SUSE 9.2 Released

peterprior writes "Novell have issued a press release announcing SUSE Linux 9.2. The new version comes with kernel 2.6, KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.6 and features (amongst other things) enhanced wireless support as well as Evolution 2.0 with Groupwise / Exchange connectivity. The WYSIWYG web development tool Nvu is also included. The new release is expected to hit the retail shelves in early November."

Wireless

[jeffkjo1]

But will it work natively (read: no ndiswrapper) with my Linksys WMPP54G wireless card (stinkin Broadcom chipset.)???

Gnome and KDE?

[Xpilot]

I've never tried SuSE Linux after it was acquired by Novell (who also owns Ximian). A lot of people have said SuSE is KDE-centric, but now that Novell has put a KDE team and a GNOME team under one roof, is the Linux desktop experience more "unified"? When Redhat tried to unify the desktops, there was a backlash of sorts... but I haven't heard from SuSE. How does the SuSE desktop feel, in both KDE and GNOME modes?

SUSE

[stateofmind]

I love SUSE. :) But wow, I've never seen Nvu before, it looks like it could go head-to-head with Dreamweaver?

Has anyone used Nvu in a production enviroment and/or used Dreamweaver as well? I'd like to know how your experience was, versus the two of them.

I already have the majority of the programming team using SUSE for Java development. I'd like to move over our developers. (they build out HTML/JSP/PHP pages for us and the designers)

The only thing stopping them is, is their love of Dreamweaver. (Which I've never liked, it's a resource hog)

Josh

X.org

[Anonymous Coward]

"The X.Org Foundation's new X Window System X11R.6.8.1..."

Will this include the new Composite and XDamage extensions?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Exchange ?

[stratjakt]

Why? I'm sure they love OSS exchange clients. They don't have to support it, and the per-seat licensing revenue for Exchange server comes in either way. Businesses can superficially "switch" to linux on all the desktops, and they can still charge per-seat in the backend.

Why is this so? Because "IT" dopes are ass backwards. They put linux on the desktop and MS in the server room.

Personal Edition?

[Anonymous Coward]

German news sites heise and pro-linux are claiming that Suse will not release a personal edition this time.

However, it doesn't seem to be clear yet, if Suse will just not release a boxed version of the personal edition, or if they even stop the distribution of the personal edition iso for free downloads.

Any infos?

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[Jahf]

Gnot yet, but expect that to change when they have Novell Linux 10 completed (probably another quarter or so) and the Ximian products are integrated with the SuSE distribution.

Screenshots of Novell Linux 10 have been primarily using a Ximian-like GNOME desktop. It appears that while KDE will continue to get development, the "face" of Novell Linux will be the Ximian product.

That makes sense given how much influence the Ximian employees have retained in Novell's Linux decision making process.

Re:Exchange ?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This is an interesting point because while most people say the Office (word, excel, access, and so on) are M$'s cash cow, truth is the only real reason that Enterprise stays with M$ is Exchange.

Re:Exchange ?

[afidel]

Give me a replacement for Exchange that has group calandering, shared folders, works seemlessly with Outlook as well as an open client and doesn't have an ugly front end like Groupwise or Notes and I'll be sure to check it out. The truth is there isn't one out there that doesn't cost at least as much as Exchange does. So there is little incentive to go through the expense, pain, and risk of migrating.

Latest?

[balster neb]

Press release says "SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 comes with latest open source functionality". But it only comes with GNOME 2.6. GNOME 2.8 was out about 3 weeks ago [slashdot.org]

Anyway, lets hope this release has more than half-hearted GNOME support. The previous version included GNOME, but barely. It's going to be interesting to see how Novell balances KDE and GNOME in the future, given their conflict.

Re:Gnome and KDE?

[IceFox]

Well although you couldn't tell it here on slashdot
1) The gnome and kde developers arn't arch enemies.
2) Distros that want more users want both desktops.

What does this mean? A lot of colaberation, quite a bit through freedeskop.org. Little things like all my gnome apps now show up in the kde start menu without any effort on my part are a big deal (and vice versa). Everyone understands that the better the two desktops behave together (not code wise, but behavior wise) the more the user wins.

One neat project which I don't think (might be wrong) anyone is working on right now is a common icon set. When gnome or kde load up the icon "cut" it should be the same. Help create an icon set (without a slant to the current gnome or kde) and then get it in freedesktop.org and I bet you that distros would adopt it. If you are interested in helping with this or other colaberation projects head over to freedesktop.org.

Some other ones that would be nice to have:
-A common bookmark and cookie storage standard (way to many browsers these days)
-Along with a common icon set, a standard for the default toolbar format (size, and with or without text and text placement)

Down the road expect distros to be less and less KDE or Gnome only.

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:Which version of 2.6???

[MikeBabcock]

That's just FUD. I use 2.6.8.1 at home right now with Fedora Core 2 and it runs cdrecord and cdrecord-ProDVD fine on my combo DVD/CD burner.

For what its worth, I compile my own kernel with my own options, but no patches applied.

Also, it runs Wine fine, and I play Morrowind regularly with it.

What's advanced here?

[Bruha]

I paid for 9.1 Professional, Gaim was broke and you couldnt get a new 64bit compile from suse of the fixed version to save your life. They just farmed me out to ask the community for a fixed version. With no true workstation install you have to get all the compilers and such installed. And even then the 64bit version was missing packages that the 32bit version was not. So you couldnt compile a 64bit version if you wanted.

I had high hopes of Novell buying SuSe only to see not much being done with it. Patches to broken applications if made available need to be recompiled in a timely manner and be available to the users. Telling a customer to find it on the web is the wrong answer.

Re:Suse is nice

[M1FCJ]

I'm not a big fan or SuSE, I used to use RedHat all around the place... But FC1 and 2 were nothing but dissapointments for me. After screwing my Debian installation and waiting for too long for Gentoo to finish compilation, I switched all of my boxes, including an obsolete Sunsparc box to SuSE. I still hate Yast's limitations but I find its packages at least usable.

Strange though... Two years ago I could reccommend at least five distros to people. These days it is either FC or SuSE. I won't reccommend Gentoo or Debian to a newcomer and although Mandrake 10 was good, I had too many people coming back to me stating "their modem didn't work"...

Notice They're Using Bleeding-Edge X.Org

[Lethyos]

The X.Org Foundation's new X Window System X11R.6.8.1 also contributes to overall better hardware support.

So does this mean SuSE is going to be one of the first "user-friendly" distros to offer OSX-esque eye-candy like drop-shadows and transparency?

Re:Exchange ?

[MikeBabcock]

A lot of people give me a hard time because I sell people Dell servers with Red Hat Enterprise 3 on them as their back-end and Dell desktops running Windows as the clients.

My clients love it -- they get a desktop they recognize and the stability of a Linux server while not paying licensing to Microsoft for anything beyond the Dell MS tax.

For what its worth, yes, some of them even run Open Office on Windows.

Network mounting netware filesystems natively

[rlgoer]

SUSE 9.2 is all well and good, as another Linux distro.

But how well does it integrate with Novell's own products?

For example, can SUSE 9.2 network mount a Netware volume? Or do we have to use Novell's 'native file access' and export it using SMB (ugh)?

Also, if we can mount Netware volumes, can we do anything significant with them? E.g., can we set rights?

Is ConsoleOne actually working (with all the plug-ins we have under Windows) with SUSE 9.2?

I'd be pleased to hear that all these things were possible, but I'm inclined to doubt they are given what I've seen thus far....

Re:Suse is nice

[twener]

Ubuntu will need at least another 6 months (2nd release) to catch-up with SUSE excluding configuration tools. And much more time after to catch up with SUSE's YaST functionality (if they don't start to use it too :-).

I knew this was coming!

[jht]

This announcement was inevitable. Because I just got around to installing 9.1 on test hardware from the kit Novell just sent me a few weeks ago.

From what I've seen of 9.1, though, it's maturing rapidly - and that's got to be good. Personally, I use it mainly on a VM under Virtual PC on my PowerBook. Performance is surprisingly good, and much better than XP under the same environment (with all the XP eye candy turned off). I also run it on a PC VMware VM, where it behaves well, and so on.

I do think the two releases per year target is kind of arbitrary and silly for the most part, though. Novell/SuSE should be concentrating on supporting and updating the existing release over a year or so, and then release a new version when enough spiffy new stuff is out there to justify it. Other than Bluetooth support, improved wireless, and some new apps I don't see a lot of real justification for this version.

Re:Exchange ?

[afidel]

Unfortunatly OpenMail went EOL at HP and the company that bought it doesn't have the resources to really support it. It's unfortunatly a legacy product at this point. You're right though if HP had held onto it I would be using it at quite a few places right now.

Re:Wireless

[Homology]

I used to feel that Debian was that, but they can't manage to get Atheros and Prism2 wireless support in their mainstream releases that will install in 32mb of ram (yea, I want to turn old machines into access points. Yeah, I know I can use pebble. But there are reasons I don't want to).

Then install OpenBSD [openbsd.org]. If the card is Prism2 [openbsd.org] based, you can easily turn your shiny new OpenBSD gateway to an access point. No support for Atheros based card due to the propertiary and binary HAL component needed to make them work. OpenBSD does not accept unfree drivers.

For wireless security the authpf - authenticating gateway user shell [openbsd.org] is quite handy. Or you can just use VPN [openbsd.org] that is part of base install.

Re:No Ximian??

[riggwelter]

Well, Ximian patches for GNOME go into the SuSE builds (reading the RPM changelogs is fascinating).

In any case, most SuSE GNOME users prefer ULB GNOME [usr-local-bin.org].

Re:Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for

[theendlessnow]

Under Novell's leadership they released the first free version of SuSE on ISO that I can ever recall hearing about.

Then you must only be a few years old. Come on! SUSE had free ISO downloads clear up to 7.3... while that may seem ancient, remember 8.0 came out in 2002! Support for 7.3 and the ability (apart from mirrors that still exist) to get ISOs ended December 2003.

SUSE has provided a mechansim by which their software can be downloaded... perhaps not as convenient as ISOs for some, but you can always get ISOs from your local LUG... I'm sure that someone there will burn you a set for free.

Now, SuSE has the chance to actually gain marketshare against RedHat and force them to work harder on Fedora.

SUSE actually has more marketshare than you realize. Do you not know that over 90% of large scale enterprise deployments occur using SUSE?? Why? Because Red Hat was VERY, VERY late to the game when it came to supporting things like the mainframe.

When IBM was looking for vendor distribution support for the mainframe, SUSE dropped them a release on their doorstep. Red Hat came armed with contracts and "deals" (before they would even consider supporting the platform).

Which enterprise dist was first to provide logical volume support? Dynamically resizeable live file system support? A graphical and TEXT(!) based administration utility? Key integrated Unix features like NIS and NFS? Even LDAP?
Then ask, what enterprise dist was first to provide an unreleased private fork of GCC and its libraries, graphical-only administration tools (e.g. just like Windows requires a graphical head...), numerous kernel hacks that were not well tested, an NIS subsystem and automounter that is not well behaved or integrated, ...

SUSE's motto is "Have a lot of fun!". Now... we can all argue that having a lot of fun doesn't put bread on the table... but the guys sure are motivated when it comes to trying to their best to come out with solid technology that's easy to use.

IMHO, Novell brings the typical American business angle to SUSE (now they can be just like Red Hat). While some might argue that Red Hat is the most pro open source company out there... remember they also have vigorously protected their trademark (there's a whole story on that... but too long to write about here) to prevent those "free" CD's from bearing Red Hat's name. In many ways, Red Hat has shown more old-style IP protectionism than people realize. They're just a whole lot slicker (stealthier) about how they do it.

I liked SUSE better as a private company. However, IBM needs a real enterprise level player to help them provide enterprise level solutions... so you can kind of blame IBM for the whole Novell acquisition thing.. it brings a large scale support arm (that dwarfs Red Hat) and the flexibility of SUSE which has always had a better Unix integration philosophy (Red Hat is a GNU/Linux dist, SUSE is a GNU/Linux dist with the experience of former large scale enterprise Unix types).

Anyone who has been in the industry can tell you that Red Hat tends to have a "if it's not Linux, then it sucks" attitude. SUSE tends to have a "hey if we change this a bit, we'll integrate better with existing Unix systems" attitude. Now, which style is more enterprise focused??

With that said, Red Hat was the first publically traded American based Linux dist. Being publically traded goes a LONG way with American businesses (you protect my tail, I'll protect yours). It's easier to make "deals" when you are dealing with a public company. It's a "safer" business situation for large enterprises (sort of a good ole boy system). Anyone who has help take a company from private to public can fill in the details about what I mean there.

Well.. now there's Novell/SUSE. But the problem is that large enterprises got somewhat burnt by Novell in the past (doesn't matter if it's just perception... perception is all that matters). So, now businesses will choos

Re:Wireless

[spoonyfork]

I have SuSE 9.1 (2.6 kernel) running on boxes with 128 MB RAM. What do you mean won't install? The installer pukes out or coded to stop?

Re:Exchange ?

[Deagol]

Could someone make a decent argument why Exchange is so damned "important" in the private sector? I'm serious here. Managerial groupthink does not count.

I was once an admin for a M$ shop, and ran the Exchange Server 5.5. The higher-ups would get so damned pissed at me 'cause I simply refused to use the entire calendar/planner/contact-list crap that was part of LookOut. I just couldn't (and still can't) stomach that stuff. Yet I somehow managed to get the important shit done.

Please, will someone tell me what's so useful about the Exchange/Outlook combo (or either half, for that matter) that a business will spend the money on the MS Server, the Exchange Server, CALs, and the Windows/Outlook licesnes?

In an age of such fierce competition and cost-cutting measurse to increase the bottom line, I fail to see how a business can justify canning decent employees and cutting benefits, yet they're still willing to pay the MS crack dealer the annual licensing fees. Providing pet features for management doesn't seem like a good reason to me.

In all honesty, I continue to be stumped by this practice. The open source solutions we have available today are light years ahead of the commercial offerings we had ten years ago. Yet, we somehow managed with the tools back then. This isn't about not enjoying progress -- I'm no software Luddite -- it's about freedom (in the RMS sense). Isn't a little growing pain and inconvenience worth not having to worry about the BSA and the annual software audit?

Re:Exchange ?

[ckaminski]

Or worse, take a perfectly working sendmail/Netscape based email system and a 3rd party calendaring system that was distributed throughout the world on 8 boxes, and replacing each site with a clustered exchange host, burning a million+ $$$$ in the process...

Yeah, who's kid works at Microsoft and needed to make quota?

Cost vs. Value

[bill_mcgonigle]

Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi)....Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works.

Unless your time is worthless you would have been better off putting some money into a decent laptop with a wireless card from a vendor that doesn't solely provide windows-binary drivers and no specs as Broadcom does. Especially if linux was the goal of the hardware.

It's hard to buy hardware with no linux support from a linux-hostile vendor and be surprised when linux is hard to get working.

I've heard good things about IBM and Toshiba laptops, though I use an Apple myself (who unfortunately uses Broadcom in their newest wireless cards). Mandrake [linux-mandrake.com] and Redhat [redhat.com] have searchable databases if you want actual recommendations.

Re:Wireless

[beejhuff]

I'd like to echo on this point. I was literally amazed when I completed my first OpenBSD 3.5 install on an old Compaq Presario 1920 laptop. It recognized and configured my NetGear wireless pcmcia adapter and also a REALLY old linksys 10/100 ethernet card I had difficulties with even on previous Linux installations.

I was so impressed I took a plunge and attempted the 3.5 install on a new Averatec laptop with a built-in Intel wireless adapter. It properly detected and auto-configured the wireless adapter AND the crappy Realtek based 10/100 interface.

Really, I think MAJOR kudos should go out to the OpenBSD team for the 3.5 release. The latest failover utilities (carp and pfsynch) and driver support have really made it easier for me to setup and maintain WAPs on my ever-growing collection of used laptops. I've always been a bit paranoid about setting up wireless networks for friends and family but it's becoming much easier for me to do so with this latest release.

If you also consider the latest kernel support for the VPN Accelerator products from soekris (obligatory link - www.soekris.com) they've also come a LONG way to providing a platform for incredibly secure enterprise firewall and wireless access point systems. Given the cost of the soekris hardware (even their high end stuff) comes in at about HALF of what you'd pay for comparable cisco gear EVEN ON EBAY, I can't but help to throw some props their way.

Give the latest 3.5 release a shot. And order the CD if you like it. If for no other reason buy it for the HILARIOUS audio track of their Python-tribute. You'll piss yourself laughing...or at least I heard that some people did that....