New Financing And Fewer Staff @ SuSE

jdfox writes: "According to this press release from SuSE, they have just received another 15 million Euros (about 14 million $US) venture capital, with some big names listed in the consortium's membership. They have also announced that a quarter of their 500 staff will be let go, following on from similar recent cuts. This excellent distro deserves to succeed: I hope this move will see them through the current slowdown." The upcoming release (needs babelfishing from German) of SuSE's version 7.3 promised for October 13th is loaded with a ton of goodies, too -- Kernel 2.4.10, KDE 2.2.1 and GNOME 1.4.1 beta2, among other things.

English announcement of SuSE 7.3

[Schoinobates Volans]

That announcement [www.suse.de] won't need babelfishing: It's the english version ;-)

Re:pronunciation

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically it should be pronounced like "ZOO-zuh" but the Americanized pronounciation of "SOO- zuh" is fine (pronounced like last name of John Philip Sousa the famous marching band music writer of the late 1800's thru early 1900's).

Re:SuSE can't compete

[jfunk]

Your approach to criticising SuSE is misguided:

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to software. How many users choose SuSE just because the esoteric, useless package they need is provided as an rpm? It's probably not that many. Seriously, folks - how many users *actually need* five or six CDs of packages? Debian offers three but only the first is really required, unless you need something weird. But Debian doesn't have to pay the maintainers of the extraneous CDs; they're volunteers.

I prefer to have it on DVD and I leave it on my laptop as well as store the entire thing on a server. If I need a package, I can open up YaST and do a search. I much prefer SuSE RPMs because they seem to pay a lot of attention to detail, making sure that everything integrates nicely and is easy to setup. Do note that you're not representative of their big customers, who *do* want the kitchen sink approach, and often use Alice, a great system, to do mass installations. It all saves a lot of time in a big company.

The crappy installer. It's proprietary and annoying. dselect or kpackage blows it out of the water. And the penguin looks like the ball he's sitting on is wedged up his behind. (cf "Take it Tux")

The installer is great. Dselect has a *horrid* user interface and Kpackage is not an installer. I'm also sick of the "proprietary YaST" FUD I see around here. Did you actually *read* the license? Not only did I read it, but I agree with it. You obviusly have no idea that it is extremely customisable, either. Each YaST2 module is a perl script, which you can mess with. You can also make your own, if you want. It's really cool, and well documented. All of the source is there for the binary parts, as well, and you can modify it all you want, as long as you don't modify it *and* sell it. One or the other is just fine.

The fact that you need to cycle through each of the 5-6 installation CDs for a standard install. It completely defies reason.

You're totally wrong. Not much more to say here.

The silly, unprofessional prompts. "Have a lot of fun!" Is this really from a serious company that wants to make money? I showed it to my boss and he thought it was a joke (like the "redneck" dialect in RH 4 - which actually was funny).

I'm having trouble understanding you here. You think 'redneck' dialogue is professional and the single phrase "Have a lot of fun!" isn't? If anybody uses that phrase for their prime criteria for dumping a solution they should be fired on the spot.

Beeping right before rebooting the system. Again, it serves no useful purpose and only annoys your office mates.

Speaking as someone who works for a company that sells servers, we did the same thing. An ascending beep for startup and a descending beep for shutdown. Why did we do this? Reason 1 was that our customers asked for it. There are usually no monitors hooked up to servers and if you're shutting down from a ssh connection, it would be really nice to know when it's safe to turn the server off.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:English announcement of SuSE 7.3

[Hanno]

Wow, they really DID call us Linux users "Freaks".

Possibly a misguided translation attempt by a non-native-English German.

Here in Germany, "Freak" has become part of German slang and is used much in the same way as you use "geek" or "nerd" - part insult, part joke, part praise of unusual talent.

I do say "Ich bin ein Computer-Freak" about myself in German and don't mind being called that way by others, while the actual English translation would be "I'm a computer geek".

Just as with every language, lots of foreign words find their way into German and sometimes change their original meaning a little bit during assimilation.

say what?

[cabbey]

Have you looked ever actually looked at ftp.suse.com? Distros back to version 6.3 on seven architectures are all there. Here's 7.2 for x86 [suse.com].