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openSUSE Launches 11.1
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 15, 2008 01:16 PM
from the i-am-lizard-hear-me-roar dept.
from the i-am-lizard-hear-me-roar dept.
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."
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OpenSUSE Beta Can Brick Intel e1000e Network Cards 129 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Some Intel cards don't just not work with the new OpenSUSE beta, they can get bricked as well. Check your hardware before you install!" The only card mentioned as affected is the Intel e1000e, and it's not just OpenSUSE for which this card is a problem, according to this short article: "Bug reports for Fedora 9 and 10 and Linux Kernel 2.6.27rc1 match the symptoms reported by SUSE users."
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not completely off topic (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
umm its not out yet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:umm its not out yet (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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openSUSE 11.1, the next major version of the company's community-driven Linux distribution, is scheduled for release on December 18.
Copy/paste! How did you get 17, parent?
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So /. is actually ahead of breaking news for a change?
Pushing or Straggling? (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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A reasonable alternative is to use a distribution which keeps a clear distinction between free software and non-free.
Unlike RH and some other companies, Novell didn't claimed any openness until community shaped around openSUSE.
Just recall Fedora earlier days: RH claimed it was open (in whatever sense they meant it), yet RH retained rights to do whatever it liked with it. And there was no community - or rather original Fedora community was simply excluded from the development process.
Novell did it right - they learned mistakes of Fedora and did none of them. They first forked and opened distro, assigned internal dev
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If you read my post, you'd see the word I had a problem with was "pushing", not "opening".
Is it really trolling? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Sure.
The reason is that the Novell-Microsoft deal was discussed in length the month after it took place. Little is left to say.
Re:Is it really trolling? (Score:4, Insightful)
um maybe because they are trolling
Parent
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It seems I was not alone with that impression. I agree that many of the replies qualified as trolling, but some of the 'insightful' replies are now marked as such.
For instance: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1062891&cid=26122539 [slashdot.org]
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Deal is between M$ and Novell. Between you (as user) and Novell stands GPL. Users are NOT affected by the deal.
If Novell truly goes to dark side... Stop. Actually, if you read history of Novell, you would notice that they are of the dark side: company run by lawyers (M$ being company run by sales).
Though point stands: flaming Novell for deal with M$ is silly and pointless as it doesn't affect normal SUSE users. On other side, business users (== paying customers) are more than happy about the deal and
I hope this is better than SuSE 11. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
hardlock without any log records sounds like a hardware issue - maybe the newer version used some capabilities that triggered this.
what you could have tried, redirecting syslog to a remote networked machine - though in my experience this has not helped much, as nothing gets logged in that case either.
speaking about suse/opensuse release quality, personally, i felt that including zmd as default was _the_ worst release[s] (10.1-10.2, if i remember correctly).
parts of zmd were written in mono (eww), and it was
Parents use it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Took about two seconds for the morons to come out (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is This One the Microsoft Certified Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Re:Is This One the Microsoft Certified Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [cnet.com]
Now stop it already
Parent
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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, an
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People say this stuff, but the truth is that Novell doesn't love Microsoft, they just see a business opportunity and a legal wrangle.
If Microsoft wanted to take on Novell again, they'd need a chair. AND a gun. AND a dog.
If I wanted to use SUSE, I would without fear. It's not Microsoft that I'm afraid of. It's Google. M$ is in decline. Google is not.
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Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [gnu.org] 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.)
Parent
Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort (Score:5, Informative)
+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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
You have a short memory. YaST was non-free not so long ago. I think Novell made it free software after they bought SuSE. Back in the day, SuSE intentionally tried to package non-free software without warning the user: see this talk by RMS [beust.com]:
Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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! :-)
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And another Ars article [arstechnica.com] says:
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Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort (Score:5, Informative)
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 ^_^)
Parent
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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)
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You using X.org? Have you stripped out any Novell code from the Kernel? Did Banshee, FSpot?
So you don't use OpenSuse. I happen to like Unbuntu myself but that has nothing to do with the Microsoft deal. OpenSuse is a good system from what I have seen, We use it in our office because that is what our sysadmin likes.
Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort (Score:5, Informative)
Please take your American software patent problems elsewhere.
Thank you,
rest of the world
Parent
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Ironically, I know companies which started Linux (SUSE) adoption upon hearing the news about collaboration.
If nothing else, that was one huge pitch to use Linux coming from nobody else but Microsoft itself.
If you have business and have heaps of Windows servers and Windows clients, adopting something (e.g. RH or Debian) what isn't targeting heterogeneous environment where M$ dominates, is plain too risky. With SUSE the risk is much lower and calling Novell support on M$ vs. Linux compatibility is alre
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Suse is not linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids, you read too much of rabbid flames [boycottnovell.com]...
As I'm concerned, SUSE is good OS. Let the rest be sorted out by GPL.
Parent
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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 e
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I bet most women fail your girlfriend test too.
Re:Failed the Grandma Test (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Failed the Grandma Test (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Why write an email in Word or PDF format and attach it to the email? Why not just write it in the email client?
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to test how accessable a word processor is. One of the most common activities at work is attaching a file to an email so we just create a document to attach. Feel free to switch it to a spreadsheet but last time I checked most grandmas know what a letter is more so then a spreadsheet.
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What does your grandma attaching a document to an email have to do with work? My mother, who's a grandma (if it matters) has no trouble with this on any OS I've thrown at her except it wasn't word. It was a picture which is more common than writing a letter in a word processing program and far more likely. In fact, I can't think of a time when she's opened office/productivity software other than to make greeting cards with clip art.
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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?
Don't feed the trolls (Score:2)
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