good, as another Linux distro.

But how well does it integrate with Novell's own products?

For example, can SUSE 9.2 network mount a Netware volume? Or do we have to use Novell's 'native file access' and export it using SMB (ugh)?

Also, if we can mount Netware volumes, can we do anything significant with them? E.g., can we set rights?

Is ConsoleOne actually working (with all the plug-ins we have under Windows) with SUSE 9.2?

I'd be pleased to hear that all these things were possible, but I'm inclined to doubt they are given what I've seen thus far....

Re:Network mounting netware filesystems natively

[Zenophran]

From what I understand, mounting a netware volume will be available in Open Enterprise Server. Basically it's SLES 9.1 or Netware 7 with all the Novell services running on top. You can choose either kernel to use and it "should" act similarly. This even includes NSS volume support apparently.

We're itching to get it at work so we can consolidate our file servers and mail (Notes/Domino) on to one box. It worked well with Novell's Linux services v1 in our dev environment.

Re:Network mounting netware filesystems natively

[sloanster]

Is ConsoleOne actually working (with all the plug-ins we have under Windows) with SUSE 9.2?

ConsoleOne (1.3.3 and 1.3.6) and plugins all good here under suse 9.1. I use it quite often to manage our edirectory servers...

Re:Network mounting netware filesystems natively

[IgorMrBean]

Wait about a month, and Novell will release their Open-Enterprise Server. This will be a merge between Netware 6.5 & SuSE Enterprise Server 9. NSS will be available, Certificate server, etc. For ConsoleOne, i affraid No, but again, Novell annouces for this winter ZENworks plugins for iManager...

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[account_deleted]

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I, for one,

[Gothmolly]

welcome our new green chameleon overlords.

Re:I, for one,

[Scud]

Better known as the order of the stoned lizard.

Dang...

[whiteranger99x]

And I just got the Linux Technical Resource kit, based on SuSE 9.1 :P

Although I havent had a chance to really play with it and they aren't accepting orders anymore, it's really an interesting display of what Novell has to bring to the table as far as SuSE and their other products are concerned :)

Well, there's always this weekend if I don't suddenly get a life ;)

Who's a dope?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

We put Linux and Macs everywhere we can. We run Windows only where we have no choice (as in interfacing with clients who use MS apps). So we have a handful of Windows systems (mostly laptops), one Windows server (required for Great Plains), and
everything else, front and back, is Linux, Mac or Solaris.

Frankly, I don't know any of the "dopes" you refer to. Most IT people who use Linux (BSD, whatever) have Linux on their own desktops if they can, but otherwise start in the server room.

But no Windows compatibility???

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seeing a lot of the same old stuff but no emphasis on Windows migration. No talk of Wine or CodeWeavers integrated like in Xandros. The VPN is nice for the business users but there is no talk of Windows peer-to-peer networking or Active Directory support so it's going to have a tough time fitting into a real corporate environment where Windows is still running rampant. I'll stick with Xandros.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[whiteranger99x]

Well, even though they we're stingy on the ISO downloads for a while (I avoided them like the plague then), I've installed 9.1 and I've been really impressed so far.

Failing that, wouldn't it have been possible to perform an FTP or HTTP install? I know many distributions let you do it now, but I'm not too sure about then.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Daengbo]

I'm not going to dispute you, but this is a well-known bug, not FUD. Many of us are still running 2.6.7 in Debian because 2.6.8 (any version) is still broken. I don't know what you did to get it to work, but the Debian bug report says that 2.6.8.1 wasn't fixed.

How they feel on 9.1 Pro (and 8.0 Enterprise)

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Gnome is pretty much Gnome, KDE is pretty much KDE. I did end up with both a KDE and a GNOME "home" icon on my GNOME desktop, but I had some issues related to conversion from legacy SLackware and RedHat config file sin my home directory, plus I installed in a couple of stages, so it's hard to say whose fault that is.

I prefered the version of GNOME that came in RH8, but the new one is plenty GNOMish under SuSe. I'm less familiar with KDE, but it certainly looks and feels like KDE to me.

Since I'm running SuSe on a 500MHz system, I explored all the desktops, then switched back to ctwm. 8^/

FWIW, we also have a couple of dual Opterons at work running 8.0 Enterprise (or whatever they call it). KDE and GNOME also seemed pretty normal there.

now I can wait on my failed 9.0 = 9.1 upgrade

[e40]

Perhaps 9.0 => 9.2 will work.

Basically, the upgrade failed (and left my system in a partially upgraded state, requiring me to restore from backup tapes) due to some internal error. Yes, I have an older system (dual Celeron 500's). Red Hast was happy on it before the upgrade to SuSE 9.0, though.

Since I purchased the professional, I figured I'd get support. Not so. I was told, because of the error I got, I had to do a "manual upgrade", but that's not covered by professional support. And, I had to wait weeks to be told this. Perhaps it was the language barrier.

Since the system involved is fairly critical, I deicded to leave it at 9.0. I'm a little wary now of SuSE.

Re:now I can wait on my failed 9.0 = 9.1 upgrade

[visualight]

Suse upgrades kinda suck. I tried a few times, without complete success. You're better off just giving up, back up your data, wipe your / partition and start over. In six to eight months be prepared to do it again.

Re:now I can wait on my failed 9.0 = 9.1 upgrade

[Bruj0]

I have used all the mayor distros, and the only ones that i had success upgrading were Debian and Gentoo.
In gentoo case theres no even upgrading the distro per se.
Just the packages you want newer version becouse of new features. All the rest can be kept.

Re:now I can wait on my failed 9.0 = 9.1 upgrade

[Scud]

I purchased 9.1 as well (as well as every version from 5.1 on up) and pretty much had to give up on it due to the SubFS problem. After two emails requesting support for my *paid for* version, I gave up and shipped the whole works of to a guy in England who wanted a copy. I just got done installing Mandrake over it. Buh-bye.

Basically their support sucks, I've had support questions in the past which have been ignored as well.

I'll try out 9.2, but I won't be buying it. Maybe 9.3, maybe not.

Re:now I can wait on my failed 9.0 = 9.1 upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, that's a major turn-off for me. I know running apt-get on a RedHat/Fedora box, upgrading works, no need to wipe and re-install. I'm seriously considering SUSE considering the many positive comments I hear about it, but I have a few questions,
1) how easy is it to upgrade... looks like you answered that.
2) free version? I hear the ISOs and such are difficult to come by unless you buy a retail box (I'm a cheap student who won't be buying anything).
3) home/light version? So if I followed everything correctly, I can't download the full version. If I got the light version, can I just download/update with additional RPMS to get those additional features?
4) how does yast compare to apt-get? is there anything analagous to the unofficial repositories for Fedora such as freshrpms in the SUSE world?

I'm a little more nervous about jumping off the RedHat boat now... hmm.. thx to anyone who answers.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[Anonymous Coward]

I think SuSE basically allways offered free FTP installation. You just have to wait a couple of weeks after the official boxed release...

I knew this was coming!

[jht]

This announcement was inevitable. Because I just got around to installing 9.1 on test hardware from the kit Novell just sent me a few weeks ago.

From what I've seen of 9.1, though, it's maturing rapidly - and that's got to be good. Personally, I use it mainly on a VM under Virtual PC on my PowerBook. Performance is surprisingly good, and much better than XP under the same environment (with all the XP eye candy turned off). I also run it on a PC VMware VM, where it behaves well, and so on.

I do think the two releases per year target is kind of arbitrary and silly for the most part, though. Novell/SuSE should be concentrating on supporting and updating the existing release over a year or so, and then release a new version when enough spiffy new stuff is out there to justify it. Other than Bluetooth support, improved wireless, and some new apps I don't see a lot of real justification for this version.

Re:I knew this was coming!

[Zemran]

You are lucky, I only just got around to buying 9.1 and have not had time to install it. Now I am not sure if I will use 9.1 (I have 9) or wait until 9.2... I feel that I want a refund :(

Re:I knew this was coming!

[angrykeyboarder]

I figured this would happen too. I got my Free 9.1 DVD (thanks to a tip in a past /. article) a month or so ago and have yet to get around to installing it. I can't decide if I want to try it or another distro.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[theendlessnow]

Under Novell's leadership they released the first free version of SuSE on ISO that I can ever recall hearing about.

Then you must only be a few years old. Come on! SUSE had free ISO downloads clear up to 7.3... while that may seem ancient, remember 8.0 came out in 2002! Support for 7.3 and the ability (apart from mirrors that still exist) to get ISOs ended December 2003.

SUSE has provided a mechansim by which their software can be downloaded... perhaps not as convenient as ISOs for some, but you can always get ISOs from your local LUG... I'm sure that someone there will burn you a set for free.

Now, SuSE has the chance to actually gain marketshare against RedHat and force them to work harder on Fedora.

SUSE actually has more marketshare than you realize. Do you not know that over 90% of large scale enterprise deployments occur using SUSE?? Why? Because Red Hat was VERY, VERY late to the game when it came to supporting things like the mainframe.

When IBM was looking for vendor distribution support for the mainframe, SUSE dropped them a release on their doorstep. Red Hat came armed with contracts and "deals" (before they would even consider supporting the platform).

Which enterprise dist was first to provide logical volume support? Dynamically resizeable live file system support? A graphical and TEXT(!) based administration utility? Key integrated Unix features like NIS and NFS? Even LDAP?
Then ask, what enterprise dist was first to provide an unreleased private fork of GCC and its libraries, graphical-only administration tools (e.g. just like Windows requires a graphical head...), numerous kernel hacks that were not well tested, an NIS subsystem and automounter that is not well behaved or integrated, ...

SUSE's motto is "Have a lot of fun!". Now... we can all argue that having a lot of fun doesn't put bread on the table... but the guys sure are motivated when it comes to trying to their best to come out with solid technology that's easy to use.

IMHO, Novell brings the typical American business angle to SUSE (now they can be just like Red Hat). While some might argue that Red Hat is the most pro open source company out there... remember they also have vigorously protected their trademark (there's a whole story on that... but too long to write about here) to prevent those "free" CD's from bearing Red Hat's name. In many ways, Red Hat has shown more old-style IP protectionism than people realize. They're just a whole lot slicker (stealthier) about how they do it.

I liked SUSE better as a private company. However, IBM needs a real enterprise level player to help them provide enterprise level solutions... so you can kind of blame IBM for the whole Novell acquisition thing.. it brings a large scale support arm (that dwarfs Red Hat) and the flexibility of SUSE which has always had a better Unix integration philosophy (Red Hat is a GNU/Linux dist, SUSE is a GNU/Linux dist with the experience of former large scale enterprise Unix types).

Anyone who has been in the industry can tell you that Red Hat tends to have a "if it's not Linux, then it sucks" attitude. SUSE tends to have a "hey if we change this a bit, we'll integrate better with existing Unix systems" attitude. Now, which style is more enterprise focused??

With that said, Red Hat was the first publically traded American based Linux dist. Being publically traded goes a LONG way with American businesses (you protect my tail, I'll protect yours). It's easier to make "deals" when you are dealing with a public company. It's a "safer" business situation for large enterprises (sort of a good ole boy system). Anyone who has help take a company from private to public can fill in the details about what I mean there.

Well.. now there's Novell/SUSE. But the problem is that large enterprises got somewhat burnt by Novell in the past (doesn't matter if it's just perception... perception is all that matters). So, now businesses will choos

Nvu?

[dfj225]

Has anyone tried Nvu? I never heard about it until today. If it works, it seems like a great program, as I currently don't use FP (because it sucks) and Dreamweaver because it is expensive. I think I'll give it a try on my OS X box when I get home tonight.

Re:Nvu?

[MasterLordSatan]

"Has anyone tried Nvu? I never heard about it until today. If it works, it seems like a great program"> I've been using Nvu for awhile now. It's not a version 1.x release yet so expect some bugs. Thankfully, there's an official Nvu forum for discussion & reporting of bugs. I've found it more enjoyable to use than Mozilla's Composer but again, there's still some bugs but most of them aren't too annoying and one can carry out their work within Nvu without much trouble. I look forward to the 1.x releases, it's a very nice little program and I can't wait for it to mature.

Re:Nvu?

[angrykeyboarder]

I've you've ever used Netscape or Mozilla Composer, you've used Nvu (with somewhat fewer features).
Nvu was started from the Mozilla Composer code base. I discovered it earlier this year and I love it. It's perfect for my needs.

Novell Resource Kit

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

me too, but it arrived so late (due to it being repackaged with Enterprise v9.0) that i had already installed the .iso version. however, i will re-install 9.1 Pro and purchase the 9.2 upgrade.

Re:So close! When will we get the perfect SME-serv

[T3kno]

While I fully agree with you, I have to disagree with one point, that last mile is a marathon :) I rolled my own solution using Gentoo. OpenLDAP + Samba + Courier IMAP + Kerberos + DHCP + DNS + SSL, and it was a bear. A fun, interesting and challenging bear, but still a bear. There is a ton of configuration in many different places, I can't tell you how many hours were spent in newsgroups, mailing lists, source, and especially the LDAP schemas getting the damned thing to work. Now that it's working I love it, but it was a long road.

On the other hand I am one person and I was the only one working on this, and I have no doubt that SuSE / Novell can easily pull off this feat and if they need help I'm available (wink wink nudge nudge). The process really needs to be bug free though, any screwups here and all of the sudden people can't login to the domain, no mail, my home directory is gone, etc.

The other really frustrating thing I found is the lack of LDAP support in just about everything Windows. A certain windows email client will search LDAP sort of, but unless you're speaking Microsofts own LDAP the support is at about 60% at best. Even with Microsofts objectClasses, attributeTypes and names Outlook still wont read some fields. Thunderbird and Evolution do a way better job on that front. Nothing will edit LDAP records though, and that's a bummer. JXplorer to the rescue.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

ACPI support for Thinkpad R40

[gsasha]

<rant>I wonder if SUSE will be any better than Mandrake 10.1 on the laptop. It (Mandrake), like any previous version, has a huge problem with ACPI on Thinkpad R40 - it suspends just find, but never wakes up :(
I know it's probably a kernel problem... but still, they both *do* declare laptop support. </rant>.

Personal Edition was crippled anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Professional Edition is a little pricey, about the price of an OEM version of XP Professional. I wonder if being unemployed qualifies you for the student discount. It's a minor before the fact vs. after the fact distinction.

Re:Personal Edition was crippled anyway

[colinrichardday]

Hmm. . . Of course, where can one buy an OEM version of Windows XP professional? And how much treeware does XP Pro include? And can I install it on more than one machine? What server software does XP Pro have?
Does one have to activate an OEM copy of Win XP Pro?

Also, Office Depot charges $199 (US) for the upgrade version of Windows XP Pro, so your price seems a bit low.

Final nail in the coffin...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for BSD.

Is there anyway for it to survive this mauling?

I for one will mourn its passing.

SuSe For Me

[megarich]

Our company uses Suse on most of our engineer's desktops (ranging from 7.3 to 9.1 and everything in between).

In general I am very happy and pleased with Suse especially seeing how for it came since the 7.0 days. YAST and SAX2 advanced nicely where you can almost feel comfortable about configuring a linux machine. And now they try to have "plug and play" capibilities.

Yes, like any other os or distribution, it has its downfalls and it does have a couple of issues the urks the hell out of me(like so many default start up scripts and one of them can cause problems on the 64 bit platform). But I do give Suse/Novell alot of credit seeing how much they advanced over the 2 year time since i've first been introduced to Suse.

You're making stuff up...

[aber]

From the SuSE site:

Main memory: At least 128 MB; 256 MB recommended

And that's probably for the default kde desktop install. If you use something lighter you should be ok with less memory.

And, of course, it will probably install even if you're running on much less than the minimum req.

Re:You're making stuff up...

[gasp]

Try it before you say stuff. SuSE 9.1's installer flatly refuses to install on less than the minimum memory requirement. I expect the same from 9.2.

Re:You're making stuff up...

[hyperlinx]

Speculation abounds...I'm currently running SuSE 9.1 Personal (free as in beer, download edition) on a Dell Latitude CP laptop with 64mb ram, 233mhz processor....using wireless lan pcmcia card (dlink dwl-650 (atheros chipset)).....no i don't play 3d games on it, but for checkin email and /. while watchin movies with my wife instead of sitting in a computer room, it works great. Bought it cheap on ebay for just a experimental project on running a linux-based router and firewall system....really liked size and functionality so I just kept using it. Had to read about and play a bit with wireless settings, but that's what free linux is all about. Pay for the boxed edition and u can get call in tech support.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Gactaculon]

He's probably running 2.6.8.1, but with a patchset like gentoo-dev or CK, both of which implement a fix for the CD recording bug. At any rate, this certainly will not affect the SuSE release, as they are plenty competent enough to pull in a patch either from 2.6.9 or one of the other tested 2.6.8 derivatives.

Novell Suse--

[matt-fu]

At the government institution I work at, Linux has been slowly phasing out Solaris for just about everything. We use SuSE because it's been rock solid and easy to do everything with on whatever cheap hardware we threw at it. We have a couple machines running other distros but SuSE was far and away the most used multitool on our Unix belt.

Then we got SuSE 9.1, which managed to invalidate every one of the statements in sentence #2. Our Unix team has literally wasted weeks on 9.1 related installation, usability, and stability issues. I've been very unimpressed with Novell's handling of SuSE since the handoff and I'm not sure it's worth giving another shot with 9.2. The lack of quality control is amazing to me.

Re:Novell Suse--

[nonmaskable]

Could you mention specific issues you have with it?

I switched to SuSE from RedHat at about SuSE 8.0, and have had no problems migrating a fairly large codebase through all the revisions up to current 9.1

It's been rock solid on a variety of system types and the KDE environment is second to none for usability.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[jocknerd]

What bug are you referring to? I'm running Debian with the 2.6.8-1-686 kernel and my cd burner works fine. I remember I did have to go back and change some settings in /etc/default/cdrecord. It works fine now.

Nvu

[musselm]

I tried Nvu about a month ago but put it away because it lacks too many things I rely on in Dreamweaver.

The biggest missing part at this point is the file-management Dreamweaver has tackled so well. In Dreamweaver you can define a local site as well as a remote site, work on local files and upload them easily, browse remote files, etc., etc.

But Nvu so far lets you define one site, that site being your remote, live site. Too non-useful yet.

That said, Nvu will get there eventually, and it should rival Dreamweaver's rich features, including syntax-coloring, find-and-replacing, and on and on.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[AJWM]

Yes, you've been able to do network installs of SUSE since they discontinued the ISO images (and maybe before that, too). It's pretty easy, assuming you have a reasonable internet connection. (Don't try this on dial-up ;-)

I just _PURCHASED_ 9.1

[catalupus]

2 days ago I purchased 9.1 pro. D'oH! Do they do an upgrade path?

Re:I just _PURCHASED_ 9.1

[MattHaffner]

Same here! Just last week for me. Grumble, grumble... Hope they have a better option than that $59.95 update edition.

Re:I just _PURCHASED_ 9.1

[rpdillon]

I did a lot of research on SuSe before I installed in on my laptop, and found through a lot of reading that Novell doesn't really expect you to buy every version. If you go to their FTP or a mirror, you'll find that almost all updates can be obtained:

1)Through FTP for the given version (i.e. 9.1)
2)Through Yast Update
3)In the "supplemental" directory on the FTP

I have 9.1 Professional, but new kernels, KDE 3.3 and X.Org, first available "officially" in 9.2 have been available for some time in the "Supplemental" FTP directroy for a while now.

They expect the more tech saavy users to update that way, and the less tech saavy users to either not update (OK, who is still running Win98?) or to pay for the upgrade package.

I hear you, but...

[mckwant]

Example: My geek wife and I just bought notebooks. Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi).

We didn't buy these as development workstations, just boxes we could carry around. Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works. Cygwin does most of what I need anyway.

I don't consider that box to be horribly outdated, but if the grandparent's accurate, then I'm probably better off in Windows anyway. I'm not asking to run KDE 3 on a P60/16M/500M here.

I'll check back in a year or so, but in the meantime, forget it. Reinstalling various distros got old after the third or fourth time.

Re:I hear you, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

grandparent is not accurate. Minium requirements for Suse are 128mb, and they recommend 256. If you haven't given Suse 9.x a shot, try it on a seperate partition. Your system is just fine to run it.

works for me

[Anubis350]

I'm running debian testing with kernel 2.6.8-1 and I can use my burners fine.....

Re:works for me

[Daengbo]

See here

re: sig -- I haven't read Amber in over 20 years. Is it still popular?

Re:works for me

[Anubis350]

interesting. I had to modify some permisions to get it to work, so the fact that it needs root permisions + loopholes to work makes sense. I didnt think about it at the time (thought it was a bug with the record tools, though I guess in part it is as they need to use loopholes to work), but I guess the whole problem is caused by a kernel bug afterall.

As for the sig, Amber is an amazing series. Zelazny was one of the best scifi/fantasy authors around, I doubt his stuff will die anytime soon. Always good to meet another Amber fan though!

Cheers,
--Aaron

"seemlessly"

[ThreeDayMonk]

Give me a replacement for Exchange that ... works seemlessly with Outlook...

Well, I'll agree that Outlook is unseemly, but I think that the word you were looking for was seamlessly.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Daengbo]

Bug #267338 (note the "Update 2: The problem is NOT fixed in 2.6.8.1"

From here: Consensus on this seems to be that the kernel will not be fixed, that the old way the userland tools used to speak to the burners involve security holes, and thus the userland tools (cdrecord and co) need to be fixed.

Another thread here: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13501 &highlight=

I understand that cdrecord works properly when run as root, so maybe that's what you're doing (maybe suid)?

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Anonymous Coward]

2.6.8 broke burning for me in Debian unstable (except as root). apt-get remove kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7. Bang! God, I love Debian.

Ximian is dying

[poptones]

No one seems dare mention this. Since the big fanfare over Novell scooping up Ximian, how many news releases have there been? Even with this next anounced release, how much talk is there of Ximian? The Gnome desktop in 9.1 was pretty much unusable on my system (even basic video overlay support did not work properly) and that came well after the initial fanfare. Now here it is many months later, and still no talk of the wonderful Ximian stuff save for the corporate email extenders. Is mono even part of this latest version fo Suse? What was the point of it all?

Suse shows no signs of moving toward a Gnome desktop. About the best gnome users can hope for at this point is more support for open desktop - which might, in itself, be a very good thing.

Suse might have it in the corporate world, but for my own personal use (and most of my friends) I've still found nothing better than Mandrake. After using 10.1 for a few weeks, I'm now more convinced of this than ever.

Re:Ximian is dying

[Fouquet]

I find this to be a very intersting claim:

The Gnome desktop in 9.1 was pretty much unusable

I regularly use the gnome with suse 9.1, and haven't had any problems. I hear (and read on /.) that people have issues with gnome, but don't know what it is that they are doing. Please tell me what you are trying to do that gnome doesn't work for!

I use gnome daily for work, and haven't found anything that I'd like it to do that it doesn't (not quite true, I wish I could switch workspaces with the mouse by bumping against the edge, but can't figure out how to activate this feature in 2.4 - it works fine on my rh7.3 system).

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is true, it is related to some SCSI commands which are only allowed as root in 2.6.8.x. This is fixed only in 2.6.9rcX. But for example Mandrakelinux 10.1 is using 2.6.8.1 with the necessary patches from 2.6.9 tree, so that this will work. I'm sure SuSE will havce done the same.

NVU could go head-to-head with Drreamweaver.....

[heffrey]

....and lose

Exchange Rates

[manganese4]

According to the press release they sell the thing for $89.95 or 89,95 euro. At the current exchange rate, you could buy they in the US, fly to France and sell them for euros and pocket the 20 cents ont he dollar profit. Of course getting the 5000 units through customs might be an issue.

Better: Will Cisco/Linksys stop lipservice?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for Cisco to stop paying lip service to Linux and enable firmware upgrades to their BEFSR41 and other (BEFSX41, others) wired routers without needing to use a windows computer. The only thing I've seen for firmware upgrades up until now is an .exe executable. And this is strange, because watching the upgrade process, it appears all it is is a simple tftp get/put process, with one or two more steps thrown in. If I knew any more, I'd probably be able to figure it out (if its possible), but this shouldn't be necessary. These routers are being used more and more with Linux computers behind them. I don't have a single Windows computer in my lan, and the last time I had to upgrade firmware, I had to reinstall windows 98 on a computer I had to temporary reassemble to get the firmware updated. PIA.

Stop paying lip service to Linux and answer the damn questions Cisco. Everything went downhill after you bought Linksys. This is reflected in the number of firmware releases before/after purchase.

Nvu - Quanta Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

I just checked the testing archives for debian on nvu and it doesn't appear its in there. I'll take a look at unstable later. The ironic part is my distro includes Quanta Plus, but I gave up on wysiwyg on Quanta Plus this year as it appears that true wysiwyg appears to have been abandoned by the developers, in favor of what they coin "VPL" which isn't functional wysiwyg at all. Too bad because this is one of the limitations keeping a large number of individuals and small businesses from straying from Windows. I hope Nvu does a better job at wysiwyg than Quanta Plus does (although QP gets rave reviews by users who hate wysiwyg).

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[Jeff Mahoney]

No, not that version.

Distribution kernels typically add a number of patches to the vanilla version in order to better meet the needs of their users. This includes features like lkcd or external filesystems, but more importantly, it means that it has critical bug fixes that weren't released into a vanilla release kernel.

The SUSE Linux 9.2 kernel carries the version number of 2.6.8, but is actually based on 2.6.9-rc2, with critical bug fixes beyond that. Since 2.6.9 isn't yet released, it would be inaccurate to call the kernel 2.6.9, but it's hardly vanilla 2.6.8.

You can see just what's in the kernel by checking out SUSE Kernel of the Day, which is built from the CVS tree, and picking the appropriate subdirectory under there.

Can't you just apt-get or emerge to upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought you could simply

apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade

or

emerge sync && emerge -U world

Seems package managers make it pretty painless these days. Surely what SuSE uses (rug / red carpet or something like that?) can do similar, can't it?

what's to gain for joe average?

[pair-a-noyd]

For those of us that don't use wireless, or Gnome, what's the big benefit to upgrade?

I use 9.1 pro, KDE 3.3, kernel 2.6, 512m, p4-2ghz, Nvidia, and a few large drives. DVD burner, and broadband. Pretty much standard, run of the mill stuff. I use apt-get to keep it pretty much up to date. I don't use the unstable sources, I'm not that adventurous.

What reason should I upgrade? What would be the benefit to me, an average user? I run a very small business and do a few OO things. Nothing heavy duty at all.

It's my thinking that I should just sit tight and wait for for 10.1 (I hate dot oh's)...

Am I missing some super duper nifty hidden benefit here? I think that apt-get will keep my 9.1 pretty much on par with 9.2, right??

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on this whole post. First, where do you get
your 90% of all Linux deployments are SuSE? Second, mainframe linux is a TINY fraction
of the market. Most folks who run a mainframe have no inclination
to run Linux whatsoever. Why would they? Is VMS so buggy that you need a better OS? Will IBM cut you a break for running it? They didn't when my company evaluated it.

I challenge your assertion that SuSE offered tools that RH did not, but even if that's
correct why does it matter? RH favors stability over cool which actually matters to folks like myself who actually use Linux in a true enterprise environment. RH has the big names in kernel development working in-house. Can SuSE boast as many?
RH *IS* the most pro-open source company out there. Novell's bread and butter
is off of closed-source apps. Netware, eDirectory, and ZenWORKS have brought in a lot more revenue than their Ximian or SuSE acquisitions, so you're sounding plain dumb by asserting they are more open-source friendly than RH, who currently sells no closed source software that I'm aware of. Whose business model are they trying to rip off? Redhat's. They
had no OSS cred so they give away the exchange plugin for evo and YAST and folks like you forget everything. Jeez.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[OreoCookie]

This gets repeated over and over on /. "Now that XYZ Corp is giving away their software they'll really gain marketshare."

News-Flash: If you never pay for a companies products and only use the free downloads then you are not their customer, you are a leech and they don't care what you think.

Network....Card....Driver?

[voteforkerry78]

Hey, I have suse Linux 9.1 personal and i can't figure out how to use it with my wireless network. i have xp on the same pc. i'm no computer guy, i'm just learning, but apparently i need a "driver" or something. any help?

SUSE 9.2 and Novell Linux Desktop: Differences?

[reallocate]

Anyone have any insights about the differences between this 9.2 release and the forthcoming Novell Linux Desktop?

I gather the NLD will target the "enterprise" market. That could well mean it will be 9.2 plus a support agreement and a 3-digit price. Or, it might not.

More to the point, when are the things the Ximian developers are working on at Novell -- mono, Beagle, Dashboard, the Project Utopia stuff, etc. -- going to show up in $99 shrinkwrapped box?

Cost vs. Value

[bill_mcgonigle]

Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi)....Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works.

Unless your time is worthless you would have been better off putting some money into a decent laptop with a wireless card from a vendor that doesn't solely provide windows-binary drivers and no specs as Broadcom does. Especially if linux was the goal of the hardware.

It's hard to buy hardware with no linux support from a linux-hostile vendor and be surprised when linux is hard to get working.

I've heard good things about IBM and Toshiba laptops, though I use an Apple myself (who unfortunately uses Broadcom in their newest wireless cards). Mandrake and Redhat have searchable databases if you want actual recommendations.

Re:Cost vs. Value

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like you don't know well about Toshiba.
If anyone remembers Toshiba ACPI legacy-free PC and their cover-up for the bad design on their 5005-S504/S507 series (CPU overheat/UJDA710 CD-RW problem), you will never ever buy another Toshiba.

Quanta not wysiwyg

[Anonymous Coward]

More powerful? Yes. Can do more? Yes. XML editor? Yes. KDE app? Maybe. Doesn't come with a base KDE install unlike a lot of other KDE apps that come with base KDE. Doesn't come on Knoppix. Doesn't come on some other distros that include KDE.

wysiwyg? Not. The Quanta developers show the same disdain for wysiwyg that developers who use vi for page layout show. They hate wysiwyg so much that they didn't even bother calling their version wysiwyg, instead calling it "VPL", or visual page layout, or their superior version of wysiwyg. In other words, they are redefining what wysiwyg to what they think it should be, not what it really is. And if you don't like it? Write it yourself.

And you have a problem with Quanta? If you didn't read every bit of documentation, if you didn't search every corner of the email archives, if you didn't read the minds of the developers, if you didn't contribute code they pre-approved after reaming you out on what you think vs. what they are doing, if you didn't contribute money to an individual who couldn't be bothered to incorporate as a non-profit for deductability, if you don't get your question exactly right in a form and outline as approved by the lead developer after divining the correct form without asking, if you aren't already a developer who's made his bones and sees web development in the exact manner as the lead developer, if you aren't a code programmer who also happens to web develop, be prepared for your castration and beheading when you post on the mailing list.

wysiwyg is for novices. If you use Quanta Plus and don't contribute funds or some other help to the project, can't install the absolute latest version (not the one on the web site you fool, not the one that came with your distro you fool, you have dependency issues you fool? You don't know what header files are, you fool? You don't know what development packages are, you fool? expect to have your knees capped if you have the temerity to bother the developers.

If you are not a coding, kernel, distro, guru capable of compiling, using cvs, patching, and have many other talents, basically if you haven't made your bones in the linux development and coding fields, you simply have no business using, or daring to ask about, Quanta Plus. To do so is to waste valuable developer time. Go back to Windows, go back to Frontpage, go back to your miserable life in wysiwyg land.

Have you tried Redhat Support?

[bill_mcgonigle]

If something breaks or just doesn't even run how you'd like it to, you call Red Hat tell them whats up and they will take care of it. Red Hat's support is one of the best in the industry, up there with Dell and Veritas.

Yeah.. in theory.

Except if you've upgraded anything - from an older version or any of the packages.

Or you're using any hardware not on their "standard" list, like any firewire gear.

Then they won't talk to you other than to offer to help you re-install it. It's down-right Microsoftonian.

I've purchased several RHEL licenses, but after having to finally use the support for an RPM database problem and getting the brush-off, my customers are going to get fedora servers. The money can be better directed to real support and/or paying an OSS programmer to fix a bug.

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[speculatrix]

What's all the fuss about? Suse9.1 has had the *option* of installing a 2.6 kernel since, well, forever, and not just in single processor, in SMP too. For example kernel-bigsmp-2.6.4-52.i586

I was happy with this, but took SuSE's config as the basis to built a newer 2.6 kernel from www.kernel.org; it also allowed me to tune my processor and architecture and get rid of the unnecessary cruft.

And KDE3.3 had been available in their "unsupported" downloads section if you wanted to take the risk, as discussed in this forum at suselinuxsupport

I took the plunge with kde3.3, and it's been completely stable.

hyperbolae

[poptones]

My experiences with Suse 9.1 Gnome were:

SiS 7xx chipset: video works fine, hauppauge tuner does NOT work properly with ANY of the included TV apps. TVtime (the best, IMO) is so unstable as to be useless - frequent lockups, dropped frames, etc. Seems this release must have a very old version, because most of the issues on the support page along these lines were supposed to have been cleared up long ago. KDTV works sorta, but it lacks many features the newer version has. Forget about Xaw - it's just a black screen, as is zapping (gnome TV).

Nautilus works ok as Gnome 2.4 goes. Occasional lockups and generally flaky behavior prevented me from even keeping with the setup long enough to see if (for example) CD burning works. DMA is not enabled by default on my DVD drive, so even when I manage to get the (very poorly supported) multimedia apps to work the video is very choppy. On the upside, YAST makes it very easy to enable this setting and it is remembered (much better than mandrake 10).

When I went to an MN31N motherboard (Nvidia with MCP-T chipset) I could not even get Mandrake 10 to install. I even tried the "safe" methods and it still would lock up. Suse installed great here and generally seemed much more stable than with the SiS chipset and I was actually excited because I had been wanting to give Suse a better shot. It installed the "good" drivers OOTB and I had great 3D performance. Unfortunately, video overlays did not work properly at all (it looks like an inability to properly deal with the YUY colorspace) in Gnome. I know this is a Gnome only issue, as things work like gangbusters in KDE. Unfortunately, no matter how nice I can dress KDE up (and I used to use it all the time) kde still looks like kde and after a while of looking at all those scrunched up icons I begin to feel claustrophobic (not to mention it is SO EASY to do things in Gnome - like dragging files to the "burn:///" folder and pressing "write contents to CD") I just really find kde way overdone after a little while of using it.

Anyway, Mandrake 10.1 installed on my system (with the nvidia chipset) just fine, but the "community" doesn't install the "high end" drivers (and thus far I've been unable to get the video drivers from Nvidia's website to compile, much less install). I'm hoping the full version of mdk 10.1 will address my needs completely.. I've generally just given up on Suse.

I really don't use 3D that much, my whole reason (believe it or not) for making the move to an nvidia chipset is because mandrake doesn't do GL 3D with my SiS motherboard and I wanted to run a windows emulator so I could play America McGee's Alice. I wanted to like Suse because it has dynamite binary support (Gnome 2.8, Ximian, Codeweavers etc can all be had in premade RPMs) but I just don't find it to have the polish for the home user. I can install Mandrake and be up and running with full multimedia support in just a few minutes - Suse requires an order of magnitude more support in the form of packages that need to be installed and even then it's just not as cohesive (thumbnails don't render reliably in Nautilus, media apps crash unexpectedly, etc). Suse has SCADS more business software OOTB than Mandrake - nice CAD package, vector graphics, etc - but it's moot on my home desktop if it takes an hour (on top of the 90 minute install time) monkeying around with RPMs just to get the thing where one is able to enjoy a fucking DVD. Suse might have what business needs, but IME it sure doesn't have what most home users need. I'm not saying "it sucks" I'm just saying it really doesn't meet my needs.

More than that, 'tho, I'm wondering why Novell bought these projects, because they sure don't seem to be using the desktop stuff. What about mono support? It's barely mentioned. Ximian? Only mentioned so far as the corporate email crap. What about all the other cool stuff that was part of these projects? Since they were assimilated we just don't hear about these "features" at all.

Re:hyperbolae

[Fouquet]

That's an interesting analysis. I have Suse 9.1 running on 2 machines, a notebook with an Intel i810 graphics card, and a desktop with an Nvidia Ti4200 graphics card. I have never used any tv app, and I generally haven't watched much video at all. I was quite impressed though at how easy (compared to old RH) getting the Nvidia driver installed and working for my Ti4200 was.

I don't use nautilus, and in fact have never really figured out what it's purpose is. I do all my file management from the command line in an xterm (not the linux terminal). I'm probably missing out on some 'great' functionality, but am not missing what I don't know about. You mention burning CD's - I use XCDRoast because I learned the interface long ago and it still seems to work just fine (for DVD-R and DVD+R's too).

I recently installed the latest version of MPlayer on the notebook (the mplayer website has a link to Suse 9.1 binary rpms), and it seems to work just fine for qt, windows media, and dvds, although I haven't tested it extensively. I did have to switch on DMA support to get DVD's to run without chunking.

I've also not tried to play games on linux, except for Railroad Tycoon 2 (the linux version by loki), which ran just fine but doesn't really require any high power graphics processing. I dinked around with wine a few years back, but couldn't get anything to work so abandoned it.

Your description of KDE reminds me of why I abandoned it years ago - all of those ugly little icons made for a claustrophobic desktop. Actually, my favorite window manager was FVWM2, configured to look like 'openwindows', with nothing on it except for a clock and a workspace switcher. All menus were accessible via a right mouse click, and the config file was an easily customizable (and locateable) text file. Unfortunately, I think those days are gone.

I've never tried anything with Mandrake. I was a loyal RH user until they switched business models. I was concerned that upgrading packages would be a royal pain, so I switched to Suse and have been very happy. I need my machine(s) to do work on, and don't want to spend a lot of time configuring the OS.

I don't know why Novell bought all of those companies, but so far I've been quite pleased with the latest Suse releases. My wireless centrino card started working in 9.1, and my wireless mouse now works simultaneously with my touchpad (before it was one or the other, but not both). As long as things like this keep improving, and I can continue to download free patches, I'll stick with Suse.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[Luser5]

YaST is GPL

Just Google before rant

512 MB not true

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiotic moderators! Some fool claims 512 MB is required and the whole cascade of nonsense that follows gets modded up. Yes slashdot is a critical mass of stupidity.

This suse website says the the minimum specs for SuSE 9.2 will be:

• Pentium 1
• 128 MB RAM
• 500 MB HD

You mean like this?

[FreeLinux]

[root@linux root]#ncpmount -m -S SERVERNAME -A 10.0.0.2 -V VOL1 -U admin.bigcorp /mnt/netware

That's been working since 7.x or earlier. Changing rights is another story though.

The problem with Linux out of the box is porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously: when I click on a movie, it needs to play. In windows with firefox it always works. In linux, it works about 75% of the time, after I spend 2 hours messing with and configuring different movie players to see which works with which format. And I know what I'm doing.

We all know that 75+% of the computers out there are used for porn. If linux wants to caputure more market, it needs to address that reality.

Re:SUSE 9.2 and Novell Linux Desktop: Differences?

[ThoreauHD]

The difference, as far as I've read, is that 9.2 is GPL. The Desktop business version has novell proprietary workstation stuff on it. Like their NDS clients and other jazz. That's as far as I can tell.

Why Exchange

[DragonHawk]

"Managerial groupthink does not count."

When it comes to people making purchase decisions, perception is reality. A lot of people are convinced they need the Outlook/Exchange combo. How good or bad of a decision that is does not matter -- they are convinced. If I (as a systems integrator) don't offer Exchange as an option, customers go somewhere else, I go out of business, and Microsoft gains more traction.

Now, as far as pros and cons go, the Exchange/Outlook combo has a number of things in the "pro" category. For one, I'm honestly not aware of anything out there that offers that level of integration in one package. Mail, tasks, schedule, and contacts all wrapped up in one interface is something a lot of people like. (Whether or not you or I like it, again, does not matter. We're not talking you or I, we're talking everybody.)

Exchange, done properly (note: this is expensive) is very stable and reliable. As long as you can throw the hardware at it, it can handle gobs of data. That is important. I'm continually amazed by the number of people who keep every single message they have ever received in their inbox. People with 5000 or more messages in their inbox is common. I think it's crazy, but apparently some people like it that way.

Aside from large numbers of messages in one folder, we also have large attachments. Today's 20 megabyte MPEG movie that everyone has to forward to everyone else. Or maybe just a big MS Excel spreadsheet. Exchange has a feature called Single Instance Storage which makes this very efficient. I'm not aware of anything in wide-spread use that offers the same functions.

Sure, with retraining and different work habbits, you could get the same thing done with a lot less IT resources. It might even be more generally efficient in the long run. But in the short term, it would mean a lot of retraining and a lot of procederal changes, and that's not gonna fly in many organizations.

Welcome to the real world.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[whiteranger99x]

Of course we wouldn't try this on dialup, but tell me this...which is more painful? A network install of Linux over dial-up...or installing a huge Linux distribution with floppies?! Mwahahaha!! >:)

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[McLoud]

I'm sure that someone there will burn you a set for free.

If not, I'm sure I can burn YOU for free.

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[Anonymous Coward]

But... if I HAVE to use Red Hat... shoot... that's a better world than

Oh no, like RedHat is such a terrible variant of linux to run... Well, I have love/hate feelings about RedHat. You raise many issues that have annoyed or bothered me for years. I'm not so hot about Novell (this may be the perception issue you mentioned). But I sure would like a better way than RedHat.

I've never run SUSE before, but I think this post and this thread seal it. I'm going to put it onto my home system. If that goes well, I could put it in at work on some machines, though the larger base of systems where I work, have already been decided to move to WhiteBox (generic RHEL3) by someone else, who in part rejects SUSE because of a "lack of documentation" on their site, with at least the insinuation that to get anywhere with it his perception is you must buy stuff vs the open, free, and friendlier (tongue in cheek) RedHat.

I will say though, that with the advent of apt for rpm, and repositories such as kde-redhat and freshrpms, it makes running a RedHat based desktop system bearable. I'm particularly peeved about some of the kernel hacks and the unreleased gcc, but even for their IMO mistakes, I still think RedHat has probably contributed a lot in the way of making linux work better and be more well supported, so I don't totally hate them.

If my SUSE experience goes well, maybe I can convince some more people at my work to give it a chance.

Some comments on your linux issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell mandrake use totem by default? XMMS works great, but no, they had to use the shiny thing that crash like if there was no tomorrow. And I'm not even talking about their configuration tools. For example, this stupid things can't understand that I have two sound card on my computer. Sure, using vi to edit modules.conf each time their tool rewrite my file is not that hard, but it's certainly annoying to redo the same thing again and again.

1) You want no totem? Just don't use it, set things up to get opened with xmms (maybe install that first: urpmi --fuzzy xmms then select all the parts you want).
2) With kernel 2.6 the file you want to edit is /etc/modprobe.conf (and related: modprobe.preload). Mandrake's wizards (drak(e)-tools) do not automatically overwrite this file, only if you use them to change something. As a general rule, once you do hand-editing, you may want to stick to that. But then again, I have changed drivers with the MCC/harddrake2 (oss to alsa) after hand editing /etc/modprobe.conf and my changes remained in there.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded to 2.6.8. And guess what... yep, no more CD burning. But you can still find people who say this is not true.

Well, if you tell people that you are on Mandrake, they may assume that you use the Mandrake 2.6.8.1 kernel - in which case they are right, since Mandrake developers applied the patches to use 2.6.8.1 as normal user with K3B. Also, you can just use xcdroast for instance and it will work. K3B does work, but only as root, on vanilla 2.6.8.1 kernels.
And as said, the Mdk 10.1 CE kernel 2.6.8.1 is patched so it doesn't have this problem.

Hope this helps,
aRTee, www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[MikeBabcock]

What *exactly* doesn't work for you?

I use ide-scsi like the 2.4.x days and cdrecord, cdrecord-ProDVD from the FTP site as of when 2.6.8.1 was released.

You mustn't have looked very hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't mean to flame or anything, but as an experienced systems administrator I can assure you none of those features are especially novel or hard to find in other commercial offerings. Try Novell groupwise for instance - or Lotus notes (if you can stand the industry's most horrid interface next to GoldMine), and there are even more. In fact, on the server-side groupwise has had those features longer and usually better (and is on millions of seats). I've run insanely large and busy postoffices with it on very little hardware. And yes, hardware is cheap, but administration of extra boxes isn't - especially when you're talking 20,000 users not 200.

Now in open-source applications/servers OTOH, you've got a point - except on the performance and backup part. At the moment in the small place I'm at I'm running courier IMAP/exim with Maildir on reiserfs for my users, and accessing it through squirrelmail and mozilla mail. I've got users with 2gb mailboxes and it flies. And I can restore individual messages easily with that setup. The spamassassin and clamav integration is nice too - spam goes directly to spambox, and bayesean-learns when the user moves something in/out of it. Shared mailboxes exist for listservs and email templates (now if only addressbooks and icals were stored in IMAP, I'd have a chance).

As for whether end-users like it, Outlook can be used with Groupwise (if you like virii) and the native client is fine and has a consistent interface despite the complaints of a very small minority (who complain about anything that isn't outlook anyway).

The main problem is a lack of workable standards in the open source world that intend to provide these features because as the original poster proved by example, many hardcore geeks don't care. The mozilla framework has all the tools you'd need to do these things without much programming - but it involves having a place and protocol with which to store and exchange them. It's astonishing that we've come so far and yet neglected such basic things as shared addressbooks, calendaring, and workflow - especially given how valuable such things could be to distributed teams of developers trying to work on something (imagine a hook-in to the bugtracking db and version control).

So, welcome to the real world to you as well - the guided tour should start in about 15 minutes if I recall.

Clarifications

[DragonHawk]

I'll admit to some over-simplifications in what I wrote, mainly because I didn't want to get down to a bit-by-bit comparison of Exchange/Outlook vs the world. But since we're here...

I was definately biasing the first "anything else out there" comment. IME, most lusers seem to like the UI in Outlook a lot better then GroupWise (which is clunky at best) and Notes (which is horrid). Maybe it's just a matter of what they are used to. *shrug*

I did some time with GroupWise in the distant past... it was version 4 or 5, I think. At the time, I thought it sucked worse then Exchange (which, given the state of Exchange at the time, is saying something). The server was cranky and the client didn't have half of what Outlook did. Things could easily have improved since then. (It would be hard for them to get worse.)

I've worked with Lotus Notes on the client side before. I've got a colleague who loves it. Myself, I found the UI to be, as you say, horrid, and pretty much left it at that. Never touched the server.

As for whether end-users like it, Outlook can be used with Groupwise ...

I thought Novell had discontinued MAPI support in GroupWise. No?

... courier IMAP/exim with Maildir on reiserfs ...

I prefer Cyrus over Maildir (persistent mailbox indexes rock), but yah, that's a great combo. We've got customers using similar. The problems, as has been noted, generally stem from a reluctance to part with Outlook. PST files suck mud. Outlook, while not the worst IMAP client out there, is far from the best. *sigh*

I will reiterate my statement that I don't know of anything in wide-spread use that does Single Instance Storage the way Exchange does. SIS means that the 20 megabyte MPEG movie (or 2 megabyte Excel spreadsheet) that everybody has to forward to everybody else only gets stored once. Is that available in Notes or GroupWise?

The "Welcome to the real world" comment was mainly aimed at the second-to-last paragraph -- that retraining and other migration costs often keep an organization from replacing an existing system that works "good enough".

Finally, don't get me wrong -- I'd much prefer it if I never had to touch MS-Exchange -- or MS-Windows, for that matter. But I've got too many customers who want it.