An Early Taste of OpenSUSE

Anonymous Coward writes "Finally the site OpenSUSE.org is up and includes some beta downloads. The stable version can be expected around September 2005. Looks like there are some differences between Novell's SUSE and Redhat's Fedora mentioned in the FAQ."

Comments

diffs?

[Ossifer]

Looks like there are some differences between Novell's SUSE and Redhat's Fedora mentioned in the FAQ

Yast? It that it then? The FAQ answer doesn't exactly make the differences between opensuse and fedora sounds terribly large...

Re:diffs?

[rpdillon]

Well, from TFFAQ:

The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates--through an open and transparent development process--a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

So, more than simply YasT. One of the things that drove me away from Fedora was that it is publically acknowledged to be public grounds for vetting Red Hat's technology which will be the basis for RHEL. Novell is taking a very different approach when they indicate that OpenSuSE will be directed towards end users, and will focus on the user experience. That was never a focus of Fedora Core, and, IMHO, is why a lot of people are fed up with it.

Re:diffs?

[Ossifer]

I wasn't aware of any grand uproar against Fedora by end users...

Re:diffs?

[dancpsu]

What makes the openSUSE project different from Fedora?

The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates--through an open and transparent development process--a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux.

When compared specifically to Fedora, the openSUSE project embraces and develops several additional important open standards not included in Fedora, such as CIM (the Common Information Model), and YaST (a standard, open source configuration and management suite for Linux). Plus, the openSUSE project has a large desktop and usability effort, strengthened by many of the top open source GUI designers in the world.

So YaST is there and such, but it seems like they are discounting any need for more technical users. Isn't it the technical users that give something like this the boost it needs to get to be more usable? I thought the whole purpose of opening something up was for the technical users.

Re:diffs?

[short]

As there were never any. _end_users_.

Re:diffs?

[homer_ca]

"Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience."

Umm.. Ubuntu?

Re:diffs?

[nutshell42]

To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

I've never used Fedora* but judging from some of the comments here and on other boards Fedora is much but not polished. Also, the last SuSE version I've bought in a store was 6.3 (I think), perhaps it's changed but then their manuals were definitely worth the price if you were a linux newbie, most of those I've had are still distributed among friends I've converted to linux.

* note: Of all the different Linux distros out there there are only two that I actively dislike. One is Redhat (old story =) the other is userlinux (I don't like Perens, I don't like his attitude and his approach to the whole story and I think he should have been so honest to call userlinux "Linux for Business" instead. I mean it's the fscking title of his homepage). That doesn't mean that I've never said anything against other distros but that's mostly teasing of the fanboys (e.g. Ubuntu disciples, they're even worse than the Gentoo boys at the height of its popularity, probably because they don't spend 90% of their time compiling and therefore have more time for /. =).

Re:diffs?

[Karzz1]

So YaST is there and such, but it seems like they are discounting any need for more technical users. Isn't it the technical users that give something like this the boost it needs to get to be more usable? I thought the whole purpose of opening something up was for the technical users.

As I understood it, SuSE employed several KDE developers. I assume this talent went with the sale to Novell. The same Novell that has also recently purchased Ximian. I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE. Just my 2cents.

Re:diffs?

[Digital Pizza]

Actually I think that Fedora is pretty user-friendly. I've loved the Redhat distribution ever since 5.1 (I think). I still love the "user experience" of Fedora, meaning its GUI for preferences and system settings, and the programs menu.

It's unfortunate that some fundamental things about it suck to the point I'll sadly be forced to abandon it.

They've moved from simple config files to cryptic and often compressed XML files for no good reason that I can discern, making it a pain in the butt to edit certain configs from a terminal.

As far as I know, you still can't edit the Gnome menu from the GUI without doing a flakey hack.

The worst thing is that they cut off updates for each release when the new one comes out every six months. Upgrade installs are unreliable and leave out new features, meaning you have to do a fresh install every six months! This is unacceptable to me, and is what will, sadly, cause me to switch to something else.

I've used Suse before and liked it; I'm just too cheap to pay what they wanted for it each time a new version came out, and the FTP install never seemed to work for me (I kept losing my FTP connection during the long download). I look at OpenSuse with great interest - it just might take Redhat's place as the "good" free Linux distro with business support.

Re:diffs?

[Anonymous Coward]

We were running RH (paid for) on several machines, then they dropped us like a rock.

    Next I found Gentoo...

Re:diffs?

[jackofallbrandnames]

Isn't it the technical users that give something like this the boost it needs to get to be more usable? I thought the whole purpose of opening something up was for the technical users.

Perhaps taken for granted?

Re:diffs?

[olorinpc]

Fully agreed... i used redhat for a long time till they dropped the reg version. Then once again used fedora because it had the old redhat feel. Suse tried once.. good... looking forward to seeing and possibly offering my users what they might have to offer.

Re:diffs?

[Cramer]

I don't like gentoo... it's too easy to seriously screw up the system with emerge, and all but impossible to keep a set of machines running the exact same thing. (Yes, it's doable, but it's not pretty and takes one machine to be "it".)

It's kinda sad RedHat has gone to shit. They used to support sparc, sparc64, alpha, ppc, x86. Now, they con others into developing and testing their commercial product(s) and have abandoned everything but "PCs".

Re:diffs?

[Cramer]

Pay for SuSE? What do you get when you purchase a boxed set from SuSE? The same thing you can download from their ftp server(s) after a month or two, and some documentation noone ever reads. It's just like buying a copy of RedHat a few years ago -- before all this RHEL crap. I've used various versions at times and I've never spent a penny for any of them. Granted, new versions aren't available for download immediately, but they always end up on ftp. (minus any commercially licensed applications that, obviously, I don't miss.)

Re:diffs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree ! They are the same. In fact we could ( many of us ) start our own distros and tout the diffs but wouldn't that be a waste of time ? I just wiped my drive this week to simplyfly things ( been building my custom kernels for more than 5 years now ppc, sparc, alpha and more ). I tell you unless the distros slim down ( 1 cd is all you need ) than I am going to look elsewhere. The whole thing is getting to bloated for me. I love the GPL but when you make it impossible to download the distro ( 4 cds etc ) then I look elsewhere. I keep seeing a trend ( even in yaboot devel list I am on ) to make things bigger, people want more features and at more cost to the OS. I hope when we pass Microsoft in weight of the OS people will wake up. Novell just has to be "different" without being different ( LSB ). The LSB "Linux Standard Base" is good only if it can reduce size instead of redundency in libs. When are we going to start doing more assemby or embedding ? Those are the things that impress me ! Oh well guess it is the flavor of the week kind of OS ;) This week it is blueberry linux next week it will be raspberry. Start immitating BeOS, Inferno, or BlueBottle's OS size because they are keeping it small.

Re:diffs?

[DaZZl3R]

I hate SUSE. I find Yast incredibly slow and unintuitive. I'd much rather do updates with an easy-to-use command line utility like yum. However, I too became frustrated with the 6 month window of support for Fedora. When I discovered CentOS, which is RedHat Enterprise Linux repackaged without RedHat's name and offered for free, I was hooked. You get all the benefit of a rock solid OS, with easy-to-find RPMs, and easy to keep updated.

Re:diffs?

[twener]

afaik yum support is planned for a later beta. And you can also use apt-rpm.

Re:diffs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used yum and worked with Duke developers ( working on yum ) and run yellowdog that switched from yum to apt-get. When yellowdog switched I too said bye bye as I was already running debian on one machine. I like debian and I see the Duke fellows work with and run CentOS ( the ones I worked with on Fink (Mac OS X project ). I would put apt above yum for package management.

Re:diffs?

[miyako]

I generally pay for every other version of Suse. I do so for a couple of reasons. One is that downloading and burning the iso's or installing via ftp can be a pita compared to just having the disks. I also switch a lot of people over to Linux, and the user manuals can be helpful to people who are just starting with Linux. It's also amazing how far seeing a real retail box can go in convincing someone that Linux is worth trying (strangely enough people seem to be more comfortable with pirating software then with knowing that the software is actually free). I also like to support people who make products that I like. Buying a boxed set is one way of supporting the distro that I like.

Re:diffs?

[jdray]

Umm.. Ubuntu?

Umm... Is Ubuntu supported? I'm not trolling, I seriously don't know. I'm thinking that Novell may be considering themselves "only" because it's a distro with support behind it, sort of deprecating every distro put together by... um... non-professionals. Not that I support the differentiation, I'm just guessing at what they mean.

Of course, that leaves one open to wonder about Xandros. I've never used it, but it's reputed to be a very easy to use and approachable desktop OS and it's supported.

What really gripes me is that just this morning I ordered a SUSE 9.3 DVD from budgetlinuxcds.com. If I'd waited a month or so, I could have had the first openSUSE distro instead. $10 down the tubes, I guess.

Re:diffs?

[twener]

> Umm... Is Ubuntu supported? I'm not trolling, I seriously don't know.

Afaik for 6 months. Ubuntu wants to release a *single* release with 2 years support only next year. *All* releases of SUSE Linux have and will be supported for 2 years after release.

Re:diffs?

[BobVila]

I understand the argument against Fedora Core, but why did they even mention Ubuntu? I thought end users are definitely their focus. Am I wrong?

Re:diffs?

[proughlinux]

ditto. I buy at least every other boxed version for the manuals, and to pay back those who are working their butts off to help my computers run so well.

Re:diffs?

[einhverfr]

I haven't tried SuSE for a while (since 8.x)... At that point, I had finally abandoned SuSE for Red Hat a bit later.

I do look forward to the increased competition. YAST is hardly an open standard, but it may be a good configuration tool (assuming that some of the corner cases have improved since I tried it last).

However, there is one correction to your points though that I would like to make:

The worst thing is that they cut off updates for each release when the new one comes out every six months. Upgrade installs are unreliable and leave out new features, meaning you have to do a fresh install every six months! This is unacceptable to me, and is what will, sadly, cause me to switch to something else.

Hmm??? On my wife's FC3 system, I just did a yum update and got 124MB of updates. This is hardly cutting off updates when the new version comes out.

I will probably be running OpenSuSE on one of my systems in the near future. I welcome Novell's new-found focus on FOSS and the fact that they are clearly extending that focus even after the loss of Chris Stone some time ago. The competition will no doubt help make Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. even better. With any luck the combination of these players will bring Linux to the masses.

Re:diffs?

[LnxAddct]

To edit gnome menus, you don't need a separate tool, just drag and drop, but because of many KDE folks not figuring that out, the next version will have a configue tool. As far as the compressed XML files go, I have yet to run across any of them, perhaps the GUI related ones are, but in all honesty if a tool is designed to edit a conf file, most likely you shouldnt be editing it by hand, and that holds true for quite a few popular open source CLI apps too. Fedora does *NOT* cut off updates until 2 releases later, also they recently extended the development time to 9 months to give them some time for some really advanced features in the next release. Upgrades have never failed for me and I have no lost functionality. If you decide to not upgrade, Fedora Legacy is active now and effective at keeping older Cores up to date with security fixes.

The reason Fedora tends to be integrated so well is simply because you have literally the best of the best linux engineers working on the stuff. The GUI works so well because of great guys like Havoc and Seth, the kernel tends to have the latest and greatest (i.e. Xen, SELInux, LVM, GFS). Fedora also consistently has security updates out faster then other distros, typically a few days, sometimes over a week. I've used every distro out there including Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Yoper, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Suse, but find myself always going back to Fedora. Who better to get my distro from other then the guys who do a large portion of the coding and whose job it is to ensure clean integration with other components. Not to mention, Fedora has a very strict free software only stance which sits well with me.
Regards,
Steve

Re:diffs?

[homer_ca]

"Umm... Is Ubuntu supported?"

I was talking more about being user-friendly for non-technical people. If you're talking about paid support, Canonical provides that for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is backed by a non-profit foundation with millions in funding from Shuttleworth. Although it's Free, it also has a polished commercial feel to it (as opposed to a hobbyist feel).

Re:diffs?

[iwan-nl]

Supported? As in paid tech support? Ofcource it is.

Re:diffs?

[Mostly a lurker]

"Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience."

Umm.. Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is good, but I am pushing my small business customers more towards SUSE.

The FAQ is certainly laced with a bit of marketing. That said, I have been really impressed by the progress Novell has made in the last year, and with their commitment to two aspects critical to long term success: following standards (trying to create genuinely open standards where no good ones exist) and a big investment in improving the experience of end users.

IMHO, Red Hat would like to "differentiate" itself and be the dominant Linux vendor. SUSE is aiming to be the best among cooperating organisations.

Re:diffs?

[ahillen]

As I understood it, SuSE employed several KDE developers. I assume this talent went with the sale to Novell.

Why? SuSE still is a strong supporter of KDE. They even still look for KDE developers (sorry, link in German).

Re:diffs?

[cpthowdy]

Per your sig, "Ofcource" should be "Of course"

Re:diffs?

[Erwos]

"IMHO, Red Hat would like to "differentiate" itself and be the dominant Linux vendor. SUSE is aiming to be the best among cooperating organisations."

This is so laughable. Novell's been pushing to get lock everyone into Netware and Groupwise. I can see you've never actually been to one of their real-life presentations before.

Red Hat, OTOH, came off totally differently in real-life. Very dedicated, willing to take on all comers while still staying true to the GNU dream.

-Erwos

Re:diffs?

[Erwos]

I like Fedora Core 4 a lot more than I liked Red Hat 9. I'd give it a try. We exclusively use FC on new machines at work, and it's given us no problems. It's always a happy day when we upgrade some of the old RH boxes to FC, too...

-Erwos

Re:diffs?

[dieScheisse]

One of the things that drove me away from Fedora was that it is publically acknowledged to be public grounds for vetting Red Hat's technology which will be the basis for RHEL.

also from the FAQ:

Why is Novell starting the openSUSE project now? (last sentence)

"They will also ultimately influence the commercial SUSE Linux products businesses use to run their applications."

and

What is the relationship of the openSUSE project to Novell? (last sentence again)

"The SUSE Linux operating system and associated open source applications are used by Novell as the basis for its fully supported and hardened enterprise Linux offerings (for example, Novell Linux Desktop)."

if this is your reasoning for (not) choosing a distro, guess you better find a new one (again).

Re:diffs?

[saintp]

Uh, you must have had a very different sales team than I had. When we met with Novell IRL, they were happy to hear that we ran a lot of Linux, so they pushed SuSE, Open Enterprise Server, and Linux support. They mentioned Netware very briefly (mostly to note it wasn't a good fit for us) and never mentioned Groupwise. They seemed more interested in selling us Linux, as well as products like eDirectory and their web services stuff.

Never met with Redhat, though. Ironically, we're running four (paid-for) Redhat servers and zero paid-for SuSE servers, simply because it's cheaper.

Re:diffs?

[FictionPimp]

Actually.

Ubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. You can use the current stable release or the current development release. Each release is supported with security updates for at least 18 months.

source www.ubuntulinux.org

Re:diffs?

[Erwos]

It could very well be. The presentation we had was for a very large public academic institution. It was also rather soon after the acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE - perhaps they didn't have time to get together a better presentation? But, still, these were guys from Ximian. They should have known better.

Anyways, I would encourage you to get Red Hat over there. Everyone I've ever talked to from them (a couple large pimping/sales-oriented meetings, and a training pitch session) has been stunningly knowledgable about Red Hat's plans, and they've never given off the "WE WILL OWN YOU" vibe that everyone always accuses them of. Really professional folks, in other words, and a credit to the community.

At the end of the day, I'll choose Red Hat's free as in freedom distro over Novell's "well, it's free, except for when we think it's in our best interests" every time. Maybe that makes me irrational, but if I can spread the free software ideal without compromising the business' objectives, I'll do it.

-Erwos

Re:diffs?

[walt-sjc]

So go with something like CentOS which has the binary compatability with RHEL (for third party drivers, apps, etc.,) awesome community support, and no annual fees.

But I like Suse too. And for my personal machines, Ubuntu.

Re:diffs?

[saintp]

How is SuSE not free as in freedom? I know there was some concern over YaST a while ago, but they open sourced it. Obviously, Novell has a lot of non-free products, but how is SuSE not free?

Re:diffs?

[Lonewolf666]

Pay for SuSE? What do you get when you purchase a boxed set from SuSE?
Bootable CDs for easy installation. Last time I checked, FTP was not quite as comfortable. Of course, this is supposed to change with Open SuSE, where ISOs will be available.

This said, I don't mind spending some money on the boxed set, SuSE developers need to eat too. But I won't buy a new set every three months (last one I bought was SuSE 9.1). So Open SuSE might find it's way to me as download.

Re:diffs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy was pushing RedHat - he clearly is a "marketing type" who doesn't know about other distributions. If it wasn't in the RedHat material, it's not in the knowledge base.

Yeah, I work with RHEL and some other distros. I dislike RHEL the most.

Re:diffs?

[Cramer]

Have you looked at the ftp directories lately? 9.2 has a bootable dvd iso [oct. 2004]. 9.3 has both bootable dvd and cd versions [jun/jul 2005]. And bootable dvd/cd versions of previous releases have been available as well, 'tho not always directly from suse for free.

Re:diffs?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understood it, SuSE employed several KDE developers. I assume this talent went with the sale to Novell.

You and I parsed this statement differently.

You (apparently) took it as "I assume this talent went (out the window) with...", whereas I took it as "I assume this talent went (to Novell)".

Considering the follow-up sentence ("I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE."), I think my parsing was the correct one.

Re:diffs?

[rpdillon]

Well, it is exactly this attitude in the community that led Red Hat to stop supporting non-commercial end users of Red Hat Linux. My basic MO is that I try the disto without paying, and if I find myself using for a real machine that supports my daily operation (either on my main desktop box, either of my laptops, or my MythTV), then I donate/pay. I want to support companies that devote developer time to providing a polished desktop distro for the home user. Novell/SuSE is one of those, and they don't ask for very much money in return ($69 last time I checked, including shipping). Even if you only buy a copy once every 2 or 3 releases, it still helps Novell recognize that Linux end users are willing to support them.

Re:diffs?

[rpdillon]

Eh, not really. I try a lot of distros. I installed SuSE on my secondary laptop last week in response to the announcement. I don't really ever "switch" distros. All the main computers I use run Gentoo, and that is pretty much the end of the story.

My main laptop runs Kubuntu. As I said, I recently pulled Kubuntu off my secondary and installed SuSE.

That said, Fedora Core is laughable. Now, I admit, I am biased against Gnome, so I never really liked Red Hat's push for that DE in the first place. But that aside, my user experiences since using FC .95-4 have been mediocre. Lots of buggy interface issues and design decisions that are just plain amateurish.

For one, at some point near the release of FC1, RH decided to make their package manager (in the GUI), suck. I am a hard core command line guy, but I'll use GUIs out of a desire to know how to do things both ways. But in the case of Red Hat, their GUI package manager lists about 40 packages. If it is going to the distro's package manager, I should be able to manage all the distro's packages from it. Instead, I find myself digging up Synaptic/Kynaptic to do GUI package management in leiu of yum on the command line.

There are lots of little things like this. In general, they try to pry decision away from the end user, which, for a lot of people, is why they use Linux in the first place. I also don't like that they label things "Web Browser", "Email Client". WTF? *Which* web browser? How do I switch it? I want the darn icon to reflect the program it's running, not be come generic "blue curve" androgenous Gnome-wants-to-mix-with-KDE mess.

SuSE does this in places, too, but they make choices that I would make anyway (KDE, for one). But they provide program groups that have colections of programs in a category. Take a look at 9.3 sometime and look at the program lists under Internet, Email, etc.

Frankly, SuSE is just better designed, IMO. So if I were to actually switch, that would be why. Because it is better designed. The thrust of my post above was that I think it is better designed because SuSE exists to focus on end user experience, whereas Fedora Core exists as a testing ground for RHEL, and makes no mention anywhere of end user experience being a priority.

Re:diffs?

[Master of Transhuman]

And if you'd gone to LinuxWorld yesterday like I did, they are handing out SUSE 9.3 Professional DVDs to anybody who walks up to the booth. The hawker giving one of their talks was practically tossing them to people in the audience.

Still, $10 is nothing to cry over - unless you needed it for rent this month, which happens.

Speaking of Novell, they have a huge pavilion at LinuxWorld with 35 of their business partners umbrella-ed under it. They are as big a presence as IBM, Intel, and AMD there.

Re:diffs?

[ahillen]

You and I parsed this statement differently.

[...]

Considering the follow-up sentence ("I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE."), I think my parsing was the correct one.

I guess you are right. Sorry Karzz1. ;)

Re:diffs?

[quantaman]

IMHO, Red Hat would like to "differentiate" itself and be the dominant Linux vendor. SUSE is aiming to be the best among cooperating organisations.

I'm sorry, but your HO would be wrong.

I googled for a bit and unfortunately couldn't find a link but several times in the past I've seen figures where SuSE has about an order of magnitudes more patches to their kernel than RHEL.

If you want a Linux similar to upstream that won't lock you in SuSE is about the last distro you should be looking at.

Re:diffs?

[Karzz1]

np at all -- I guess I could have worded that better :)

Re:diffs?

[It'sYerMam]

Not only that, but it shouldn't be too much hassle to intelligently upgrade to the next version when it rolls out. Of course, this is irrelevant if you're looking for a stable base of operations that doesn't change, but with support dropping after 18 months, you'd be best off going for debian if you wanted that much stability.

Re:diffs?

[Erwos]

SuSE Pro 9.3 comes with a lot of non-free, patent-encumbered software (ie, MP3 playing), from what I recall. YAST is not what I was referring to.

-Erwos

Re:diffs?

[saintp]

The three media players I can find available to my SuSE Pro 9.3 install are amaroK, Kaffeine, and xmcd, all of which are GPL'd. Do you have any examples? I'm genuinely interested.

Re:diffs?

[oglueck]

it's too easy to seriously screw up the system with emerge

That's interesting. I use Gentoo daily and never managed to screw up my system although trying lots of even unstable packages. What was your key experience that made you write this sentence?

To make machines run the exact same Gentoo, IMHO all you have to keep in sync are: /etc /var/lib/portage/world
and emerge world.

Re:diffs?

[Cramer]

More than once, emerge has merged in broken versions of python, portage, glibc, etc. Having to remove the hard drive from a machine ONCE to unfuck up what should never have been fucked up is one too many times. (yes, there are other options... boot from cd [if it has a cd], boot from network [if you have that setup], etc.)

And no, there's MUCH more involved in making two machine run EXACTLY the same VERSIONS. If one machine syncs later than the other (or even to different mirrors), it may (and often does) pick up newer versions. The only real option is to make one machine your own gentoo rsync mirror and have it do all the building (keeping binary packages.) This is an enormous pain in the ass.

Just because I hate gentoo doesn't mean anyone else has to hate it, too. Yes, I have a few gentoo machines to admin -- 'tho they have indicated their intent to move to redhat (fedora) shortly. (which has it's own concerns...)

Welcome

[Elitist_Phoenix]

I for one Welcome our new Novell overlords, I would like to remind them that as a trusted programmer I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground coding labs.

Re:Welcome

[cpthowdy]

Seriously, you would shit yourself if you saw Novell's lab. I got to tour it since I'm President of a Novell User's Group.

They call it the Super Lab, and it's nothing but rows and rows of computers so that they can stress test apps before they are released. They even have different companies come and rent it out for their own apps.

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like any other major vendor. I'm glad you got our of your mother's basement to see how the real world works though. Good on ya.

You would think there are some differences

[Anonymous Coward]

considering that OpenSUSE and Fedora core are two different products.

OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[PenguinBoyDave]

There was quite a lot of buzz around the Novell booth today regarding OpenSuSE in San Fran at Linux World. I am not a Novell employee, but as my booth is right across from theirs, the interest from the public was obvious...then again it could have been the pea-green free hats!

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[NanoGator]

"...then again it could have been the pea-green free hats!"

Yoo-rhine should only be green if you're Mr. Spock.

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[Crashmaster007]

Free hats?!?! OMG! OpenSuSE rules! Actually I am rather enthused by it..

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. If you are a copper-blooded lifeform green yoo-rhine is the last thing you'd want because you'd be losing all of your copper. This is like saying that an iron-blooded creature should have red yoo-rhine.

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[NanoGator]

"Nonsense. If you are a copper-blooded lifeform green yoo-rhine is the last thing you'd want because you'd be losing all of your copper. This is like saying that an iron-blooded creature should have red yoo-rhine."

This is why I hate making Red Dwarf quotes. It's like that one show that everybody here SHOULD have seen but there's always some git that didn't do their homework.

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out my new hat http://www.opensuse.org/images/e/eb/Xgonzo.jpg

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[Deadguy2322]

New improved Linux - With HAT!!!!!

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, it's Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket!!!!

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[wh00dini]

you pee green? ewwwwwwwwwww

Re:OpenSuSE at Linux World San Fran

[GrodinTierce]

...or the chance of getting a 4GB thumb drive.

how does it compare?

[RLiegh]

How does OpenSUSE compare to OpenBSD or OpenSolaris which I can also afford to download?

Re:how does it compare?

[debilo]

Yes, and how does it compare to OpenSSH and OpenNTPD, which we can also afford to download?

Re:how does it compare?

[bigbadunix]

It's sexy, it's stable, and has an emphasis on the desktop. I've used SuSE in one way, shape, or form since about 8.0. It's always been a reliable, well-put-together (although somewhat too 'commercialy' for me at times) system. Early provider of AMD64 support didn't hurt either. It's one linux distro that I never had an issue paying for, as they didn't go the "screw the users on pricing" or the "we're focusing on the server" attitudes that Red Hat did.

I use it in some instances as a lamp server, used to on the desktop(with great results), and have never been underwhelmed by it's stability and completeness.

If it weren't for OS X, I'd probably still be using it as my primary desktop. Bottom line is, use the right tool for the right job. Each system, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, GNU/Debian, NetBSD, Solaris, IRIX(gah!) each have their own place in the mix.

Re:how does it compare?

[joeljkp]

How's its GNOME desktop? I've tried both GNOME and KDE, and I'm definitely in the market for a good GNOME distro.

Re:how does it compare?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Ubuntu alot. It's an easy-to use Debian-based distro.

Re:how does it compare?

[imemyself]

Its been much better since they've purchased Ximian. SuSE and NLD both have (atleast IMO) pretty nice Gnome desktops. They feel a lot like Ximian Desktop.

Re:how does it compare?

[Cramer]

Ok, I gotta ask... where the hell does IRIX fit? Using the CDs to level a table???

Re:how does it compare?

[SpaceLifeForm]

You first must cover them with duct tape, otherwise they are too slippery.

Re:How does it compare?

[Hasai]

Simply put, it's the distro that I put on an IBM 600X laptop and gave to my technophobic wife when she came to the conclusion that she had no choice but to use a PC.

How's that?

;)

Just a new name?

[cloudmaster]

So, basically this is a new name for the FTP version of SuSE that's always been available for download a few weeks after the retail version hits the stores? Eh, I guess that's nice.

I like SuSE in general - they've always struck me as supporting the community because it's the right thing to do, rather than RedHat's feeling of being semi-forced to give back because it's good marketing and because of the GPL. Just my opinion, of course, but then, I spend days mostly working with RHEL (ugh)...

Re:Just a new name?

[Anonymous Coward]

how would you get that impression, when RH has always released all their code GPL and SuSE only recently released YaST?

Re:Just a new name?

[rpdillon]

No. They provide ISO's (both CDs and a DVD) for download, free of charge. The ISOs are images of a complete retail version of the product, despite the "eval" in the name.

Re:Just a new name?

[twener]

It's a new name for the now open development process of SUSE Linux. The main difference for end-users will be that FTP installation and ISO images will be available about two weeks before the boxed retail versions in the shops rather than one month later.

Re:Just a new name?

[clymere]

last i checked they didn't provide anything but a live cd upon initial release. The FTP and regular ISOs get updated later...this last time it was a month or two. Of course the stuff is there on FTPs for people to get at for the most part if one wanted to roll your own...they just don't have them setup for a nice clean upgrade in Yast right away.

Re:Just a new name?

[ckaminski]

9.2 and 9.3 were different. Eval CD's (which are install CD's without some packages, perl-mods, apache, tomcat, etc). Basically End-User CD's, not full "SuSE Professional".

They were released to the FTP site practically the same day as the boxed release.

Re:Just a new name?

[cloudmaster]

I donwloaded DVD ISOs for the last couple of versions of SuSE, and there were just a few releases where they stopped distributing CD ISOs... I can assure you, I did not pay [SuSE/Novell] for those downloads. :)

Differences between fedora and suse?

[espergreen]

Let me guess, you wear one and eat the other?

Great.

[ninja_assault_kitten]

Just what we need, another freaking Linux distro.

Re:Great.

[HatofPig]

Modded troll, then having your calm, reasonably put (albeit flawed) explination modded flamebait? Oh Snap!

As has been repeated time and time again, the whole point of OSS is to take something and expand on it in a new and creative way. Therefore, branching out and doing your own thing is what keeps it vibrant, interesting, and innovative. Plus, 99% of the time it only takes compiling the source on your specific distro (if the binaries aren't already provided) to get an application installed on it. Something that compiles on Suse will compile on Fedora will compile on Debian will compile on Slackware will compile on Gentoo. For the most part, there is only one operating system.

Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[Antique Geekmeister]

YaST is the absolutely worst part of SuSE, but Novell is lauding it as one of their key features? YaST gets just about everything wrong: handling chroot cages with symlinks *OUT* of the chroot cage instead of *INTO* the chroot cage, an insistence on wrapping vendor software packages in badly written install scripts that are wildly inconsistent with the underlying RPM package management, the world's most complex and least organized auto-install system, and overfriendly GUI's that refuse to let you manage more than two kernels on one machine and overwrite your hand-edits? And that YaST package management and update system that doesn't have the concept of handling both an update and base OS package site, or allow unattended operation for cron scripts or kickstart installs? Novell should take the money they overpay the YaST team and give it to the author of fou4s, which actually works, and the http://packman.links2linux.de/ website which actually keeps packages like Mplayer up-to-date and compiled with all the options, instead of forcing you to recompile packages to actually contain all the available features built into the SRPM. And especially they should take the money away from their kernel team, who couldn't publish a working SRPM if their lives depended on it because they have this custom "build system" that actually prevents the SRPM's from being compilable without hand-editing.

They also pretend that their freely downladable versions of things are the same as their commercially published ones. Roughly half the packages are different: if you use the commercial installations, you cannot use the free mirror sites for package installations due to the YaST stupidities I mentioned and their inconsistent release numbers. This is why even if you buy SuSE licenses, you should always install from the free download sites, to keep good access to updates and consistent OS numbering with them.

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[debilo]

Things must really have changed then. Back when I still used SuSE, I found YaST awesome and extremely helpful. I didn't make use of all its modules, but I never ran into problems. And quite often I hear others ask for YaST to be ported to their distro because they found it great when they saw it in action.

The FAQ is a bit weird, though - calling YaST a "standard" is a total exaggeration.

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[maxpublic]

I don't know what color the sky is in your world, but SuSE is by far and away the easiest and most user-friendly of the distros. YAST really sets SuSE apart by being the best installation and configuration tool around. I've tinkered with just about every distro under the sun and I always come back to SuSE at the end of the day.

Max

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[Cramer]

For a seasoned, knowledgable system admin, YaST is a horrible mess. BUT, for the majority of people, who aren't sysadmin's 80hrs/wk, YaST is a very useful, powerful tool.

I'm an admin, so I absolutely hate the damned thing. It's a scripting language that has 99% of what it does hardcoded in a number of interdependant library packages -- God help you if you ever need to fix so much as one damned line of that shit. "YOU" recommends upgrading packages you don't even have installed...

Oh, and the ISO images available via ftp also contain different versions from the FTP tree. I was pretty pissed at having to mirror an extra 4+GB of shit because the DVD image has newer versions than the ftp tree. I mean, Jesus, who the fuck is managing their releases?

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[einhverfr]

Things must really have changed then. Back when I still used SuSE, I found YaST awesome and extremely helpful. I didn't make use of all its modules, but I never ran into problems. And quite often I hear others ask for YaST to be ported to their distro because they found it great when they saw it in action.

What made me give up on YaST back around 8.0 was that it did not properly handle two ethernet cards if the ethernet cards required different drivers. I assume that this problem has been fixed by now or at least I am hoping it is but if not....

I also found SuSE (much like Fedora) often includes experimental software without labling it as such. SuSE 7.x included a very unstable version of Raiserfs which gave us no end of problems (weird metadata corruption issues).

In the end, I have become so comfortable with the flexibility that comes with editing the system configuration text files that I really don't care which system I am running. I am more comfortable with Fedora, but I will try OpenSuSE on a system or two.....

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn, what a pile of meaningless crap, nothing useful in your rant at all.Sorry you feel that way, Only wish Yast were a little faster, but other than that its not too bad. Most of your issues are to do with RPM, get over it already...

Antique geekmeiseter? Antique idiot more like it, sure this is flaming but I am sick and tired of seeing retards that do not understand that Yast has not overwritten hand edited files for quite a long time! I wrote my own DNS server entries for instance and they are still as I had edited.

Hope you're not considered a feature of Slashdot, if you are then we're in for it.

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to Linuxconf 5 years ago, YaST is awesome. Compared to webmin or RedHat's newer system-* configuration tools, it's a pitiful joke. Even RedHat gave up on the monolithic configuration tool approach years ago when they dumped Linuxconf. SuSE and YaST broke the command line grub-install. Their bind management tool has no concept of "views", and will not allow you to set the names of zone files in the GUI, only by hand. It has easily a dozen command line options, not a single one of which is documented anywhere. And its complete inability to handle a base OS repository and an update repository at the same time means that if you wnat to install, say, a new kernel that now requires irqbalance, you have to run a separate YaST talking to the base repository, which will then attempt to revert your old packages, and only then be able to install the new package with a satisfied dependency. Add to that their extremely peculiar script-added package management for NVidia drivers which are always out of date and therefore useless, msttfonts, and several other binary packages, and you have a very difficult to maintain mess for most administrators.

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[kosmosik]

> For a seasoned, knowledgable system
> admin, YaST is a horrible mess. BUT, for
> the majority of people, who aren't
> sysadmin's 80hrs/wk, YaST is a very useful,
> powerful tool.

Yes. Sure. But does it have to be like that?

Also - if YaST is so broken then why to use it? Uninstall it and cd /etc; vi foo :) it is possible in SuSE? To rip out YaST completely?

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[Cramer]

In theory, you should be able to nuke yast. However, there are a number of functions yast performs that aren't "vi". (like yast online updates ["you"], but then again, rpm by itself is smarter than "you" -- which will upgrade packages one doesn't even have installed.)

Re:Yast is considered a feature of SuSE

[kosmosik]

> In theory, you should be able to nuke yast.
> However, there are a number of functions yast
> performs that aren't "vi". (like yast online
> updates ["you"],

So you cannot do automagical upgrades in SuSE without using YaST? AFAIK there is APT(rpm) for SuSE.

I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[edyu]

I've been a long time Redhat user starting with Redhat 6.0 all the way to Fedora Core 4. I was having a lot of problem with FC4 on my particular x86_64 machine so I went out to purchase the SuSe 9.3 Professional DVD and installed on another machine. What I found is that the default installation of SuSe is very good because it has a good balance of open/closed software that makes it very easy to use Linux as the primary work machine. After I got the hang of YaST I started to really like using it. It is more encompassing than Yum and seems like a very good balance for people who know how thing work but don't feel like always spending time treaking things.
Over all, I give high mark for SuSe for the engineering.
Of course there are still some problems with SuSe but so far I like it more than the current version of Fedora.

Re:I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[sabio]

I have also been running Fedora for some time now, Core 3. I concur that there are some issues with Fedora. The update manager doesnt seem real stable and the time it takes to boot is downright ridiculous. I'm dual booting and XP boots much quicker. I have been contemplating reimaging to another distro, I currently run Ubuntu on my laptop but with this article and the good things I am hearing perhaps I will give SuSe a try.

Re:I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[gardyloo]

Of course I don't know your architecture, etc., but I very much recommend Mepis, especially as you've used Ubuntu and are probably somewhat used to the apt system of updates/upgrades.

Re:I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[maximus_greece]

I bought Suse to install on my AMD64 laptop. It installed without any problems, and everything was working okay. Only problem was it was running as slow as 32 bit windows. The problem was not with the distribution. The problem was Suse had too many thing in memory, so it had to go to swap more often and on my laptop HDD access could be bottle neck. I switched to Gentoo, and it couldnt get any better. I do get occasional swap access but its a "significant" improvement in perfomance because it access swap less often.

Re:I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[anandrajan]

I switched to SuSE 9.1 from redhat 9 in May 2004 and right now, I'm running SuSE 9.3 Pro x86_64 version. Took a while to get the hang of SuSE but am now reasonably aware of how things are done.

Still,

1. I couldn't find an easy way to run both 32bit and 64bit kernels via YaST.

2. I use apt/synaptic and the gwdg.de repository to install all the missing pieces - dvdcss, transcode, mjpegtools, etc. and particularly in SuSE 9.3, this approach feels like a bandaid solution. For example, I've lost the ability to burn CDs to mp3 in the KDE filemanager and have to use KAudioCreator or the command line to accomplish this task.

3. Ever since I updated firefox to 1.0.6, crashes have increased - probably due to a misconfigured flash plugin and I don't know how to fix this problem. Reinstalling and updating via YaST didn't help.

4. Back in SuSE 9.2, the CDROM would open at random and there was no way of fixing this. The fix came out a month later.

5. The artsd sound daemon (version 1.4.1-3) mysteriously dies every once in a while and reports a CPU overload error. Weird.

6. Fonts are just not as good as they were in redhat. Some webpages have font bugs.

Despite all this, I like SuSE and will stick with it. However, when compared to a Mac OS X Tiger G5 box, it does have too many problems.

Re:I just switched to Suse from Fedora

[Donny Smith]

Gee, man - sounds like you should give Windows XP a try! :-)

Re:novell.com already slashdotted??

[CypherXero]

First off, Novell.com isn't a link in the summary. Second, Novell.com works.

ISOs?

[datadriven]

So are there ISO images or do you still need to take several hours doing an FTP install?

Re:ISOs?

[mecz]

There are actually a lot of mirrors where you can download the latest SuSE DVD / CD ISOs.

Re:ISOs?

[codemangler]

So are there ISO images or do you still need to take several hours doing an FTP install?

I prefer an FTP install because
(1) it's faster if you don't use all the packages
(2) you don't waste time checking md5sums and burning CDs
(3) you don't waste media, except for the boot CD

Once you're done downloading, your install is almost complete.

Desktop

[Eightyford]

For those of you like me wondering what the desktop looks like, I found this image on of regular SUSE linux:

SUSE DESKTOP from OSDir.com

And I'm quite aware that the desktops are highly configurable and very much the same on most distributions.

Re:Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...that's quite a desktop, indeed! Almost too pretty to be useful.

Re:Desktop

[Nigel_Powers]

Hey...it's me again. I'm so stoned right now...I'm reasoning why I wouldn't like a desktop like that...

It's like, everything you'd need while using the computer is right there within a quick scroll-click. While this has a superior "star trek"-like efficiency about it, it makes a computing session less satisfying. There's no awakening of the primal hunting instincts...you need a calc....quick, open up a shell, or find that icon with the gui...a slight delay before the kill, if you will.

God that was some good weed!

Re:Desktop

[mecz]

The SuSE desktop in the parent post is a pretty highly themed one (superkaramba etc.).

By default (i.e. after installation) it looks like this.

Re:Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks nice, but I refuse to use any OS with an icon that says "My Computer". I moved away from Windoze so that I'd never have to see that type of condescension again. I'll just stay with Slackware.

Re:Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

You can rename the 'My Computer' icon at will. I have.

Re:Desktop

[cbreaker]

Which is good, because I like it simple. That superkaramba desktop is too cluttered. Who needs to see CPU and memory utilization on a workstation often enough to stick it on the desktop?

I say just let the computer do it's thing unless you need to troubleshoot it =) The same people that dress up their systems so much like that are the same ones that do nothing else with them.

Re:One thing the "FAQ" is missing

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat/Fedora : Leader in bugs
SuSE/OpenSuSE : Follower far far way behind

4 CDs?

[theantix]

I guess I've been spoiled by using Ubuntu where you only need the one CD to get things working and then download the rest. Can anyone tell me if all four CDs are actually needed?

Re:4 CDs?

[(H)elix1]

Can anyone tell me if all four CDs are actually needed?

Yup. Mostly disk one and two, but I always seemed to pick an install that would require a few packages off the other two CD's. Best to download all the ISO images.

Re:4 CDs?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

No, there's a 50Mb install CD that's downloadable. Grab that, and let the rest of the installation install over the wire overnight.

Re:4 CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The beta releases don't have their files sorted on CD yet, so you need all 4 CDs if you install from CD.

Re:4 CDs?

[np_bernstein]

With standard SuSE, you can download a boot cd or floppy and use that to do a ftp install. I assume it would be the same for opensuse.

Re:4 CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, for SuSE, there is no installer CD for x86_64. You have to use a DVD.

Biophysics

[MyLongNickName]

Why does Anonymous Cowards' link go to user Biophysics?

Re:One thing the "FAQ" is missing

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO/UnixWare: Leader
Red Hat/Fedora: Follower

Incendiary Story

[stare_at_the_sun]

I have taken the liberty of checking out the author of this story. It seems that this "Anonymous Coward" fellow has very long a history of all sorts of trolls, offtopics and soforth. He is quite obviously trying to incite a flaming distro war. Pay him no mind.

(btw - just to set the record straight: you can have your redhat and suse. Everybody knows Linspire is the most hardcore distro out there...)

Re:Incendiary Story

[strider44]

I love slashdot messages that accuse someone else of being a troll then gives one of the biggest trolling messages I can think of in brackets at the end of the post.

(Just to set the record straight: Linix and Apple suck, Windows rules all. They both would have the same security problems if they had Windows' market share.)

Re:Incendiary Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful. While under the hood, Windows has a good security model, in practice, it is hardly used. People *have* to run as administrator to use most programs, and that's a big security risk right there. Linux and the Unices are designed and used such that privileges are taken seriously and respected by most, if not all, programs and users alike. Certainly if Linux had a larger marketshare, there would be more viruses and hacks, it is unlikely to ever reach the level of Windows. Not because Windows is badly designed, but because the security model just simply isn't used in most cases.

Re:Incendiary Story

[Lord Haha]

Hear that?

Its the sound of the joke wooshing by you...

The distro for a drunken Alladin

[Anonymous Coward]

"Open SUSE" Sounds like a drunk person saying "Open Seasame"

Yes there are

[Original Buddha]

9.3 is 5 cd's and 10.0 is 4 cd's.

Re:Yes there are

[twener]

10.0 release will likely not have only 4 CDs, the beta doesn't contain Java and OOo for example. All 10.0 packages will only fit again on a DVD.

Re:One thing the "FAQ" is missing

[jackofallbrandnames]

Red Hat/Fedora : Leader
SuSE/OpenSuSE : Follower

Novell's never been a follower. They hold their own very well.

How's the media and IM?

[zogger]

Out of the box? If this is for "the masses" guy, joe bob is going to want to mash ANY media link and a player popup and play it, and Little Suzy on her Suse box will want to IM her friends immediately.

With no extra downloading/tweaking/hoop-jumping.

The goal (near as I can see it anyway, YMMV) isn't to match windows or mac, it's to be *better* with a default install.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[oddfox]

Of all the major distributions, SuSE has always been ahead in supporting multimedia for the average user. As far as IMing, well, that shouldn't be any sort of a problem as long as GAIM or some other client finds it's way onto the install. Keep in mind that these applications may need updating, as is common practice on any system, obviously. This is where YaST helps a lot with easy upgrading. I personally don't like YaST for much else, but I'm a configuration file freak.

Note that http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/lofiversion/inde x.php/t14991.html seems to indicate that 9.3 may not be as simple as I seem to remember SuSE being for multimedia, but in any case, mplayer has never failed me (Well, except for those win32codecs I miss a little bit).

Overall, your best bet would be to check out some reviews and see for yourself how the distribution's out-of-the-box experience is.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[oddfox]

BTW, I officially take back my statement regarding multimedia support in SuSE, it looks like it's a pretty big pain in the arse (For your typical user who couldn't care less) to get things setup for something as simple as mp3 playback. To quote the review from MadPenguin:

From what it looks like, GStreamer, Arts, and aKode (the latter two are both included in the kdemultimedia packages) were all compiled without MP3 support. Unlike Red Hat, where all you need to do is install a single file to resolve, SUSE has crippled their distro in such a way that it's extremely difficult to fix. Considering the main components are part of a larger package set, you'd need to recompile KDE's multimedia section in order to properly right the situation. The problem with this would be that you're throwing off the balance of package management at that point, so future upgrades might have unpredictable results. It's also a nightmare to recompile these packages on SUSE, as you'll end up installing many development packages for the likes of KDE, Xorg, etc... not to mention the need to grab source code for other key pieces such as lame, flac, and taglib. The fastest way I was able to cure the problem was to grab the SUSE 9.2 kdemultimedia packages from a reliable KDE mirror. While this cured the problem temporarily, the next time I installed something from YaST, it reinstalled its multimedia packages. Frustrating.

*sigh* I really hope SuSE/Novell fix this up by the time the next release hits the mirrors. If RedHat/Fedora's stance on mp3 support should've taught distributors anything, it should've taught them that even the small inconvenience those two distributions provide is more than a lot of users are willing to put up with.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[Novus]

SuSE put MP3 support back in 9.3 later; using YaST Online Update allows you to select MP3-enabled packages (grouped in Multimedia Option Packs, if you just want them all), and the FTP install seems to get the MP3-enabled versions, too. Not a problem if you run updates anyway (which you should) or are using the CD ISOs and want additional packages from the DVD edition.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[gowen]

joe bob is going to want to mash ANY media link

Ironically, that's not even true of XP. I installed it scratch the other day, and it wouldn't even play VCDs, let alone a bunch of peculiar codecs hidden in AVI streams.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[lmb]

Well, it is a question of licensing. Do you really think SUSE/Novell does not want to bundle these packages directly too? Java, Media Players, Codecs? That they are left out as a deliberate hurdle for end-users?

You really can't blame openSUSE for the licenses and software patent issues.

Trust me, if it was possible right now, all of these additional packages would be included. Please help with rewriting superior OSS packages for them and abolishing software patents by engaging in politics and lobbying.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[zogger]

it does suck, doesn't it? And eventually people who want the stuff get it as well by hoop jumping. It's this vague ambiguity about playing media. I wish the content people would just get a clue about a basic marketing thing, if people find your stuff easy to use and of good quality, eventually you'll make some loot off of it. It might not be as much as you'd like, but some is better than zee-ro.

Oh yeah this is user friendly

[syousef]

Okay,

How is having to update just to get Java and Open Office user friendly? I smell marketting BS *holds nose*

From:
http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Download
Please note that the OSS edition or SUSE Linux 10.0 do only contain open source software. Therefore some packages do miss in SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS distribution. This does include Java and all depending packages like OpenOffice.org.

Java and OpenOffice.org packages can get installed afterwards by adding the following repository to the installation sources in YaST: ftp://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/S L-10.0-OSS-beta1/inst-source-java/

From the FAQ:
The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates--through an open and transparent development process--a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

Re:Oh yeah this is user friendly

[TrekCycling]

In all fairness this is partly the fault of Sun and the OO.o team for making the ENTIRE OpenOffice project so heavily dependent on Java, just to have an "access-like" tool. They should either open-source Java under an LGPL license or something or they should have reconsidered that decision on what to use to develop the database program

21st century linux?

[Space_Soldier]

This is not a troll. This is what I believe that users want: the Firefox model.

Maybe Linux will evolve into the 21st century with Novell and SUSE.
My ideal Linux distro:

• 1 CD (less than 250 MiB)
• Gobo linux style file system hierarchy (mac style)
• YaST
• Only base KDE/base gnome
• base system (system binaries)
• No other applications (exactly, don't need 10 text editors, 5 databases, 20 audio players, etc.)
• All programs are provided by their developers directly via Autopackage or BitRock, and other windows-like installers sice no one in the linux community seems to like app folders

My next computer will be a Mactel.

Re: 21st century linux?

[HeroreV]

How is that similar to Firefox?

Re: 21st century linux?

[natrius]

It seems like you're trying to compare Firefox and it's additional features to a barebones Linux distro and extra programs the user gets on his own. I don't think that's what most users want. They want to be able to finish the install and get working, not spend hours customizing their computer beyond little things like wallpaper and shortcuts. Firefox is meant to perform one main task: browsing the web. Any features that aren't necessary or very complementary to that task are provided as extensions. That only works because it only has to browse the web. An operating system is expected to do everything users do with their computers.

Your last point hints at a desire for a more decentralized model for distribution building. It could work, but there are lots of benefits you miss out on as a distribution by not maintaining your own packages. For instance, the large Ubuntu repository allows us to show the users all the programs available to them and let them search among them. For most users, the things they want to install will be there. I think Autopackages work better as a complement to the centralized repository system. When a distribution isn't providing packages for new software as quickly as users want them, it'd be nice to be able to install them in a user friendly way without an official package. Autopackage gets this done, but I think centralized repositories still have their place.

Re: 21st century linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could think, for example, of a (sub?)distro aimed to people that want to suft the net. Include Firefox, a bare desktop, an easy e-mail client and a IM program. Add some DSL drivers and browser plugins and you have it. You don't even need a text editor.

Re: 21st century linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try FreeBSD.

You instal "base system" - mean, lean, coherent, well tuned system. Everything you need to run and maintain OS in some 100MB. You do not get any other application installed by default. You can select some groups of packages to be installed if you wish from sysinstall. Like documentation, Xorg, ports system, ....

*Then* you either:

- install ports (another 100MB) and compile and install all packages by doing cd into apropriate subdirectory and typing "make install"
like:
#cd /usr/ports/www/firefox
#make install
There are some 13307 applications ported at the moment

- install desired package from internet by running
#pkg_add -r firefox

- run sysinstall select "configure" from menu, select "install packages", select install source (CD, DVD, internet, NFS, ... whatever) and select from among packages those, and ONLY those, you want to install.

- run kpackage or other graphical tools and browse and install any desired application.

Configuration files are simple, well organized and well documented. Example: My .xinitrc file is 1 line long, in RedHat Linux, last time I looked (RH 8.0?), .xinitrc was 800 lines long. Try to tweak such file by hand.

And the documentation is superb.
See handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/index.html

See ported applications
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html

You do not get YAST with FreeBSD, there is sysinstall to do configuration

All programs in ports system are downloaded from authors site (or a mirror), then patches are applied and the programs are compiled the way *original* authors wanted them compiled. Patches are always as small as possible (together some 100MB for all 13307 programs).
- So kde-lite looks exactly like kde developement team wanted them look, not like in RedHat, where kde is heavily modified (BlueCurve).
- So location of files and compile options for vim are exactly like the default options in vanilla vim

Re: 21st century linux?

[PReDiToR]

You're asking for a Linux distribution to do your choosing for you, the way Bill chose what Windows users wanted.

One text editor (Notepad) one paint program (MSPaint) one document editor (Write) etc.

All these programs were dumbed down to fit the brains of the majority of users and the majority of users decided they liked having their choice made for them.

Linux is about choice. If you have ever installed SuSE you will note that there is the facility to pick an choose which packages you want installing, going from default setups for the machine's role down to dependency hell when you want to lose parts of the multimedia system needed for the Window manager.

You already have your wish with SuSE, grab a boot floppy and YaST over FTP to install whichever packages you want.

On my (was 1.5Mb last time I FTP'd an install) connection it took a couple of hours to do the standard KDE installation, and it worked a treat.

Re: 21st century linux?

[Space_Soldier]

No, I do not ask that. I ask them to do no choosing for me. I want to choose my own programs and get them directly from the developers. That's why I said, no programs bundled except system binaries and base kde/gnome binaries (base means the binaries needed for kde/gnome to launch, no the most common text editor).

Re: 21st century linux?

[labratuk]

All programs are provided by their developers directly via Autopackage or BitRock, and other windows-like installers sice no one in the linux community seems to like app folders

You really miss the whole point of a distribution and package management.

My next computer will be a Mactel.

Good for you.

MOD parent down- That's the developer version....

[Anonymous Coward]

sigh

Released Version

SUSE Linux 9.3 features an easy-to-install Linux operating system that lets you browse the Web, send e-mail, chat with friends, organize digital photos, play movies and songs, and create documents and spreadsheets. You can even use it to host a Web site or blog, create a home network, and develop your own applications. It is the most recent stabilized, fully integrated edition of SUSE Linux. If you are looking for a stable version of Linux to run on your personal computer or home server, this is the best choice.

        Note: This version of SUSE Linux contains some proprietary components such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, RealNetworks RealPlayer, Sun Java Runtime Environment and Macromedia Flash Player.

============

Development Build

Currently, SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 1 (code name: Prague) is an unsupported, open source only, preliminary edition of SUSE Linux that contains bleeding-edge packages and represents the latest development snapshot. If you intend to test for bugs or contribute patches, this version is for you.

        Note: Development snapshots are sometimes unstable. Before installing the latest development build, we recommend that you read the list of most annoying bugs. ...

Please note that the OSS edition or SUSE Linux 10.0 do only contain open source software. Therefore some packages do miss in SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS distribution. This does include Java and all depending packages like OpenOffice.org.

Java and OpenOffice.org packages can get installed afterwards by adding the following repository to the installation sources in YaST: ftp://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/S L-10.0-OSS-beta1/inst-source-java/

========

Geeze if you won the lotry when it was 1 million bucks you'd comaplin that it was 2 million last week.

Marketing rubbish.

[paul.schulz]

The FAQ in question says:

There are also many other significant open source projects, such as Debian and Ubuntu, that serve active user and development communities. Generally speaking, these open source projects focus on engineering-centric issues that serve their technical community of Linux developers and users.

The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. ... (snip) ...

Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

As a rebuttle.. I am an incredibly happy user of Ubuntu, and I have seen non-technical users also enjoy using it, whether this is via TheOpenCD (now a Ubuntu LiveCD), or on a Ubuntu desktop.

Ubuntu's user community is also actively refining the distribution for the Education market (edubuntu) and additional usability through KDE (keduntu), and well as on different hardware architectures (eg. the Mac Mini).

While there is always room of another specifically customised and targeted distribution, broad sweeping statements like the above just don't hold.

Novell's SUSE and openSUSE are aimed at providing an easy to use and maintain, site-wide contant installation base. These goals are good for corporate environments (business and non-business alike), but there are other ways. It will be interesting to see how Novell seeks to control the outcomes of openSUSE, as it attempts to let go of control at the same time.

Those arent ISOs you dolt

[Anonymous Coward]

that's just the kernel source links
eeesh.

now where is the 10.0 ISO?

Re:Those arent ISOs you dolt

[core_blimey]

The link does indeed lead to the ISO's or at least the 9 series release ISOs. Go to one of the mirrors and in i386/current/iso directory you'll find the install images as the original poster requested. :)

As for the 10 ISOs, try the link "includes some beta downloads" in the article which takes you to the site with both the torrent and direct 10 Beta ISO images.

Was that what you were after?

Re:MOD parent down- That's the developer version..

[syousef]

Geeze if you won the lotry when it was 1 million bucks you'd comaplin that it was 2 million last week

Nice analogy, and I would but...

Only if they were advertising this week's lotery as 2 million, when in fact it was 1 million.

Get back in your box.

FEE FIE FOO FUMB

[infonography]

I Smell the blood of a Gentoo bum. Yast is a hell of a lot better then endless config files and in obscure locations. Prefect? Hell no, but a good start. I have yet to see any Linux distro be bug free or completely ready. But the worst part of any Linux is the management. Yast starts well and for those willing to just start out then it's a good place to start. BTW, a lot of us are Admins here, being one does not make your words the absolute truth. Save that for the watercooler set. You have been so deep in system management your view is skewed. Not every linux user wants to fiddle every config file on the system just to get it to print files and run firefox.

Re:FEE FIE FOO FUMB

[Cramer]

No, you do not. I. Fucking. Hate. Gentoo. Of all the distros in the world, it's the only one I've ever seen destroy itself. Repeatedly. Anyway, back to the point...

Obviously, you're too blind to read what I said. It's the second damned sentence even. For people who aren't (seasoned) admins, yast is a very useful thing. As an admin, I find yast a waste of time for most tasks... it's faster to edit a config file myself than fire up yast, navigate to the appropriate modules, and click a few boxes/etc.

Re:FEE FIE FOO FUMB

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the distros in the world, it's the only one I've ever seen destroy itself. Repeatedly.

Software has the habit of doing things repeatedly. You must have had one bug and exercised it repeatedly, which is your fault. ;-)

Seriously, while there were a couple of dependency omissions in early Gentoos, as a result of which some of your fundamental resources sometimes disappeared if you did a cleanup (if you hadn't, it would have been fine), that's ancient history.

Current Gentoo is quite simply, totally and utterly stable, no ifs or buts.

Sadly it still has no installer though, which makes it pretty much uninstallable for noobs. That lack of an installer truly sucks about it, it has to be said, even for seasoned sysadmins.

It's simply an issue of *TIME*, not computer time but human interaction time. The benefit of an installer is that all the interaction happens up front, and then you can go to sleep while the machine churns away at it. The Gentoo community hasn't learned that yet, although some third-party offshoots have.

Re:FEE FIE FOO FUMB

[infonography]

I was reading your post and came up with the line. Sorry but you seemed most irratable in your original post and well I could not help posting it. I have not be disuaded from that view. I personally like SUSE because she wears long black boots and short short skirts.

For anyone who downloads this ...

[timothy]

If you have a wireless USB device (or a USB wireless device ;)), I'd appreciate knowing if it works, and with how much tweaking, under this version of SUSE. I just got email after an inquiry I sent to a writer who wrote about LiveCDs working with USB wireless devices, and he tells me that PC-OS (Mandrake based Live CD) works with his USB devices, though I have not yet replied to inquire which one/s.

Anyone else frustrated by wireless USB on Linux? :)

Cheers,

Tim

Re:For anyone who downloads this ...

[tejaskokje]

I am a frustrated wireless USB device owner. My device is Netgear MA111v2 based on SIS chipset. I am spent hours making it work with linux-wlan and ndiswrapper. But I have not acheived success as of today. It did work with Linuxant driverloader. But I don't want to pay $20 license for $15 device :-). I am back to my ever faithful ethernet card. Tejas Kokje

Re:For anyone who downloads this ...

[steve_l]

i am finding laptop linux much better than before. There are still some obscure USB based WLAN adapters to sort out, but it is much better.

Bluetooth support is pretty good too; the bluez stack is good for low level bluetooth stuff. one thing you cannot (currently) appear to do with it is route audio I/O to a bluetooth headset, which stops me running suse hands free...you can do this with windows, but only with a custom bluetooth stack.

Re:For anyone who downloads this ...

[eightwire]

This is actually one of my major gripes as well...

Re:MOD parent down- That's the developer version..

[syousef]

By the way read your own post.

Please note that the OSS edition or SUSE Linux 10.0 do only contain open source software. Therefore some packages do miss in SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS distribution. This does include Java and all depending packages like OpenOffice.org.

NOT the developer version, the open version.

SUSE Linux 9.3 is NOT openSUSE.

So yeah, go mod yourself down.

Suse Linux

[Allnighterking]

SuSE Linux .... now with open source. Am I alone in seeing the irony here. Somehow it seems that Novel is teaching SuSE how community and Open Source work. Though in the long run it is nice to see the return. Novel opened Yast, and now they are pushing SuSE back towards its roots. Kinda nice in a way.

Re:Suse Linux

[thorsen]

I can see why you would think this, but it's far from the truth.

I used to work for SuSE back some years ago, and the process of going more and more open has been running since SuSE started business back in 93.

Novell does not tell SuSE what to do - they're clever enough to let the SuSE people run their own distro. And it's SuSE people that have driven both GPL'ing YaST, OpenSuSE, ISOs on the ftp server and so on.

Re:Suse Linux

[a_karbon_devel_005]

SuSE Linux .... now with open source. Am I alone in seeing the irony here. Somehow it seems that Novel is teaching SuSE how community and Open Source work. Though in the long run it is nice to see the return. Novel opened Yast, and now they are pushing SuSE back towards its roots. Kinda nice in a way.

It's simply a matter of interest. SuSE, while it was independent, was interested in selling boxed copies of SuSE as it's highest priority. That meant keeping close to it's chest some of it's best technology, like YaST.

Novell, on the other hand, is interested in SuSE as a cheap alternative to windows on which to sell it's networking products. Therefore, the more adoption, the better. Hence, more opening of source etc.

I am, personally, leery of this move though, I think SuSE does a better job of packaging a distro than the majority of the Linux community that would get involved. So far, Fedora has not impressed me a whit, and I hope SuSE doesn't suffer similar fate.

Re:Suse Linux

[Allnighterking]

It's hard to explain. But only one other company I've seen that has "adopted" Linux gave me a feeling similar to what Novel does, that being IBM. They seem to yes, be using Linux as a path to promote what they have. However, to quote (as near as I can) one of their pitch men.

"My job is not to convince you to use SuSE. My job is to convince you to use Linux first. Naturally I believe SuSE is the best out there, and once you see the value of Linux I'm convinced you will choose SuSE, but as long as you are using Linux in the end I and my company stand to gain."

In short. I think the people at Novell get it. After all. Who short of ATT knows Unix better, Who other than IBM has been around computers as long?

Eat our dogfood

[poptones]

I never got this. Novell owns ximian and has all that pull on the gnome desktop and yet they still do not provide a very good gnome desktop and continue to focus on kde.

I tried a paid version of suse. It was very pretty and slick and had good encryption support built in when the only other decent competitor was mandrake but it still had so many glitches (like tvtime, the kde tv app - basically no tv support that worked) that I went back to mandrake. ...At least until ubuntu came out. Ubuntu's desktop isn't yet complete enough I would suggest it for newbie unless they were pretty dedicated, but I would still rank their overall stability (at least regarding warty) to exceed the version of suse I tried about a year ago.

Re:Eat our dogfood

[Knuckles]

I think Novell wanted Ximian b/c of Mono and Evolution.

So all these years...

[proughlinux]

I've been using the world's worst linux admin system and didn't even know it? When do my computers self-destruct, anyway?

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

True.

excellent for Windows/Mac users

[cahiha]

I use SuSE on some of my machines. It's probably the easiest to install and use of the various major Linux distributions. It has tons of hardware support, excellent auto-detection, and a good and intuitive installer.

It's not quite as flexible as some other Linux distributions, and command-line based maintenance can be a little harder at times. But, altogether, it is a good choice for people looking for a desktop experience similar to what they are getting from Windows or Macintosh. In fact, I think SuSE is a better choice than either: it comes with more software, it's more consistent, and it's just a better user experience.

Re:excellent for Windows/Mac users

[TrekCycling]

I used SuSE for 3 years. And most of what you say is true. However, with 9.3 they started using Beta versions of some very important software (like OpenOffice). I, personally, saw the writing on the wall and switched over to CentOS. I think it's MUCH better than SuSE, personally and I really liked SuSE.

Yast, RH

[typical]

So, more than simply YasT. One of the things that drove me away from Fedora was that it is publically acknowledged to be public grounds for vetting Red Hat's technology which will be the basis for RHEL.

Uh...yes. But the kernel is just public grounds for vetting Linux technology which will be the basis for all distributions and so forth.

It's not like RH doesn't have a pretty rich legacy of contributing back -- if you fixed something that really was Fedora-specific, like, oh, a package dependency, White Box Linux and the other folks would pick it up. Compared to SuSE, RH's pretty decent (Caldera and SuSE are the two distributions are I find to have an uncomfortably non-free feel to them -- though Caldera really isn't an issue any more). I'm glad to see that SuSE appears to have picked up on the fact.

I don't understand the deal with YaST. Okay, I understand that people want GUI config tools. Fine, nothing wrong with that -- the ease of writing GUI frontends is a great thing about Linux. But in very recent times, I've noticed a disturbing number of moves towards making the console a second-class citizen, which *does* bother me. Red Hat seems to have come out with Network Manager in FC4, which has only a GUI configuration utility (and no documentation on how to configure it in the console), which is my latest beef. The system-config* tools no longer all work in the console -- some require a display (take system-config-services, for instance). The people who get irritable when console users are snubbed are very often the people that actually *work* on the software.

So, while GUI utils are important (they help bring in the bread-and-butter folks), console utils/ease of functioning in the CLI is at least as important, as it encourages developers to use/test on your distribution -- the entire point for your company in producing an Open Source product in the first place.

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, back in the day, contained a number of constraints on design, like never having a modal dialog that led to another modal dialog, or always making actions available in a submenu or through a keystroke available through a regular menu as well. The Linux distros need a similar mindset, but WRT providing an equally good quality approach to CLI use as GUI use.

Now, I'm not going to demand that someone run out and write more code to pander to me (I think it's a good idea long-term for a distro, but I'm not going to whine about it.) It *does* irritate me, however, when a system that *used* to be configurable via the console (like the network) suddenly starts relying on GUI-only config tools. That sucks.

And GNOME and KDE are both quite complicit in this. Both have members who are apparently enthralled with the idea of tying apps to their respective DEs, and absolutely *stupid* architectural decisions have been made on this basis. Microsoft tying IE to the OS really was more reasonable. Take, for instance, the VFS layers. It makes absolutely no bloody sense for GNOME to have a VFS or KDE to have kioslaves. These functions have *nothing* to do with a desktop environment -- they are generic functionality that would be useful anywhere. They *should* be available in a separate library. You wouldn't make kxml and gnome-xml -- you'd use libxml So why all the tying into DEs?

Re:Yast, RH

[ocularsinister]

The last time I checked, YaST worked just as well from a console (albeit using ncurses) as it did from X. I'm definitely going to take a look at OpenSuSE. Having spent the last year on Gentoo learning how things work under the hood, I think I'm just about ready to move back to a more polished distribution. Not that I'm digging at Gentoo - it has some great features too!

Re:Yast, RH

[koekepeer]

"It makes absolutely no bloody sense for GNOME to have a VFS or KDE to have kioslaves. These functions have *nothing* to do with a desktop environment -- they are generic functionality that would be useful anywhere. They *should* be available in a separate library. You wouldn't make kxml and gnome-xml -- you'd use libxml So why all the tying into DEs?"

1. because they can
2. because they'd rather compete. you know, choice is good and stuff (sarcasm, indeed). anyways, the kde/gnome people are working together on these issues now.

btw: i'm too lazy to google, but i'm pretty sure i saw something called "kioexec" which allows for launching kioslaves from the command line.

i never understood this "desktop"/"system" dichotomy anyway... emacs is a desktop, bash is a desktop... kde and gnome also are desktops.

Re:Yast, RH

[Rutulian]

Take, for instance, the VFS layers. It makes absolutely no bloody sense for GNOME to have a VFS or KDE to have kioslaves. These functions have *nothing* to do with a desktop environment -- they are generic functionality that would be useful anywhere. They *should* be available in a separate library. You wouldn't make kxml and gnome-xml -- you'd use libxml So why all the tying into DEs?

I agree with this, but I think you are just dealing with a bit of history and politics here. You can argue that a good vfs layer belongs in the kernel, but the kernel guys are trying to push as much of that stuff to userspace as possible. This is becoming more reasonable with things like dbus and inotify being added to the kernel to allow for good userspace vfs implementations. But the desktops wanted this functionality years ago and had to implement some hacks. KDE came out with kioslaves and Gnome came out with gnome-vfs. Each had to implement it separately because there was no universal project, mostly because there wasn't a good way to do it until recently. Possibly in the future, both of these will go away, and we will see more system-wide integration in general (NetworkManager at the RedHat level as opposed to the Gnome level, for example).

As for the lack of console-friendly config files/apps, I have to agree 100% that it is very irritating. The Gnome System Tools are fine because they are specifically meant to be a part of Gnome. But if the distribution packages config utilities, they should be console aware. This is one reason why I still like Debian above other distributions. There is synaptic, but there is also dselect and apt-get. There is update-rc.d. There is dpkg-reconfigure with ncurses, text, and graphical frontends. Config files are plain text, sanely organized, and well-commented. Everything can be done from the console despite the nice graphical interface you might be running.

2 Linux vendors down, 3 more to go!

[kc0bus]

Well sports fans, that's 2 down and 3 more to go. Fedora went open and now SUSE is going open. So that just leaves us with Xandros, Linspire and Libranet as the only major closed source developers left. Any speculations on which one will go open next?

Re:2 Linux vendors down, 3 more to go!

[rakkasan]

umm, Xandros 3.0 Open Circulation Edition has been available for several months now. http://www.xandros.com/about/downloads.html

Granted they want 10 usd for the http download to cover bandwidth costs, but the bittorrent is free.

Open circulation edition is stripped down in the fact that cd/dvd burning is limited to 2x. Otherwise it has all the goodness of the best linux desktop ever! (yes I'm a fanboy of Xandros.. no, I don't work there.)

Dead Duck?

[fungai]

While the idea of OpenSUSE certainly sounds good, I have to wonder out loud if it will also go down the ugly, almost-dead, stagnant route that the Hula project went. As you might remember, in February Novell also open sourced the Novell NetMail product and called it Hula. They promised Hula would be "the apache of collaboration software". In reality the Hula web site has not been updated since then, and the FAQ still has phrases like "We will be providing instructions for doing this sometime soon, watch this space!" and it also says it is not production ready - the same as in February. Really Novell, as much good as you've done, you've got to put some muscle behid the OSS projects you toss out in the wild, like Sun has done with OpenOffice.org

Re:Dead Duck?

[Antique Geekmeister]

It looks like Hula has been dumped in favor of pursuinig Evolution. Take a look a thte announcements and developments over there.

Re:Dead Duck?

[fungai]

But Hula is a server, Evolution just a mail client? I can't see how the one could possibly replace the other.

Re:Dead Duck?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Novell is correctly pushing Evolution, the client, as a hook into using their webcal and mail servers. The resources that went to Hula are now going into making those features of Evolution work well with their existing commercial calendar servers.

Are they all beta downloads?

[Omicron32]

The artical says "offers some beta downloads" but they're offering SuSE 9.3 for download?

Is that SuSE 9.3 Professional, or just bog-standard 9.3?

Re:Are they all beta downloads?

[gaijinsr]

Look more carefully, there is also 10beta1, but when I downloaded my copy, not all the mirrors had the 10beta1 yet.

Will they accept patches now?

[badfish99]

I found a bug in the free-download version of Suse last year, and tried to send them a patch. All I ever got was emails from marketing droids saying "you must purchase a copy of Suse and register it before you can receive technical support".

I didn't want technical support. I was giving them support, for fscks sake. I was sending them a patch. Yet they refused to accept it.
I've used Debian since then. They are even happy to receive fault reports without a patch.

Re:Will they accept patches now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, too. I found kernel driver issues with some SATA controllers, nasty ones where it would CD install with a driver CD but not successfully put the driver in the machine's kernel so it was unbootable, and they couldn't care less about the patches. The 9.3 distributed kernel had the missing driver, but it was pretty painful to fix and harsh to be ignored that way.

If you're going to slag off Fedora, get it right..

[rklrkl]

The worst thing is that they cut off updates for each release when the new one comes out every six months.

Nothing like a big lie in there? Oh sorry, it's actually two lies in one sentence! Firstly, the minor lie is that Fedora's releases have actually had 7 or 8 months between them (FC5 will be out 8 months after FC4...and possibly even longer than that if it gets pushed back).

The bigger lie though is the claim that there's no updates for any of the previous releases as soon as the latest Fedora is released. In fact, the previous release remains under the Fedora Project banner - complete with updates - until about the Test 2 of the FC release two versions on - which typically would be about 12 months. And even then, updates are moved to the Fedora Project and would continue to receive updates for probably about another 12 months (Fedora Core 1 is still getting updates for example). So that's two years of updates, not 6 months like this poster claimed - not bad for a free distro if you ask me.

You have to do a fresh install every six months!

Yep, he compounds the earlier fibs with another one. Firstly, even if you insist on doing a fresh install when the updates stop, we're still talking 2 years, not 6 months. And, if you're willing to put a bit of effort into it, you can extend older Fedora Core releases yourself beyond the 2 year mark e.g. by building your own kernel from kernel.org's newer releases or trying out a later Fedora Core's RPM (source or binary) on the FC you're maintaining (for example, I've managed to get FC3's Firefox/Thunderbird RPMs working on FC2, although it does require you to upgrade several dependencies with FC3 versions). Now if you really want to slag Fedora off, complain about how Anaconda's Disk Druid is quite tricky to use and amazingly isn't available as a standalone app (yep, it's only part of the install process). Or about how Fedora starts way too many services by default, especially for a desktop configuration. But attacking updates when I think the Fedora Project/Legacy teams do a good job is just poor.

Re:One thing the "FAQ" is missing

[layer3switch]

"Novell's never been a follower. They hold their own very well."

Not true. Novell always has been a follower who loves to pose as a leader. For instance, indemnification plan offered by Novell. Only reason Novell bought SuSE is because of IBM/SuSE partnership and because Sun and Red Hat was contemplating with an idea to buy SuSE in the first place. IBM needed Novell to buy SuSE, period. Novell had already made a deal to buy Ximian, and didn't even have enough cash to buy a freaking SuSE distro CD.

Anyway, this is getting offtopic.

To be honest, I don't buy into Novell's "OpenSource" marketing crap. I think, that's just a flashing light getting dimmer by the second.

/. editors: PLEASE link to the mirror list!

[jdfox]

The OpenSuse home page links to a sensibly large mirror list. So it doesn't really make sense for you to link straight to the Göttingen mirror from here, does it?

Please change that link to the download page, and let your readers select the mirror closest to them.

Sheesh.

Re:/. editors: PLEASE link to the mirror list!

[justins]

Who are these "editors" of which you speak?

amendments

[wild_berry]

You missed saying that FC4 will upgrade you from previous versions of Red Hat (from 7.x, 8.0, 9 and FC1, FC2 & FC3), but only hinted at in the release notes. I think that this, retaining your $home directory and other preferences is easier than a total reinstall.

I suspect that Disk Druid isn't a stand-alone application because of the dangers of allowing people to alter the partitions of disks in use. The source is in the srpms (here, particularly anaconda-10.2.1.5-2.src.rpm ), and it shouldn't be too hard to hack it out of there and disallow access to either drives mounted or disallow access to the drives supplying important mount-points -- Fedora uses LVM2, so any drive can be mapped into /.

YaST is awful compared to Portage

[Morgaine]

I Smell the blood of a Gentoo bum.

I don't think he was a Gentoo bum, as he didn't point out the things that Gentoo users usually do.

But I am, and I also spent many years with SuSE (I can see 6 packs of SuSE Professional up on the shelf for starters), so I can comment on both.

Gentoo may have the most dreadfully appalling install system of all distros (actually, it's more correct to say that it doesn't have an install system at all), but that's overcome trivially by using 3rd-party derivatives like Vidalinux (uses the Anaconda installer).

And once installed, Gentoo's Portage system is infinitely superior to any YaST crap ... and I seriously mean crap in comparison. And I've used plenty of other distros to slightly lesser degree, and I can tell you that the same applies to them all, simply because of the amazing Portage.

Portage is better constructed, better maintained, vastly more flexible, securely designed, trivially configured, and here's the surprising kicker ... enormously more user-friendly than YaST and its brethren.

For Windoze dweebs who have a total aversion to the commandline and don't recognize real user friendliness when it stares them in the face, I have nothing but sympathy, but for the Unix-meme community in general, a distro based on Gentoo but offering a real installer is the way to go for both ease and ultimate empowerment.

(Ideally Gentoo should provide a real installer of its own of course, but there's religion there unfortunately, and they won't.)

Re:YaST is awful compared to Portage

[sydb]

Portage is great, I agree, and I like gentoo and use it, but as I get older I find I can't afford to wait 8 hours while the latest X.org compiles, just because it was a dependency of some toolkit library which a small, handy GUI app relies on.

Yes, exaggeration, but you get my point.

Anyway, that reason is why Debian and it's derivatives are still where I turn when I want something that works and will be a dream to maintain.

Hm

[Udo Schmitz]

"Open Seasame" sounds like a drunk person saying "Open Sesame"

Meh

[Lifewish]

Ubuntu is good, and they're putting some damn fine work out. Having said that, it did take me several hours to get sound working on a friend's system at one point. That doesn't really qualify as "non-techie-friendly".

This was about half a year ago so the particular problem I hit may have been fixed by now. I still wouldn't call Ubuntu completely polished yet tho.

Re:Meh

[cloudmaster]

I've worked for hours trying to get sound working on Windows machines several times, too. Ubuntu works well most of the time, which is a pretty impressive feat, IMHO.

For the record, I've installed the current stable version (Hoary) on a wide variety of old and modern hardware, and it's worked flawlessly or nearly flawlessly every time (on my old P2-333 laptop, the sound wasn't detected properly, and it took a moment on Google to find out what it was. Also, on a machine with three sound cards, one wasn't automatically set up)...

I've found Ubuntu's unattended setup (which is technically Debian, I guess) to be very nice - nicer than just kickstart on Redhat where I'd have to write post-install scripts to take care of a lot of things. Though, that's less useful to most people, I think. :)

Re:Meh

[jd142]

Ubuntu/Kubuntu was the only distro that got my video and sound working out of the box on my very cheap ECS laptop. Others I tried were Mandriva, Knoppix, and Mepis; they either didn't get the video or got the video but no sound.

And a simple apt-get install ndisloader got my wireless working.

I'm very impressed with Ubuntu.

The only problem I had with it was on my desktop machine where it had a hard time finding my drives since I have a mix of sata and ide hard drives. But Mandriva hasn't figured it out either, and I paid for that!

Feedback

[vhogemann]

That's the word... I guess Novell wants to polish Suse to be able to complete dismish any complains from a desktop user perspective, and this way be able to compete against that other Evil(tm) OS.

Re:If you're going to slag off Fedora, get it righ

[Antique Geekmeister]

SuSE has contracted for a 7 year support cycle. What sane shop uses OS's 7 years old in this security day and age? Even then, for Fedora and RedHat legacy support, there's www.fedoralegacy.org, which seems to go on providing legacy and kernel updates long after RedHat has given on OS's as a bad job, such as RedHat 8.0 and Fedora Core 2.

CentOS

[rindeee]

I am a long time SUSE user, having put it to work as a workstation and as a very capable server. I have almost no complaints about it save for the same one that everyone has had up to this point (no ISO's/unreliable FTP). That being the case, I went on the hunt for a really good alternative, at least in the server realm and have landed on CentOS. Man, what a great distro! There are certainly things about SUSE that I like better (which I won't take the time to go into here), but having a RHEL4 server that is fully functional without dropping a dime on it is pretty sweet. If you haven't tried CentOS, I'd strongly recommend it. I'm working on one as I write this that is running a CVS server, WebDAV, OpenGroupware, Postfix, SaMBa, VSFTP, blah blah blah... Very nice stuff indeed.

Re:CentOS

[Hasai]

There have been SuSE ISOs available for quite some time now, and multiple FTP sites; the one at suse.de is always overloaded, so just switch to one of the mirror sites.

P.S.: It looks like opensuse.org is supporting BitTorrent, as well. Haven't tested it yet, though, and it's currently only for the development images. Maybe with a little nudging, they'll expand BitTorrent support to the current production release....

Re:CentOS

[djbjrca]

Somebody could download them regularly and start their own torrent. I would, but my internet's a little hazy right now.

And there it is!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is arguing over the differences between OpenSUSES and Fedora. The Novell FAQ doesn't offer much information on the matter, suggesting theat the difference is just the selection of a couple of applications. Certainly, to anyone looking at the two projects from the outside, they seem to be very similar if not identical in project concept/management.

But thanks to PenguinBoyDave, we now know precisely what the difference between OpenSUSE and Fedora is. OpenSUSE is for green hats and Fedora is for Red Hats. It's so simple!

true

[zogger]

That's why I think any linux OS distro should eventually be better, and however it is able to, to be able to play all the media types right out of the box. How they can pull that off I have no idea at this point, it appears that some companies want to invent ways to play media, then not allow people to play media without charging them so much that few want to put up with the hassle, catch 22 then. Shooting themselves in the foot or something.

Well, yes

[zogger]

I'm aware of those issues of patents, etc. just wondering what this huge cost is to be able to play MP3's out of the box. What exactly does it co$t a (rather large) company like Novell to get legal permission to include that ability? Or is the decision solely based on licensing, ie, nothing but GPL software included?

Mostly I just wanted to get a sub discussion going on those topics, as I think it is important when talking about a desktop distro for the masses guy. MP3 like it or not is here to stay it appears. If a big company like Novell can't do it, well...

Re:Well, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

All the community distributions want to be freely copiable. Note that they want to use a mirror scheme, for instance, just as a start.

Build in a per user licenced bit of software, and that goes out the window.

Same issue as with Java, note the terms when you download it, each download is for you and you only, even though it's free as in beer.

So no its not the Linux distributers, and no its not going to change, at least until Joe Public looks at the strings attached to the standards they select.

And they are going to have to be burned a few more times before that message sinks home.

not so happy with suse9.3

[steve_l]

I find some bits of Suse9.3 a backward step than before. Both the sound server and cups keep crashing on me (daily), which could be down to race conditions on my multicpu box. Some other things feel a bit raw too. but it is mostly stable, and runs well on laptops.

-steve

What - no PPC/SPARC support?

[sellers]

I wonder if that is something this going to come out at some point in the future. I'm sure IBM would be interested in that effort.

HAT WARZ !

[djdavetrouble]

New improved Linux - With HAT!!!!!

are you implying that there is no hat in fedora or red HAT ?

They did have the good sense to make the hat green though,
the international color of GO!

Copy protected install CD's

[orim]

Hey are they still copy-protecting the install CD's? If I remember correctly, 9.1 package had CD's that were copy-protected.
Which would be totally ridiculous since you can install the same thing from FTP... but you go out, pay to get the CD's, and you can't even make backups.
If I remember correctly.

Re:Copy protected install CD's

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE encourages copying/sharing Suse 9.3. Read the license.txt from the root of the DVD.

Share it, copy it, torrent it, etc. and you have Novell's blessings providing no money changes hands. If you want to pay for it, buy the retail color box.

Fedora not that capricious

[salimma]

The worst thing is that they cut off updates for each release when the new one comes out every six months

They cut off updates after two releases, not one - Fedora Core 3 is still supported.

Fedora Core 2 is still supported by the Legacy team too.

Yeah...offline

[jeephistorian]

Uh..beleive it or not, there are some of us that don't have broadband. I live way out in the country, but have a fully networked house. I use Suse for all of my computers except for one Windows PC for games and one OS X for adobe work.

When I want to install Suse on a new computer at home, its very nice to have the whole thing!

Good Thing This OpenSuse

[jbdodson]

I would not touch regular SuSE because of the propretary components built in. I will download this OpenSuSE and give it a try when it is more stable. Not sure if it will dethrone Ubuntu as my Free Desktop, but never say die right?

IBM Thinkpad "Nipple" Work?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using SuSe 9.3 and using the IBM Thinkpad "nipple" results in the pointer in X going out of control (I must always use a USB external mouse which for some reason works fine). Is this fixed in the next version?

Actually

[G00F]

I think it is more of the desire to clean up the mess that has become every linux distro.

All the linux distros shouldn't have their own package for say gaim or K3B that only work for 1 version of their distro. That fact that they do this shows what the problem is. Actually , think I can sum it up in 3 things

1. One binary should be able to install on all linux distros.
2. K3b and other packages should come with all the software, you shouldn't have to spent 10 min finding and downloading all those little deps. It is worse than winzip in 1990 before they figured out how to program.
3. I should not havce to upgrade the whole system to get a newer version of something minor like gaim or k3b.

I've been using linux since 98, greate for servers, bad for desktop. I don't want to use all my time making my system usable, I'd rather be using it, or tweaking it as I see fit. Upgrading gaim or k3b can take hrs on SuSE when you end up upgrading ever pirce and using "experimental" packages from local-bin or packman.

quicky

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm a happy user of suse linux. my first run-in with
linux was with caldera, slackware and redhat. pretty
darn got my in the psycho mansion, but i was just
a win n00b back then (hmmm... still am i guess).
YAST is great and suse doesn't hang on base install
withthe grafic like FC did ...
since suse is under novel now, can we have samba do
"NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Compatible Transport
Protocol" please?
the desktop suse is offering is linux newbie proof
(learning by clicking). but i see a real need for
something "network" that's not tcp/ip. it would
be grand if just plugging a bunch of computer into
the switch and they just see each other, without
having to configure a dhcp server, dns server etc.
"plug-in head phones into jack and hear music" network solution...?
and, YAST keeps overwriting my manually edited
DHCPd.conf files into a not working version.

it ain't dead when people are working on it ..

[Blu-Ray]

look at the developers list ..

http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/maillist/arc hbrowse.php/hula-dev/?id=1613&prjname=hula&mlname= dev

also, last release
hula-r276.tar.gz 10-Aug-2005 11:16 11M

funny to see what is listed under "Linux Distro's"

Linux - Hula has been built and run on the following Linux distros
SuSE Linux 9.3
SuSE Linux 9.0
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
Novell Linux Desktop 9
Ubuntu Hoary
Slackware 10.1
Mandrakelinux 10.x
Fedora Core 2
Fedora Core 3
Fedora Core 4
CentOS 4
Gentoo 2005.0
Foresight Linux
Debian Sarge
FreeBSD 4, 5
NetBSD 2
MacOSX 10.3.8
Windows 2000, XP, 2003

Privateers

[Doc Ruby]

I don't understand how a company like Novell or Red Hat can buy a distro, and take it "private", even if they retain a "public", open version. How can they keep SuSE or RH code proprietary, if it's derived from the GPL code they acquired? And from whom do they "buy" the distro? From the core committers? What are they buying, the committers' exclusive work committment? And how can they take code contributed (by them or others) to a "parallel" OS, like Fedora or OpenSUSE, leave it open in that open version, but keep it proprietary (unviewable source) in their proprietary version?

Isn't the entire point of the GPL to prevent exactly this kind if privatization of GPL code?

Got the hat for free...

[dooglio]

A really cute gal at the Novell booth at LWE asked me to take off my free Red Hat hat and gave me a free OpenSUSE hat. How could I resist? A picture will be forthcoming. :-)

Re:Got the hat for free...

[djbjrca]

Did you make the relevant OS switch also, or just the hat?

Re:Got the hat for free...

[dooglio]

Just the hat. I'm into [k]ubuntu these days. :-)

Re:Got the hat for free...

[djbjrca]

Ubuntu is nice.

Wait...

[djbjrca]

Is OpenSuSE the EXACT SAME THING as what I just paid nearly $100 USD for?????????