Slashdot Mirror
OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here
lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."
A bit, imho, far more relevant ones, are described in Top Features. Support for Btrfs, and the visual interface of Meego for netbooks, sound to me a bit more interesting, apart of the usual incremental improvement over previous versions.
Glad to see Rosegarden gets a mention... it's great program. Spideroak... eh - at least for the free verison. Haven't played with it, but Dropbox had this covered long before Spideroak. And I can use Truecrypt with dropbox. That and the client is 75 megs. Rather large for my tastes.
I'll have to give this a try on one of my machines (currently have 11.2 installed on one).
I was at a European conference a week ago and there were quite a few attendees with laptops running some version of openSUSE. A previous UK computer science department I was in also used openSUSE as its distro.
I use openSuSE, as do most of the people I know. It doesn't have the warm fuzzies that people seem to get off Fedora and it doesn't have the nerd chic/new hotness feeling that Ubuntu has (which many, many others have had before, I might add), but it is a very well-maintained and established distro with probably the best configuration/installation (yast is very nice) of the lot, and has benefited from closeness to both the GNOME and KDE projects.
It's a nice distro.
Seriously, can't people who write software choose meaningful, easy-to-remember names for their programs?
How the hell is 'rosegarden' supposed to make me think about editing audio files? And that 'SpiderOak' name is a joke, right?
I for one do (and it is still in the top 5 on distrowatch). YaST is a wonderful tool if you have never used it. One place to edit just about every config file and deal with system admin is very useful. Also their integration with KDE is by far the best of all the distros I have tried in a long time.
What is this "Linux" thing? Is that a new Apple or Microsoft product?
Well when you quit submitting quality links with great summaries this website has just gone to hell.
Why don't you submit better stories with great summaries anymore?
I am of course being sarcastic, but really if you want better submit better.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Meh, I couldn't get YaST to work my 2 monitors properly. Fedora works.
YaST is a wonderful tool if you have never used it.
.. and once you have used it, it's not so wonderful? :)
It isn't as bleeding edge as Ubuntu, but the releases aren't nearly as broken.
openSUSE has give us Compiz, Moonlight, Office 2007 support in OpenOffice, Exchange support in Evolution, Samba, etc.
It is my distro of choice. And I also really like that they focus on putting out both really solid KDE and Gnome desktops.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yep; where I work (small university dep't) one of the faculty members has it on all his desktops.
My main grumble about OpenSuSE is that, at least until 11.2 -- I'm still fuzzy on the details -- you couldn't actually do an upgrade from SuSE itself using zypper; you had to boot from the DVD and upgrade. I'm used to CentOS and Debian where this sort of thing isn't a mix of hope and prayer or a feature request.
Carousel is a lie!
http://susestudio.com/
Build your own image with USB as your target. The process is simple and streamlined (and they have videos).
Because OpenSUSE's KDE implementation tends to be less buggy and better integrated than most, it's frequently used as a reference distro for KDE reviews. Basically, if there's a KDE function that doesn't work on OpenSUSE, it's assumed that it doesn't work anywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth.
Plus, YaST is a fairly intuitive and exhaustive system management console. It admittedly gets a little buggy when you start bumping into corner cases, but, if you're not into hand-coding your config files, it's vastly superior to dpkg-configure. Though I certainly don't begrudge anyone that's willing to wade their way through the command-line and their system's config files, it's nice to have some tools that help you go in the right direction when you need to do those one-off configuration jobs and don't require a fully functional LAMP installation (Webmin, phpMyAdmin, and so on).
The software management module is just a frontend to zypper, which works pretty much identically to apt.
I'm a very satisfied openSUSE user. I cut my teeth on Slackware back in the day (and still run it wherever stability is really important), and was never really happy with any of the auto-everything distros until I discovered openSUSE a year ago. It has the same balance of reasonably-stable and reasonably-up-to-date that I like about Slackware, combined with a sane out-of-the-box configuration. My MSI Wind U100 netbook is currently running 11.3 right now, and I've had zero problems. If it stays that way for a few days, I'll switch my desktop machine from 11.2 to 11.3.
And had Novell not gotten in bed with Microsoft, I might even consider SuSE. However, they did, and thus SuSE was completely removed from my radar (and most everyone else in our Linux User's Group. Now it is Mandriva, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
I understand those sentiments. However, as a Linux advocate, I want Linux to grow and succeed. Part of that means that people need migration paths from Microsoft solutions to Linux solutions. Novell seems to be the one company working on interoperability and migration paths to help people.
In striking the patent deal, it helps protect Novell as they work on Samba, Mono, etc. which in turn open the door for enterprise environments to integrate Linux in a Windows envrionment.
Not to mention, since openSUSE is free (as in beer) you're not financially supporting Novell. If you don't donate or contribute back, you're actually adding to their financial burdern.
openSUSE is also community driven, so you're really spiting the community more than Novell.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
openSUSE is def more aggressive than Ubuntu in integrating the latest packages. Just compare the kernel or gcc versions they've shipped vs Ubuntu on DistroWatch. Among the major distros, openSUSE is less bleeding edge than Fedora. But which major distro isn't? Also, iyam, openSUSE releases are buggier than Ubuntu releases. FWIW, I was a SUSE user for seven years. After I dealt with small inconveniences after every SUSE release (altough I didn't encounter any showstoppers in years), I recently made the switch to Ubuntu. I couldn't be happier.
On a non-production system I made the mistake of editing the httpd file through Yast2. Yast "helped" "fix" my conf file so that Apache would not longer work. I learned not to edit important configuration files through gui tools.
I haven't looked at SuSE linux in almost 4 years.. SLES 9 was very stable.
Ubuntu is on all of my workstations & laptops now, and RHEL is on the servers.
So they release 11.3, and your main gripe is a missing feature that .... isn't missing as of 11.2 ?
My favorite distro. YaST is the big difference, IMHO -- other distros have nothing like it. I've got OpenSuse 11.2 installed on my daughter's laptop (and Ubuntu on my wife's, but I much prefer the former); if my daughter can have all she needs to on it and not complain too much, they're definitely doing something right.
I'm worried that Microsoft could try to claim that it proves Linux as-is infringes on Microsoft patents. However, does Microsoft really want a lengthy SCO-type trial?
Linus has said he's pretty sure there is prior art for anything Microsoft would try to claim.
In the end, it infused Novell with cash (which they needed) and gave Novell security that they wouldn't be sued.
Personally, I don't think Microsoft really can start a massive patent war against Linux on the whole because the EU has already twice dropped massive fines on them, and said if they didn't work on interoperability (which I think led to the Novell deal) the EU would ban the sale of Microsoft products in the EU.
Microsoft's hands are somewhat tied here. They can try a little FUD every now and then, but they can't do much damage.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
i used to love suse as my distro. but the patent deal made me turn away from it. as well as much of the community. i started with redhat and loved it then it turned into garbage with fedora. so i moved to mandrake i found it to buggy. then ran suse for a long time. patent deal moved me to ubuntu and thats where i still am. debs are also alot easer to manage then rpms when it come to cleaning the system of old librarys on software you remove.
We use SuSE Studio to create pre-configured linux distros of our POS application and Database Server. It's stable and works. I can't say we've had that experience with Ubuntu as Ubuntu broke stuff from 8 to 9 and then from 9 to 10 with our point of sale system. Sometimes it was hardware support that was suddenly buggy, other times it was buggy libraries causing the problem. We've never had that problem with SuSE/OpenSuSE. Plus SuSE Point of Service is the linux supported by NCR on their equipment and is supported by HP retail equipment.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I've found that those of us using OpenSuSE do so because it generally works and stable so we can be working on fixing other problems.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Works on any of the live CD downloads. Needs to be done as root. usbdevice will typically be sd[a-z]. setting the block size to 8 MB just makes it go faster.
Detailed instructions here.
Can I update V 11.2 , 11.1 in place and expect not lose what I have ?
Likely?, Yes ?, impossible?
or no?
Yes you can. With 11.2 you can either do it via the updater (zypper ) or do an upgrade from the appropriate CD / DVD. I can't remember if 11.1 can do a dist upgrade via zypper or not.
I normally just do the upgrade from DVD, and have always done so. I've never had any significant issues in the past. I normally do some testing on OpenSUSE releases and that is the thing I concentrate on, making sure that upgrades work (NB. I was a slacker this time and didn't do any testing on 11.3)
Ever stop to think
The EVIL Novell has done it again! OpenSuse which by the way is free as in $0.00 USD. Patches and updates are free as $0.00 USD. If you want Novel's SLES product, guess what it is free as well AND includes 60 days worth of updates and if you want it out farther then it costs you around $30.00 USD a month The NERVE! Those fuckers from Novel hell gaul selling support AND pushing all their changes back to the Free Version they are such bastards!
You folks need to get that stick worked out of your collective asses. Novel's rock solid support of the Linux Community is on-par with Red Hat and all the rest of them and in many ways it is better.
How many distros come with an Oracle option ready to role? Yast may not handle all the various Apache configuration strangeness the way you might like it, but if you use it as designed it works damn fine. It could have a much better Firewall config utility but they are getting there. I have installed it on many many different versions of hardware and in 99% of the cases it has just found all the parts bits and pieces and handled them quite well. I even put it on a ancient IBM Thinkpad and the only glitch was a display setting and one quick google search solved that problem.
The SLED Distro is a great desktop OS and handles prety much anything you want to throw at it and then some and does it better then most any other Distro. So all you zealots can have a tall cool glass of Shut The Fuck up. And as for giving people a reason to migrate to MS, that's funny since I just moved an entire company ( 100 Desktops ) from Windows XP to OpenSuse.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I know, we can call it "Bitterface," because of the experimental Btrfs support.
Get off my launchpad!