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SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, a Closer Look
Tripperfish writes "Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater has published an in-depth review of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Novell's alleged 'Vista Killer.' From the article: 'SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a very capable, industrial strength desktop which is ready to take on basic desktop chores in the corporate environment, and for the price you simply cannot go wrong. ' The review comes complete with screenshots and Flash movies of the install, new GNOME interface, and Beagle in action."
Mozilla = Mosaic Killer, dating from long before you ever pushed a mouse. Relax, it's an olde tradition.
So what kind of article were you expecting from a guy called "Mad Penguin"?
Different strokes for differnent folks. I enjoy Mad Penguin's crazy style, and so do others. That's why we read him.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I find OpenSuSE (which SLED/SLES is based on) a bit of a mixed bag. YaST is still clunky and annoying. I wiped out Mono as the disease it is, and that took out Xen. I installed APT, and had a usable packaging system, now I just need to find aptitude or synaptic.
It's a big improvement over SLES 9, though. At least YaST doesn't have terminal problems and lockup problems any more.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Haven't you heard of the incredible "hack" known as ndiswrapper? i am replying on my laptop with builtin broadcom airforce one 54g. as far as i know there is no support for broadcom chipsets in ANY non-windows OS
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Gnome is default only in the enterprise releases, and that probably owes a great deal to how many Gnome developers they got from Ximian (it's easier to pay someone you already hire to do something than to hire someone entirely new). openSUSE will continue to keep the whole bleeding-edge KDE thing, because many desktop users desire that.
Take a look at this article. Yes it's crap - but this article DOES say that desktop 10 is taking on VISTA and aims to beat it.
Sure - it doesn't use the word "killer". But that quote has the same meaning that I understand from the term "Vista Killer".It won't be tho - VISTA will probably end up kicking its ass when it's released (bundled with Duke Nukem Forever)
It is at the moment. If you have a look on their website, Novell are offering a free download for evaluation. Unlike some other evaluation versions of operating systems, it doesn't expire.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
uhhh... they are refining those everyday apps and polishing current versions. SLES9 is already on update3. What exactly did you think the "update" part of update3 meant?
The reviewer totally spaced off the coolest part of SLED, seamless support for XGL. SLED has an XGL configurator built into the control panel. It even makes installing vga drivers easy on Linux for once, no mucking with the xorg.conf to get dual monitors or XGL working.
Seriously, if you like eye candy, Linux has never had it better. This will even impress the guys using a Mac. Remember how cool it was to play with the Dock the first time? This is like that only better.
If you could care less for eye candy but like the productivity boost of Apple's Expose, then you need to look into SLED. If you like accessability, XGL does zoom better than any other desktop, even Windows. No other distro has XGL like SLED does since Novell sponsored its development. http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/ Its hard for me to believe that this guy missed that in his review.
I don't think that SLED 10 is a Vista killer, but it does make Desktop linux look good even to Windows fanboys. Seriously, give XGL on SLED a look.
10.1 still ships with KDE as the Desktop.
SuSE recently shifted from KDE to GNOME since the acuisition of Ximian.
Miguel De Icaza has assumed a more influential role in Novell's Linux effort, hence the Mono presence in so many tools in SLES/D.
as far as i know there is no support for broadcom chipsets in ANY non-windows OS
Except, you know, OS X (airport extreme is broadcom) and the 2.6.17 kernel.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
You can download SUSE Linux 10.2 Alpha 1 here.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
"for Linux to a serious desktop option, your mom needs to be able to use it, write a word doc and e-mail her friends. That is not the case with Linux."
Me moms been using Linux since 1998. And I mean using it, not dicking around with like you. First SuSE, now Gentoo soon to be Ubuntu. She clicks the icon in her taskbar to dialup her ISP. She prefers it to Windows because:
1. It's stable
2. It's easy to use
3. It has all the applications she wants (e-mail, word processor, web browser)
4. Multiple desktops
5. It looks better than Windows
So maybe your talking about your mom?
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
I am not a regular SUSE user but I have used SUSE in the past and as an administrator at a site with a small (few 100) Linux desktops I have recently been testing SUSE 10.1 as the site has always used SUSE.
Take all of these replies with a grain of salt. I haven't filed problems in Novell's bugzilla and anyone complaining about things but not filing bugs probably isn't interested in helping to make things better.
1. Package management. This is a curious one as Yast's dep solving seems to now be done by the Novell zmd daemon. This daemon seems to have a XML-RPC interface and consequently can be driven by many interfaces. Yast is one GUI front end, rug is a text driven front end and there are some GTK zmd-installer/zmd-updater tools too. Alas Yast's package groups don't yet appear to be rug bundles which is a little frustrating. In SUSE 10.1 there is also a bug which renders the zmd* and rug unable to resolve dependencies. You will have to use Yast to get an update that fixes this.
2. SUSE has alway had the option within the Yast control centre to upgrade to a new version of SUSE. I haven't tested rug's ability to do this but after patching it seems fairly capable. The bad news is that the dep solver is slower than Red Hat/Fedora's yum (interesting yum is written in Python and novell-zmd is written in mono). The daemon can go to sleep and takes time to wake up (I also wonder if it refetches the list of packages on remote sources every time it wakes up). It eats a lot of memory and CPU when solving but might have lots of interesting features like being able to have updates "pushed" to it (handy when you have lots of machines).
3. There are drop shadows in compiz under XGL when I used it.
4. This is true. Compiz lacks metacity's focus stealing prevention, you can't drag windows off the top and bottom of the screen. You can configure keybindings and it seems to follow GNOME's theme (but not KDEs). It's very usuable and I believe was based off metacity originally (for Wm decisions).
5. Dunno. Perhaps they want to let it stablise (Ubuntu carries a bunch of patches to stabalise its version of 2.14).
There are things in SUSE 10.1 that definitely make it more attractive for large installations (proxy management is far better than the other distros I've used). I need more time to evaulate beagle, XGL works fairly well for me even with KDE (getting XGL going on the integrated Intel graphics cards with open source drivers was a dream compared to the ATI binary drivers). However there are also things broken within SUSE that are not broken elsewhere due to their patches (gaim + jabber + proxy = have to use proxy?!) but other places where their patches are absolutely amazing (I've never seen openoffice start so quickly from cold boot, evolution has right mouse button spelling suggestions!). Until I get round to filing bugs I'm going to leave my criticism there though.
1. yes, the package manager can handle conflicts and can point to either Novell (ZLM) or YUM backends...your choice. It does have a slightly modified front end from before (rug)...but it could handle that before.
2. somewhat. It doesn't use the package manager to do that, but does use yast, which can be run from cmd line, cui, or gui
3. i believe they were left off because of some issues in the final versions of xgl they shipped with. in any case, you can easily turn them on and/or update your packages just like any other linux distro.
4. if you are running xgl, then the wm is compiz, if you decide not to run xgl, you can still run any wm you want...so choose what you want. there definitely is room for others to add in other customizations if they want. keep in mind though that sled is really aimed not at the high-geek like ourselves, but the enterprise user. It can easily be tailored for folks like us, but again, the goal is the enterprise user, so as someone said before, more != better in their eyes. just my opinion after having worked with the product and the novell folks for a bit. also should mention that if you are interested in more of a enterprise developer type setup, you'll want their updated SDK for SLE10 when it ships...has a number of packages and additions a developer or linux-savvy person might want.
5. Cause that's what they went with. keep in mind they have to freeze the packages months in advance, and that's what they felt comfortable with at the time...believe me...for miguel and his group, they'd typically go with the latest and greatest if they could, but they also wanted to add some nifty things in, which they did. believe they did do a few regressions from 2.14 into this version of 2.12, but check it out and see.
I have to agree that it does have some great new features and it shows that Novell has been thinking about the desktop quite a bit, so from a Linux zealot perspective, I think they've done a pretty respectable job. I wouldn't necessarily call it a "vista killer", but honestly, I don't believe they did either...they've been pretty adamant to us that it's not that at all. They don't want to compete with Microsoft, but they really do want to play nice in a MS network with this product, hence the AD connectivity, and that's a good thing. Because honestly it does give customers a choice and at a $50 price point retail, it's a pretty compelling option for those folks who might want a cheaper desktop in some places of their enterprise.
just my 2 cents...but again, if you haven't had a chance to check it out, give it a try...it's on their site (believe that version is RC2, so it's not final code)...see if it might give MS some competition for the corporate desktop.
SUSE uses the 2.6.15 kernel, so no native Bcm driver yet (possibly not even the native wifi stack to support it, which is in .16 I think... .17 has the driver). Short of building your own kernel, you have two options: ndiswrapper, or Linuxant Driverloader. ndiswrapper is an OSS kernel module and CLI configuration tool that allows the use of a Windows driver in Linux. Personally, I have not once gotten it to work completely, on any distro, but I have seen it done on other peoples' computers. SUSE ships with a (usually somewhat outdated) version of ndiswrapper. Driverloader, on the other hand, is proprietary software. The licencing cost isn't bad, and there's a trial period to make sure it works, but it's not free. As best I can tell, it does the same thing as ndiswrapper, but it seems to do it better (I once got it to work in FC4, though it would cause a kernel panic in seconds... apparently this is/was a known problem. During those seconds I had connectivity, though.) It uses a web-based GUI on loopback address for configuration. The newer versions of either should, hopefully, support WPA (Driverloader says it does), maybe WPA2.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...