OpenSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 Has Been Released

Francis Giannaros writes "The first beta release for openSUSE 11.0 is now available. Some of the highlights include fast package management, KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1 and an impressive new installer using Qt4 CSS-like stylesheets. Changes behind the scenes include switching to RPM LZMA payload and making RPMs smaller (faster to download), and quicker to decompress (faster installation)."

Comments

Dodgy Link

[kernowyon]

Please mod the parent down - this is the dodgy malware linky yet again :(

I hope

[hansraj]

that comments are about the distro and not about Novel.

Re:I hope

[Darundal]

You expect comments about the article, and not a moralized tangent discussion? What site do you think you are on?

Re:I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Comments about the licensing, legal, and ethical aspects of a distro are entirely legitimate and on-topic discussion of the distro.

If many Linux fans consider Suse to be the anti-Linux Linux distro, in the sense that it sabotages the larger community, then it would be foolish not to discuss this as part of discussing Suse.

And it's Novell, not Novel.

SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[moreati]

SuSE Linux was my first Linux distro, back when I thought 'I paid money for this, it came in a box' automatically means 'This is better'.

I've moved to other distributions since, but I still think SuSE has the best packaging mechnanics. I'm not talking about their packages/repositories or the merits of apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. I mean that SuSE better optimise the package transfer and installation.

To my knowledge, SuSE Linux is still the only pre-compiled distribution that patches/upgrades a package by downloading only the changes. They have delta rpms that are much smaller to download than completely new packages.

The linked video would suggest that their new package front end is much nippier also.

Hats off to you.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[IBBoard]

Fedora were planning to include Presto for Yum to allow Fedora 9 to take advantage of 'delta RPMs' that just download the changes. Unfortunately it seems they haven't made it yet. The delta RPMs in SuSe did always seem like a great idea that I thought more distros should take up.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[the eric conspiracy]

delta upgrades is a great feature. However this is about the 4th version of SuSE that promises fast package management. I moved away from SuSE a couple of years ago because of slow package management and package management bugs.

I hope package management is SuSE really is competitive with other distros this time. Otherwise I enjoyed using SuSE.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[Azuma Hazuki]

Uh...no. Foresight Linux (and any distro that uses the Conary package manager) download delta-packages for upgrades. SuSE may be the first one to do it, but it doesn't have a monopoly on the idea.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[miscz]

It's quite fast since 10.3. I have been waiting for reasonably fast package management in Suse for some time now and most promises were not fulfilled. It seems that Suse developers finally got their act together and 11.0 will bring near apt/dpkg speeds. Actually OpenSUSE 10.3 was the first RPM-based distro that didn't make me want to throw some furniture at my computer. There are still some nasty quirks (like opening dozens of windows that steal focus during installing packages via YaST) but I can stand those.

The second screenshot is great!

[denominateur]

"Multimedia sucks."

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/qt4-rocks.png

Re:Anyone else...

[apokryphos]

It is the first beta; for the next beta this issue will likely be resolved. There was quite a big rush to get features in, and pretty much all the time from now will be spent on bug-fixing.

OpenSUSE is awesome

[Skylinux]

SUSE was my first Linux distribution because I could purchase it at BestBuy.... that was many years ago.
I eventually switched to Slackware to learn Linux but decided to switch back to SUSE a few years ago because I wanted to become productive instead of hunting depended software to satisfy ./configure
Don't get me wrong, there is noting wrong with the "hands on" Linux systems as I recommend Slackware to anybody who wants to know Linux.

One thing that makes me shake my head is the over hyped Ubuntu distribution, bracing for negative mod points now... Seriously though, OpenSUSE makes it so simple to install almost any program, add Pacman's repository, install Mplayer and it all begins to "just work"...

If you have not tried OpenSUSE, give it a try, I doubt you will regret it.

BTW, I am typing this on my Fujitsu laptop connected to a wireless lan which worked "out of the box" ... Windows is a true sandbox OS for me now, useful only for gaming....

Re:OpenSUSE is awesome

[AndGodSed]

Disclosure: I am a bit of an Ubuntu fanboi ;) (please notice the wink *nudge-nudge*)

Right - One of my first distributions was also Suse - SLED and SLES - got it from the novell stands at Software Freedom Day here in South Africa.

I liked it, but because of some niggles I moved on.

1. I run on limited hardware, and Suse being a bit hardware intensive (my impression here) it was a bit slow - took four hours to install on my pc and five hours on my laptop. Not a fault on the Distro's part I am quick to point out.
2. Everything did not just work in my case, but I enjoy tinkering so that was not a big reason for movin on.

Currently I am using Ubuntu.

1. It contends better with my limited hardware. A clean install takes only about 40minutes to an hour. (Yes my computer/laptop is O_L_D!)
2. It "feels" more intuitive, but that is more personal taste than any real advantage over SUSE.
3. Shipit. This is a real advantage over other distributions. Being able to order a free disk of the latest version is a real plus.

Here are a few critiscisms of Ubuntu:

1. Heavy reliance on the internet to install anything from codecs to extra software.
2. DVD releases that in fact have extra software are not available as boxed sets is a disadvantage wrt boxed sets like Suse.
3 The color scheme - what the heck with the brown? Many distro's look much better - Suse, Linux Mint are just a few examples. Fedora looks great too.

One thing that gives Suse a great advantage is the effort that goes into the Enterprise Desktop package. It makes a lot of effort to be easy to integrate with an office environment - this naturally spills over to the Opensuse version.

I don't think Ubuntu is OVER hyped - it has many good points, and is really a leader in many aspects, just as Suse, PCLOS, Fedora, Mandriva and so on all have areas where they lead. What I really find exciting is that every distro has access to what it lacks and is available in another. Take PCLOS using Synaptic for instance.

THAT is what has handed the lead to Linux, and has placed Windows in second/Third place.

Re:OpenSUSE is awesome

[twistedcubic]

Does SuSE "just work" on amd64? I had a few problems when playing with Ubuntu and Flash on amd64. But one of the labs where I work just installed OpenSuSE 10.3 on its computers, and the Gnome theme/style is beautiful.

Anyway, I also bought SuSE at Best Buy around 2000-2001, for $39.95. I installed Postfix, and whenever I did updates, it would install Sendmail. So I sold the box on Ebay for about $17. Switched back to playing with Mandrake and RedHat. Now I'm permanently sold on Gentoo on the desktop, Debian on the server, and Debian in KVM guests (runs well on just 128MB RAM). I'll try OpenSuSE in a KVM guest to see how well it runs.

Re:OpenSUSE is awesome

[Bralkein]

SuSE was my first distro too, and I'm certainly glad I forked out for the box set, because it came with a couple of really awesome manuals that were a huge help to me as a complete Linux newbie. The YAST configuration tool also allowed me to set up a home server to replace the Windows 98 machine my dad had set up for that task (yeah, I know). There were also a couple of other nice touches for Windows refugees, e.g. some DOS commands were aliased to their UNIX equivalents, which allowed me to make limited use of the command line without any extra knowledge. If you can still buy the box sets with the manual in, I would definitely recommend that to someone thinking of switching to Linux.

I also made the same move to Slackware, for the same reason as yourself, and like yourself I got frustrated with its rather sparse nature. This spurred me on to Arch Linux though, which is sort of like Slackware for the 21st century, complete with a package manager which automatically resolves dependencies, downloads new packages and all the rest. If you ever yearn for the clean simplicity of Slackware, but want something with all the power of a modern distro, I would highly recommend it.

Honest and helpful information, I appreciate that

[golodh]

I was struck by the usefulness and honesty of one of the comments on the SuSE 11.0 release site.

This one:

"To make a long story short: KDE 4.0 is not and never was meant to replace 3.5.x for regular users. The main goals were porting to Qt4 and creating the frameworks to create all the things announced for KDE 4. Frameworks are unfortunately hardly visible to the user, so most things that use them, like plasmoids, panel-functionality etc., will only appear after the frameworks are in place, i.e. starting with 4.1." (see http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/announcing-opensuse-110-beta-1/)

Now that's a useful comment for an end-user like me. It honestly tells me what's not in the package and what not to expect, and it does so in an up-front manner in three short sentences. As such it's a relief from the way you have to dig for this sort of information on the KDE webpage (see http://www.kde.org/).

Don't get me wrong, I like the KDE desktop ... but I just don't want to know about (or have to dig through) the details of how the desktop is evolving. Let alone the vagaries of all those applets starting with a K. This announcement is end-user friendly in that it gets to the heart of the matter (i.e. I can try KDE 4 in SuSE 11.0 if I want to beta-test it, but it won't give me anything new) without me having to wade through pages of details ... or worse an install. My compliments.

Re:Honest and helpful information, I appreciate th

[QCompson]

Agreed. If only the KDE was so forthright about the release in January instead of trying to cover for the shortfalls of the final 4.0 release by relying on meaningless marketing drivel. They really should have just named it a "developer release" and avoided all this hoopla.

Warning to KDE users!

[pxc]

If you download the KDE4 LiveCD and want to install it on any system or VM, don't bother! The LiveCD installer is broken. To install the test system, you have to download the DVD.

Somewhere down this page it lists it as a "most annoying bug."

Damn right... :-\

I am a convert

[Stu101]

I recently removed XP and put OpenSuse 10.3 on it. As people before have said, the packman repository makes everything work re:mulitmedia.

The real nice thing is, it just works. I tried Ubuntu before, and Fedora etc etc but went back because a lot of it didn't work or i couldnt be bothered messing around for hours. OpenSuse is so good that I now just have Opensuse on it, and can do all my sysadmin work just as easily. It is THE distro that converted me to Linux full time, so much so im about to take my CLP exam in a few weeks. Windows really is becoming a has been to me, at least.

The other really nice thing about Suse is that it has all the packages one could reasonably expect ready to install. Unlike some other distros that have broken RPMs of such important software as MySQL. Best thing is, it takes literally 3 or 4 clicks to install MySQL onto a system in a usable.

Try it, it really does rock. It's slick, all the packages work! Ok so their alliance to another company sucks but hey, cant win em all.

Re:I am a convert

[Tastecicles]

I have exactly one laptop running xp now. It runs xp for gaming and that's it. Everyhting else runs SuSE, Debian or NetBSD. I'll never go back to Microsoft for a production platform; since Linux came along I stopped looking for an alternative to the bugridden, malware-infested, botched-together mess that 80% of the people I know still insist on using even though they are, as they extoll the virtues of the "easy to use interface", fighting popups and dialog boxes and blue screens of death. More fool them I say, and while Andy over there goes for yet another restart after plugging in a new flash stick, I'll just keep right on posting my drivel on slashdot. Fortunately for you lot that's all I got right now.