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openSUSE Launches 11.1
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 15, 2008 02:16 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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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?
Re:Is it really trolling? (Score:4, Insightful)
um maybe because they are trolling
Parent
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...
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.
Re:Is This One the Microsoft Certified Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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
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: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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And another Ars article [arstechnica.com] says:
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
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
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:3, Insightful)
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
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?