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SUSE Linux Becomes openSUSE

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the radical-new-direction dept.

houghi writes "With the anouncement of the release of SUSE Linux 10.2 Alpha 2 there is also an anouncement that SUSE Linux will be renamend to openSUSE. A very logical step to clear things up. The name went from S.u.S.E over SuSE to SUSE Linux and for many people it was not clear what the name realy was. It also points out the importance Novell gives the the openness of the whole openSUSE project."

5 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. This doesn't affect SLED and SLES by michael+path · · Score: 5, Informative

    Summary is a bit misleading....

    With current naming we experienced confusion internally and externally
    between the project openSUSE and the distribution created there. And
    especially with the new naming of our Linux business products (SUSE
    Linux Enterprise 10) the differentiation between our business products
    and community/consumer product is not intuitive. Therefor the upcoming
    community/consumer version will be named openSUSE 10.2. We'll
    implement first name changes with Alpha 3 starting directly after
    Alpha 2 and will have a fully renamed distribution with Beta 1 in Nov.

    The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 are keeping their names.

    This seems to illustrate yet again the issues Novell has had for the last decade with their product marketing - how can they develop brand loyalty when they keep changing the product names?

    Had they left the Novell Linux Desktop name and replaced the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Novell Linux Server or Novell Linux Enterprise Server, wouldn't they have been able to distinguish the community versions against the enterprise versions much easier?

    Novell's seemingly quarterly change in nomenclature and direction is baffling.

  2. Exactly. by Jack+Johnson · · Score: 2, Informative

    As usual, Novell lacks focus and can't figure out how to name or version their products properly.

    Forgive me if I'm wrong about some of these. I work with these products every day and I don't even know exactly how to differentiate everything. In the last few years we've had...

    -NNLS (Novel Nterprise Linux Services), a package of Novell Services like eDirectory for use on Linux.

    -OES (Open Enterprise Server Linux and Open Enterprise Server NetWare) They are both called OES by Novell. The NetWare version is basically NetWare 6.5 and the original Linux version was SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. Obviously, OES L and OES N are very different. I think Novell used this naming to give people a false sense of security in sticking with NetWare based systems a little longer while they got their Linux act together.

    -SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) - SLES and OES are used interchangably by Novell employees and some documentation even though SLES didn't have the components on disk to be OES until SLES 9.

    -NLD9 (Novell Linux Desktop 9), based on SUSE 9.

    -SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), the new name for NLD and when it switched to SUSE 10.

    -SUSE 10 OSS (The open sourced version of SUSE 10), this is now openSUSE it seems.

    Before this we had...

    -DirXML which became Identity Manager overnight with a major revision.

    -NDS, NDS 8 and eDirectory 8 and eDirectory. eDirectory 8.5 is newer than NDS 8, it's module version is v85.x versus v8.77. Though, Prior to eDirectory 8.5 it was eDirectory 8.3 which used module v8.3. With eDirectory 8.6 the module versioning was changed entirely v10110.xx and incremented from there.

  3. Re:I hadn't realised... by enitime · · Score: 5, Informative
    it was called S.u.S.E. at one point. Did it stand for something?


    "Software und SystemEntwicklung" = "Software and System Development" in German.

  4. Not going for the bait. by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 1, Informative

    I bought the retail Suse 10.0 last year.
    When 10.1 came out I tried that and it is total shit.
    Nothing works right, ALL the multimedia features are crippled and the package management system sucks ass.

    After two weeks I dumped Xgl & Compiz because it's broken crap that can't go an hour without crashing and locking up. After a month I gave up on 10.1 totally. I reformatted the drive and did a fresh, clean install of 10.0 retail and by that evening I was up and running with everything working properly as it should.

    Suse 10.0 is a little slow and clunky on my Athlon 64 3500+ w/1gb ram but it's tolerable.
    The 64bit version has way too many short comings to use, namely it won't support my proprietary and very expensive Epson scanner. So until Epson/Avasys releases a 64bit driver I'm stuck in 32bit hell..

    As for Suse 10.2, no way in hell.. 10.1 was a piece of steaming monkey crap. 10.2 will be a piece of steaming gorilla crap.

    Mod me down but I've been using Suse since the 7.x days and I use it daily on several machines...

    1. Re:Not going for the bait. by michael+path · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, you're dead on. They decided to do some crazy things with the installation and package management starting with 10.1.

      10.0 was nice as it was released. However, there's a lot of things that were needed in 10.1 to make it unusable. It made no sense for it to be a minor revision, as it was a major overhaul.