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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."
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...
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.
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
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!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
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)...
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.
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.
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
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.
So are there ISO images or do you still need to take several hours doing an FTP install?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
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.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
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?
501 Not Implemented
Why does Anonymous Cowards' link go to user Biophysics?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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...)
"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" -Jesus (John 14:6)
9.3 is 5 cd's and 10.0 is 4 cd's.
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.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.
Maybe Linux will evolve into the 21st century with Novell and SUSE.
My ideal Linux distro:
My next computer will be a Mactel.
Ok, I gotta ask... where the hell does IRIX fit? Using the CDs to level a table???
The FAQ in question says:
... (snip) ...
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.
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.
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?
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
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.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Look more carefully, there is also 10beta1, but when I downloaded my copy, not all the mirrors had the 10beta1 yet.