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openSUSE Launches 11.1
Novell has unveiled their latest release to the openSUSE line with 11.1. Offering both updates and new features, Novell continues to push for more openness and transparency. The new release includes Linux kernel 2.6.27, Python 2.6, Mono 2.0, OpenOffice 3.0, and many others. "[...] Our choice was also influenced by impressive changes that are transpiring in the openSUSE community, which is growing rapidly and is also becoming more open, inclusive, and transparent. Last month, the project announced its first community-elected board, a major milestone in its advancement towards community empowerment. This is a very good openSUSE release and it delivers some very impressive enhancements. The distro has evolved tremendously in the past two releases and is becoming a very solid and usable option for regular users."
paste from distrowatch weekly:
The Faculty of Physical Sciences at the University of Glasgow recently migrated their main logon server across to Slackware Linux. Shane Kelly writes: "A little while ago, the requirements for data transfer from some overseas research sites jumped tremendously, meaning I needed to assess the impact on our aging 'log in' server that was used as a portal to the Physics network." Their original server running SUSE Linux 9.3 had been working well, handling numerous login sessions, but its P3 CPU, 100 Mb network card and 96 MB of RAM were no longer enough to handle the increasing load. A new AMD Opteron-based server was selected and when it came time to choose a distribution, he headed here to DistroWatch.com to help decide. "I have never liked Red Hat (too many 'extras' between you and the operating system), ditto SUSE, and looking at the top twenty Linux distributions on DistroWatch, I could see that many were more suited to desktops, while many more had no 'pedigree' and were simply re-vamped editions of something else. Then my eye hit upon an old-timer that was said to be a bit difficult, devoid of GUI management tools, and rock solid. Yep, I'm talking about Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution, now at version 12.1". The author is happy to be re-acquainted with his old friend Slackware and is recommending it to others for use on their servers.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
openSUSE 11.1, the next major version of the company's community-driven Linux distribution, is scheduled for release on December 17.
You need Linux Genuine Advantage.
how often does this bullshit have to be trotted out, only to make the poster (In this case, AC) look like a moron?
http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft,-Novell-spar-over-Linux-agreement/2100-7344_3-6137444.html
Now stop it already
Novell is "pushing" for more openness? Why does it take "pushing"? Novell owns SuSE - it can just open it as much as it wants. Finally opening the project governance to the community that's been contributing for years isn't even "pushing", or at least not harder than inertia.
Novell does seem to be gradually getting around to opening SuSE. Which is good. But since SuSE could be doing even better if Novell just opened it more, and more quickly, bottlenecked by only it's community's maturity and not by corporate hesitance, I'm not believing this happy talk about "pushing".
--
make install -not war
It seems that every post that points out the Novell/Microsoft deal are marked as troll or flamebait.
I know it's a hot issue and the Microsoft/Novell deal still bothers me, but anyone bringing up this issue is automatically tagged as troll. Care to explain?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
How does the Novell/Microsoft deal affect your rights? You have not signed it.
If it did affect your rights in some nefarious way, how would not using Suse counteract that?
But still, being aware to look after your rights is a good instinct. Just make sure it is based on facts not FUD. The Free Software Foundation has a list of free distributions which meet their standards. The FSF is generally the most legally conservative and ideologically pure outfit in the free software world, so if you use something they have approved you can be pretty certain of peace of mind.
A reasonable alternative is to use a distribution which keeps a clear distinction between free software and non-free. Debian is famous for this, but Fedora (which is what I use) also has a policy to include only free software (in recent releases anyway). The difference with the FSF-approved distributions lies in loadable firmware, but you may not be concerned about that.
(If you don't want to use Suse because you dislike Novell's business practices and their deal with Microsoft, that's your choice, but just say so rather than inventing stuff about 'legal risks'. Or if you do know of legal risks, please explain what they are so that people can fix the problem.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
And another Ars article says:
Mono does not seem to be just means to an end, but an end in itself.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Kids, you read too much of rabbid flames...
As I'm concerned, SUSE is good OS. Let the rest be sorted out by GPL.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I bet most women fail your girlfriend test too.
I don't know what elderly people you work with, but none, I repeat, none of the people I work with have every known how to shut down or reboot Vista without me explaining.
MS has hidden the Shut Down and Reboot options under a very small, and unassuming button with a triangle on it in the very lower right of the menu. The Sleep button is the big, red button with the power symbol on it.
I know anecdotal evidence and everything; but your test fails for Vista on every user I have worked with.
+1.
A reasonable alternative is to use a distribution which keeps a clear distinction between free software and non-free.
SUSE always made clear distinction between commercial/non-free software they include and core OS. Core OS always was and is GPL'ed Linux.
All software is installed with rpm - you can always grep for license.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I have hard time belieeving your grandma was able to install Windows and not Linux. 1) Pop in Fedora Live , hit "Install to Hard drive" 2) Open up what word processor (usually only one on a Live cd) 2b) Type letter, save as/export as PDF 3) Open up Firefox/Gmail or Thunderbird send email 4) Take picture, plug SSD into SSD reader on machine 5) Here it gets tricky, can't remember if Linux distros auto add printers... then again I can't remember Windows auto adding printers either. And why exactly does your grandma test include installing and setting up and operating system?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Your grandmother knows how to find drivers for her network card and install them? Wow. I'm impressed.
Erm...so your grandma can install an OS but can't turn the computer off?
And how the frack is grandma supposed to send an email in Word or PDF from a fresh Windows install? Did she also install Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat, or was she supposed to use Wordpad?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
You have a short memory. YaST was non-free not so long ago. I think Novell made it free software after they bought SuSE.
Well, in the days I used SUSE very extensively. And, no, SUSE never tried to hide the fact that they ship and install non-free software.
What's more, if you would dig you memory, you might recall that they pretty much from day one were stating that it is impossible to build good OS with only free software. And they were always shipping commercial software. e.g. SUSE was first Linux to include movie editing software - in the times when there was no F/LOSS alternatives. They were also shipping MP3 support - because they acquired license for that. (*)
SUSE was openly stating that they are per se not free. You can make out of SUSE free OS - yet you would loose lots of functionality, making OS non-starter in any OS comparison. And SUSE was always comparable versus Windows and Mac OS.
(*) Freely downloadable ISO image not always included all goodies of the boxed retail version.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Principles have nothing to do with it... it's a matter of engineering.
Microsoft threatened lawsuits over 200 patents but licensed them to SUSE. Our IT dept (as well as many other IT departments) saw a potential for incompatible licenses after that licensing agreement and made a purchasing decision not to purchase SUSE or other Novell products due to potential incompatibilities in licensing.
It's more than principles... It's engineering and logic, stupid.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Ahh... that's interesting. Still it does not rule out using OpenSUSE, which is not a Novell product (in the sense that they do not sell it, and OpenSUSE users are not Novell customers) and is not covered by the no-sue agreement.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I am a long-time SuSE fan, since it had the least problems with my hardware (esp. laptops), could get my favorite package manager (apt, although since 10.3 & zypper you don't need it), and its config tool Yast was better than most things out there. When our company needed 64bit servers (running VMware among other things) about 4 years ago, SuSE was the best option.
And with every version, it did get much better... until the dreaded 11. At first I installed a SuSE 11 beta on an AMD system to check out KDE 4. As you all know, KDE 4.0 was nothing to look at unless you were a KDE developer, so I didn't have much fun there as a KDE user, however I noticed that the system was VERY unstable, even for a beta. I am not used to seeing hard locks even on beta linux distros.
Anyway, I gave SuSE 11 a shot when it came out. I installed it on a very common Core 2 system (Asus mobo, fresh bios etc). A few seconds after you started KDE (random number), even WITHOUT doing anything, the screen would freeze, and there was nothing you could do, no ctrl+F1, or ssh etc, it was a hard lock. If you switched off and on, nothing out of the ordinary was on the system logs... Tried three clean installations, same behavior, gave up and reinstalled 10.3 (which was always fine). I never had a hard lock with out any clue in the logs, so I could not imagine how I could troubleshoot (without randomly trying things)...
Sorry for the rant, I hope I am allowed a little bit as a SuSE fan. Anyway really hope 11.1 is what 11 should have been for me...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Well, while you go on in fear, I'm going to continue using what I've found to be the most polished distribution for KDE4 users (out of Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and Debian). Fedora annoyingly included a pre-release version of xorg that didn't have driver support from nvidia or amd. I have no idea what's up with Kubuntu; the maintainers need to work a little harder at making it stable and fast. Debian is just missing some of the nicer GUI tools for system administration.
If you've got a better distribution to try, I'd love to hear it. (I'm really happy we have KVM ^_^)
Google is such a terrible company. They go around pretending to be the good guys by helping open source projects, promoting an open-source browser, developing an open source browser and supporting webkit, pushing standardization and inter-communication between chat clients. pushing for the use of free (as in beer) software. It clearly won't be long before we were wishing Microsoft was back and those rat-bastards at Google had never touched the web!
Please take your American software patent problems elsewhere.
Thank you,
rest of the world
I set up my parents with openSuSE 11.0 on an older desktop of mine. It runs fine. They are using KDE 4.0. I have to fix a few things now and then, I had to show them how to use some stuff, but they are using it now to print (Canon MP210, network share... slightly buggy when accessing via network on XP but it still works), e-mail (gmail), web (firefox), video (can't remember the program), music (amarok, pandora), documents (openoffice.org, pdf reading), etc.
I'll upgrade my laptop to openSuSE 11.1 first and if it works, upgrade their desktop as well. Hopefully it will support the video card (Radeon 9800) drivers a little bit better.
Frankly, the Microsoft/Novell "evil deal" thing is extremely frustrating to me. I'm working with both SuSE and RedHat a lot at work now, and I frankly prefer SuSE to RedHat as far as usability. I've tried Ubuntu and I don't like Gnome, and it was harder to customize Ubuntu (at least for me) than SuSE 10.3/11.0.
No, SuSE did not pass the grandma-install test, but it passed the set-up-for-parents-and-let-them-use test.
Why would anyone ship python 3.0 at this point when it broke backward compatibility and probably doens't work for a large number of python applications?
Time makes more converts than reason
'Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft' please explain why HP uses SLED and not say debian ? or Fedora (redhat?)
Used to be a suse user myself - then Novell came.
The GPL is time consuming remember those 235 patent infingements that ms have 'yet' to name ?
I'm not 'rabbid' just theres better distro's out there.
Yes Mono. Software that would have required a Windows box is now running on a Linux box.
[sarcasm]
It's terrible that organizations have another option for migrating to a non Microsoft Platform. Obviously they should rewrite their software from scratch or stay away from Linux. Linux is pure and holy!!! The power of Linus compels you!
Samba, Wine, Evolution, Pidgin, etc, etc, are all evil too.
[/sarcasm]
Yeah I know... all those packages that could be useful for migrating away from a Genuine Microsoft OS are evil. You can go away now.
I want this account deleted.
But then that's usually the case for /.
OpenSUSE is a good Linux distro - one of the top five best, and probably the best. I have 10.3 on my old machine and just installed 11.0 on my new machine. Only complaint I have is now I have to consider whether to upgrade to 11.1. As usual, I'll probably hold off for a couple months to let the bugs get fixed. And I won't touch KDE 4.x until it's at 4.2 at least - too many people complaining about bugs for me to consider using it, although 4.1 is allegedly stable for many people.
Once again, I said when it occurred that Novell's deal with Microsoft was irrelevant for Linux and FOSS in general except to a bunch of FSF psychos and that has proven to be the case. Only lames with no clue continue to bring it up every time Novell is mentioned.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Well, while you go on in fear, I'm going to continue using what I've found to be the most polished distribution for KDE4 users (out of Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and Debian). Fedora annoyingly included a pre-release version of xorg that didn't have driver support from nvidia or amd. I have no idea what's up with Kubuntu; the maintainers need to work a little harder at making it stable and fast. Debian is just missing some of the nicer GUI tools for system administration.
If you've got a better distribution to try, I'd love to hear it. (I'm really happy we have KVM ^_^)
Have you looked at Mandriva?
I haven't used Mandrake / Mandriva in many years (I'm an openSUSE user), but it is a KDE oriented distribution. Last time I used it, it was quite polished and worked well. I can only imagine that is still true.
Personally, I will stay with openSUSE for the foreseeable future. For me, it just works (TM)
Ever stop to think
Novell bought SuSE and open sourced YaST.
But first they bought Ximian and open sourced the Exchange Connector for Evolution.
Damn those Novell guys for liberating the non-open source pieces of code these companies had! The community has suffered greatly because of Novell! :-)
The point of the deal was blatantly obvious: Microsoft paid Novell loads of money so that people like you will go around to places like slashdot making posts like the above to create the impression that linux is of questionable legality. Microsoft hopes that business people will get wind of your fears and therefore shy away from linux.
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Not to sound too Monty Python-esque, but Brain Damage does not a cogent argument make. I did not prove nor disprove anything other than what was already stated. The deal equed out by Microsoft and Novell amounted to nothing more than "Feel Good" protection for Novell's customers, who may or may not have been clamoring for this type of assurance.
In any respect, Microsoft paid Novell more money as they probably felt that this would now be the death knell for Linux' claims of non infringement. Hovsepian, and Novell proper, disagreed with Microsoft's assertions. They are proponents for open source and people who deride Novell are often the most uneducated about the contributions that they themselves use, that were provided by Novell or their support of Open Source.
Get off your high horse. I dislike Miguel as well, as he is contrary to the above points, nearly becoming a full Microsoft apologist within the Linux community.
Now, bugger off.
Sincerely
Anarke Incarnate