Slashdot Mirror
OpenSUSE 11.4 Released
MasterPatricko writes with good news from SUSE: "'We are proud to announce the launch of 11.4 in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. The 11.4 release brings significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. Combined with the appearance of new tools, projects and services around the release, 11.4 marks a showcase of growth and vitality for the openSUSE Project!' This release is available now (direct download and bittorrent) as installable DVD or KDE/Gnome LiveCD images, as well as being installable over a network or as a live upgrade from a previous openSUSE release. Highlights include Linux kernel 2.6.37, improved package management, KDE SC 4.6.0, Gnome 2.32 with a preview of Gnome 3, Firefox 4.0, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and the debut of a rolling release project called Tumbleweed. 11.4 images are also already available for customization on SUSEstudio, and you can build your own packages for 11.4 and other GNU/Linux distros on the openSUSE Build Service."
What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?
Steven Jobs not even mentioned? What kind of slashdot is this becoming now?
I was a die-hard Linux user (stretching back to Libranet) till Windows 7 came out. It's just that good.
I'm not a big fan of [Open]SUSE, since I think there's always something missing in every version, but I installed the KDE flavor in my personal laptop and I will rollback to my old Debian again. Slow installation (I already had a /home partition and it took about 10 minutes only "preparing the configuration" with a heavy I/O load), slow package manager as usual (compared to synaptic. Zypper is quite good in contrast), KDE is once again a bloated monster (Akonadi stole 200MB of my home directory and the network manager looks cool, but has too many unnecessary stuff. Well, that's not an oS issue, but counts) and the default Firefox look and feel is ugly (seems that there's no GTK/Qt out of the box integration). Maybe I give the GNOME version a try this weekend.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
etc. etc.
Why report this particular distro as opposed to any others? Fusion Linux 14 also came out today, as did Vinux 3.0.1 - which is possibly more newsworthy given that it is targeted specifically at blind and visually-impaired users. Now that is newsworthy I feel - the attempt to make they technology we have available to as many people as possible, people who you wouldn't have thought would be able to use a computer.
Not only did the entire openSUSE user base comment here, some of them more than once.
I upgraded a couple of machines from 11.3 to 11.4 and everything went very smoothly and just worked. I've found OpenSUSE to be fairly stable and I like the fact that out of the box it has full LVM and RAID support and easily recognized my LVM setup from before.
The installation went quickly and seemed faster than 11.3 when I installed off of a DVD. It feels faster than 11.3 as well.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Just not in your moms basement. I have yet to see a copy of ubuntu running in a corporate environment. On the other hand, i've seen openSUSE on peoples desktops, and SLES running in data center after data center. Look at the large OEM's linux support list. Usually its RedHat and SLES, and there is a reason. Part of that has to do with the long support cycles, the rest has to do with testing and support of "enterprise hardware". For example, zSeries mainframes, 10G ethernet, SAS, fibre channel, 300+TB RAID arrays, you quickly find that the "popular" distributions don't work. For that matter, the last time I installed ubuntu it took 20 minutes to convince it to work properly in a vmware session, it kept disconnecting the network because it's MAC detection layer wasn't working properly with the vmware adapter. Heck probably 50% of the hardware I own won't run ubuntu. (50% of my personal hardware is non x86, cause i have POWER, sparc, ARM, etc machines).
Plus, as I posted in another thread, modern Yast is actually quite good. You can configured pretty much the whole machine from it now. From basic stuff like network, disk/LVM/RAID, iscsi, etc to nearly every service the machine ships with like Samba, and Bind. While many of the configurations are basic and need further tuning, it gets the beginner most of the way down the road without having to drop to a command line or editor. The package management is just as good as anywhere else with yast/zypper, so much so I can't remember the last time i had to compile something.
Finally, SUSE's binary driver story is a lot better than anyone elses, so a lot of "proprietary" hardware just tends to work. Like say, multihead with openGL support sufficient to run blender...
As some PCs do not have a CD player, you could also make a (live) USB key: http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You mean it doesn't say in the koran?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Inclusion of Mono killed SuSE for me. Unfortunately, the DVD isn't even as complete as the Mandriva one. When will the boxed sets begin to include the majority of the distribution? All they seem to want to do is give you a partial dump on DVD (or CD) and expect you to connect to their webserver to update or get anything useful (like, for example, a complete development environment including kernel headers for writing drivers).
Be advised that upgrading a running system with zypper dup with the installation DVD as the source will break the package manager halfway. I've spent a few hours sorting out the mess left by the upgrade from 11.3 (which is actually quite little) and it seems to work pretty well (most of the other problems were due to having too small a boot partition; make it 100 MB instead of 50 MB). Phonon is still failing to use my sound card, but I disable most of the KDE system sounds anyway.
Performance seems to have improved quite a bit in most applications and quite a few performance issues in the previous version have been fixed, so I'm liking 11.4 so far.