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Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse

Posted by Hemos on from the virtual-shipping dept.

daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."

10 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. What about UML? by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux? They appear to scratch a similar itch, but has anyone tried out both to compare?

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    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
  2. Good Idea! by elemur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The virtualization software makes it much easier to build task-focused servers, helping add more security to your environment... with very low overhead.

    Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides? The Solaris setup is really very easy.. you can have a custom environment booted and running in a few minutes..

    I will say that Xen is impressive, given its benchmarks posted.. it shows a very efficient virtualization engine.

  3. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by saintp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I almost wonder if this isn't so much an effort to compete with VMware or Wine or whatever, but rather an effort to compete with Sun's N1 Grid computing. Sun boasts a lot about running different apps in different containers, etc., which is something Jonathan Schwartz likes to claim Linux can't do. It appears that now SuSE (and soon Fedora) *can* do that out of the box.

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    Another one bites the dust
  4. LOL? I want WOL. by Quixote · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Linux-on-Linux (or, for that matter, Unix-on-Linux) is interesting in its own right (think shared hosting), but I want Windows-on-Linux for the occasional Windows app, as well as to just play around.

    It is interesting to see that Microsoft earlier supported Xen, but then later pulled support. Their (Xen's) homepage still mentions having received support from Microsoft Research.

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    Does MSN censor search results?

  5. From TFA... by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Interesting
    SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 also adds the Linphone software for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); the Firefox Web browser; and the F-Spot photo organizer software. And it comes with the latest versions of graphical interface software, Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4.

    They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

    --
    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
    1. Re:From TFA... by Wudbaer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As SuSE 9.3 is planned to be released around middle of April and KDE 3.4 is due next week IIRC and KDE usually meets its planned release dates quite accurately for such a large project I assume it will have KDE 3.4 final. SuSE usually supplies RPMs of new KDE versions (sometimes even betas and RCs) for the last 2-3 versions of their distro inside 2-3 days after release, sometimes even on the same day.

      I wish they would do the same for Gnome.

    2. Re:From TFA... by Rydia · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They do that because SuSE has a load of people on staff that work on KDE. Not so with gnome.

      Which has, much to my chagrin, made KDE the preferred SuSE desktop, making us SuSE gnome users feel a little shunted-off.

  6. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I must admit I don't understand what's so funny about your line. What I mean is; I think I understand virtualization and its uses, but none of those uses target the same userbase as these operating systems.

    Developers? Sure, it might be handy for some small subset of developers (drivers, etc). Malware researchers? Bring it on. Huge servers where each user gets his own virtual computer? Sure.

    These all know how to install Xen, UML, VMWare, DOSBox, Whatever, so they're not going to be jumping up and down over this.

    These are consumer oriented desktop OSen. So they ship with Xen. Then what? Is the idea that users are going to run MS-DOS on top of Linux? Why are we excited?

  7. Stable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    As much as I like Suse and Xen....I wonder if it's really stable. Suse's historial has several "addons" to the kernel, like CKRM and XEN. Is not that those projects are not great....but they are not included in the kernel.org kernel...they have been submitted but there's "work" to do. Suse is free to ship whatever they want - this is open software - but running software which is still not good enought to be included in kernel.org...scares the sh*t out of me. It's still being cleaned up, doesn't have a lot of users...i'd say it's in "beta" stage: "works for most of the people, but..."

  8. Re:The Easy Wipe OS! by mike260 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is mentioned on their roadmap. On 3.0, you'll be able to fork a VM, let a luser loose on it, and then just throw it away along with all the crap they've managed to infect it with.