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AMD Backs openSUSE with Huge New Infrastructure
apokryphos writes "AMD has helped sponsor the progress of openSUSE with leading-edge hardware and development expertise. "AMD is helping to ensure that the openSUSE Build Service continues to be an important collaboration and development platform for developers of all distributions," said Terri Hall, AMD vice president of Commercial Systems Marketing. Are these continued announcements of huge support from large OEMs an indication of a new era?"
Apart from having a single repository for packages for many major distros, the BUILD SERVICE actually will BUILD the packages for you if you are a package maintainer. For multiple architectures. Hence it's name - the BUILD SERVICE.
Maybe something about the name wasn't clear? Perhaps you should read about the BUILD SERVICE then.
The obvious benefit for end users becomes that regardless of what you use for package management, if the package maintainer opts to use the openSUSE build service, you can point your package management software - ZDM, YaST, apt-get, synaptic, etc - at the repositories on the build service servers and not *have* to search for them.
The obvious benefit for a package maintainer is that they don't have to maintain a compile farm of different architectures to actually build the packages across multiple distributions. The build service has that and does the build for you.
killjoy
You missed the part where it's a build service for developers. If you are a developer and have used or looked at their tools and interface, you'll find it will save you a lot of time, hassle and resources - write your software, upload it, and have it packaged and readily available for multiple distributions on multiple architectures. Your package has dependencies that have been updated by their developers? No problem, the service will automatically trigger to rebuild your package using the updated dependencies. Read more here.
Yes, the fact that the MS-Novell deal was about SLES and interopreability, not about making RPM and DEB packages on a remote machine (because that is what the Build Service is in the end)
Sure AMD does not care. Perhaps they just use it, because for them processors are cheap and that is the cheapest way to get advertisement.
All packages are build on an olmost daily basis (e.g. for Factory, that resulted in the now out Beta 1 for openSUSE 10.3) and that needs a bit of power that Novell did not have.
Perhaps AMD will use it as a way to tell people: You want to switch to Linux? Well, we sponsor Novells Build Service, so we are the best choice.
It is strange to see that Linux is winning and everybody is scared of it. Why? Do you WANT it to be an OS for just geeks?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The installer and the Yast system were enough for me to stick with Opensuse, I have found both to be invaluable daily. I also like the fact that the X11 and curses versions of Yast are equivalent in functionality, since you can always configure the system easily over SSH or when X11 isn't even installed. In particular I like the partitioner (for its LVM and crypto features), the user, network services, and runlevel configuration panels.
In addition on my laptop with opensuse I was able to fix X11 from a graphical interface when the config file was actually deleted (Sax2), and setup the wlan card for a WPA2 wireless network in runlevel 3, all without editing config files.
I'm really hoping that more distros write systems like Yast or adopt it (its GPL).
For those of us who have installed, uninstalled, updated, removed, forcibily found, hand-loaded, mod-probed, and editted the dreaded /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for:
it is called fglrx.