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

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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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.

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.

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...

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: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: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: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: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.

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.

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.