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SuSE Linux

openSUSE 11.2 Released 207

An anonymous reader tips news that openSUSE 11.2 has reached its official release. You can get it from their download page, or just grab the torrents (32-bit, 64-bit). "openSUSE 11.2 will come with the latest version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel, the beating heart of every openSUSE system. The default file system of openSUSE will be switched to the new Ext4 as well. Of course, openSUSE will continue to support Ext3 and other filesystems — but on install, new partitions will automatically be designated Ext4. ... Desktops and servers can use the same kernel, but it's better to tune the kernel for the job at hand. That's why openSUSE now includes a desktop kernel specially tuned for desktop users. ... In addition to the work of the openSUSE Project in the desktop, openSUSE 11.2 includes the latest versions of the two desktop environments, KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28. KDE users will enjoy the new Firefox KDE integration, OpenOffice.org KDE4 integration, consistent KDE artwork and all standard applications being ported to KDE4 including KNetworkManager, Amarok, Digikam, k3b, Konversation and more."
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openSUSE 11.2 Released

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  • by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @12:58PM (#30075696)

    openSUSE 11.2 will come with the latest version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel, the beating heart of every openSUSE system.

    As opposed to all those other distros, which don't use the Linux kernel as their "beating heart." :)

    • by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:40PM (#30076482)
      at least its a differentiation of Linux and Distro. As in Ubuntu is not Linux. Really? Try telling (most) Ubuntu users. When somebody on the internet claims 'their Linux i not working' I'd say the odds are good that they are running Ubuntu.
      • by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @02:12PM (#30077046)

        Even geeks on slashdot refer to it as "Linux" and distros are named "RedHat Linux" and "Ubuntu Linux" and "SuSE Linux."

        If you called your car a "Mercedes Car" you might be under the impression that the entire thing was called a "car" and that "Mercedes" made a "version" of it. You probably wouldn't think that the "car" was actually just the engine and all the rest was called a "distribution." :)

        And frankly, I'm fine with calling it as a whole "Linux" just like people refer to Windows as a whole as "Windows," even if it's Windows XP or Windows 2003 or Windows Vista or Windows 3.1. Most people differentiate, but not all the time.... "Windows" is the least common denominator. "Linux" is the least common denominator. :)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            I know it's openSUSE or SLES... it's actually "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server" if you want to be picky. I've used openSUSE personally and SLES at work.

            (I actually had the capitalization wrong though, I thought the U wasn't capitalized. Oh well. Learn something new...)

            But most people don't get caught up in saying exactly the right name, I don't think. Nobody calls it GNU/Linux ;) (hehe)

            Seems that most people call it by the distro name first, though, since most distros market it as such, I guess...

      • by caluml ( 551744 )

        When somebody on the internet claims 'their Linux i not working' I'd say the odds are good that they are running Ubuntu.

        Rewind 10 years, and s/Ubuntu/Redhat/g

    • by Bralkein ( 685733 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:59PM (#30076802)
      Depends if they set CONFIG_NO_HZ=y :P
    • by Mr. DOS ( 1276020 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @02:00PM (#30076828)

      Yeah; the others have the tick(er)less kernel.

            --- Mr. DOS

    • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

      OpenSUSEbsd?

    • Most distros don't need to move gallons of blood...

      Come to think of it, what the heck is SUSE doing!?

      • Well, if they ever *gasp* upgrade their kernel, I guess they'll be doing a heart transplant...

        I knew upgrades were scary things sometimes, but...

  • Finally (Score:4, Informative)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @12:59PM (#30075710) Homepage Journal

    Finally, easy upgrades come to OpenSUSE.

    sudo zypper dup !

    I just had to cleanly install OpenSUSE 11.1 the other day because I was in the middle of patching 10.3 when Novell took down the repositories. I worked on the broken system for a week before making the time to reformat/reinstall. I started patching it by hand to make the 10.3 -> 11.1 dup work, but it was just too time consuming.

    But anyway, I'll be running zypper dup in the next few days after demand on the servers dies down. It's about time SUSE users get a clean in-place upgrade process. :-)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Macka ( 9388 )

      Zypper *groan* .. what the hell was wrong with yum? It pisses me off that if I am ever called on to work on a SuSE system that I can't use the knowledge and experience I have with yum and have to learn yet another fucking package manager. If they had a problem with Yum, why not just work closer with Redhat to improve it and keep the development effort/cost down for everyone. They obviously haven't learned from Unix history: that trying to be a "better" unix than everyone else by being different doesn't

      • Zypper *groan* .. what the hell was wrong with yum?

        Well, for starters it's incredibly slow. I have quad-core 3GHz servers with RAID arrays that take longer to update using Yum than my 1GHz VIA C3 EPIA box does using APT.

        • by Macka ( 9388 )

          And you've tried zypper and it's faster? And what does quad-core have to do with anything? yum isn't multi-threaded. I have a bunch of HP Proliants at work with 2.13GHz CPUs, also with RAID and yum whizzes along quite nicely from a local repo server over NFS.

          • by Macka ( 9388 )

            I should clarify that NFS statement. Was thinking about when I do a yum localupdate ... of cause you don't need NFS to install/update from a local repo.

          • Yes, zypper is significantly faster.

            I mentioned quad-core and RAID to reassure readers that it couldn't be a CPU or disk speed constraint causing yum's slowness.

            I don't think I've ever seen yum do something I would describe as whizzing. I've seen it take a crap a few times, but that's probably due to RPM.

            • by Macka ( 9388 )

              That's not justification enough for pissing off your users who have to work with multiple linux distributions. An update is something you do very infrequently, and yum not that slow that shaving a few minutes off an update is going to make a snot of difference. The important thing is whether or not it works, resolves dependencies properly and preserves changes you've made to local config files. And yum does the job very well.

              Zypper to me is a "political" move, not a technical one, and it's not going to w

              • Yum was also a political move. They could have gone with urpmi, Smart, or APT4RPM, all of which were proven parts of other RPM-based distros at the time they decided to switch to yum.

                (In fact, ideally they'd have switched to APT4RPM, and then in a later release dropped RPM in favor of dpkg, and ended up with something that actually works reliably. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen because RPM was written into LSB, RedHat would never go along with any change, and SuSE needs to stay close to RedHat

          • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

            And what does quad-core have to do with anything?

            Probably nothing, though the 2 GHz difference is pretty substantial.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Klivian ( 850755 )
      The "finally" is a bit strong, since it has been there for a while.

      Using zypper dup worked flawlessly upgrading my 11.0 installs to 11.1. So I'll say you are at least one release to late with that one.
  • by RiotingPacifist ( 1228016 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:00PM (#30075730)

    This is nice and all but that's a pretty standard distro release, can anybody tell me why i would want to switch from a similar distro, say ubuntu 9.10 or fedora 12 to openSuse?

    sure I could try them all but there is only so much time i want to spend installing/setting stuff up.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Don't! It is made by Novell so this is actually a M$ Linux and thus evil!!11one

    • yast
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:15PM (#30075998)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Krondor ( 306666 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:21PM (#30076128) Homepage

      Sure a few reasons;

      OpenSUSE has one of the best KDE4 setups. They've done a lot of work into making KDE4 really shine. The Firefox KDE integration is AWESOME, and not something I am sure the other distros are shipping with. There is also additional work above and beyond stock on OpenOffice and such. A great attention to detail on the theming (not that you can't change that on Ubuntu and Fedora).

      Zypper is hands down the best RPM tool and I would say on par or superior to Apt. Definitely a step over yum.

      Nomad provide an RDP server for Linux that supports Compiz, not sure if that's been ported to other distros.

      iFolder (if you care about that) is so far only packaged for SUSE, I believe.

      Also Yast is great to administer your system if you're not command line friendly. It used to be atrocious, but now is very much decent. I still don't use it that much, but it has an appeal to people (especially our Windows friends). Overall it's a solid distro and I would say on par with Ubuntu and others.

      • One of the best aspects of Yast is that the core design and libraries are agnostic of the toolkit. So the CLI version of Yast looks and operates the same was as the GTK+ and Qt versions.

        • by richlv ( 778496 )

          exactly. some time ago they evaluated whether they should keep this approach. it seems they decided on keeping, which is great.

          when gui breaks, or when using cli only (servers), console yast is awesome to have even if you are a slackware user (like me), who is used to configuring everything with config files.

          if anybody from suse reads this, keep console/gui uniformity of yast, that is definitely a selling point (as opposed to gui-only redhat tools...)

          i'm also using opensuse for people whom i'm setting up li

      • by cbhacking ( 979169 ) <been_out_cruising-slashdot@@@yahoo...com> on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:59PM (#30076806) Homepage Journal

        Actually, one of the major advantages of Yast is that it has an excellent NCurses-based terminal interface, which works beautifully over ssh. Easiest distro to remotely manage that I've ever tried (also, back in the day, easiest one to fix on the occasion that a graphics driver update made X stop working).

        For those who don't know, Yast is basically the configuration tool for *everything* - repository and package management, network configuration, video driver configuration, user accounts, runlevel and login behavior, configuring a hypervisor, re-partitioning, managing GRUB... basically, it's a centralized management tool. It's graphical and designed for user-friendliness, with help info for every setting, but it will also display the relevant config files and allow you to edit them manually too. I've actually found it useful when trying to learn the format of a given config file, since Yast's help info + comparing the options on the graphical display with the generated config file = an easy way to learn the format and options of a config file.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by slonik ( 108174 )

          For those who don't know, Yast is basically the configuration tool for *everything* - repository and package management, network configuration, video driver configuration, user accounts, runlevel and login behavior, configuring a hypervisor, re-partitioning, managing GRUB... basically, it's a centralized management tool.

          Your forgot to mention that Yast also manages Apache, Samba, security, sshd, printers/scanners, fax, network time ntp, etc. Pretty much Yast configures everything that is configurable:-)

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:23PM (#30076162)

      It's a bit more stable that Fedora, or at least that's been my opinion from using it. It's well balanced new enough packages but it doesn't change every 6 months and when it does change it's possible and fairly easy to upgrade.

      It has java packages, mono packages, all the dev tools you can image. The repository collection they have is fairly rich and complete as well. Flash runs in Firefox, there are VLC package with video codecs and all the good stuff. Honestly, to me as a user and I've sort of done my time being a bleeding heart libre/free software advocate and monk, it's not ideological, it's simply a platform and it works pretty darn well. I know people get butt hurt about mono and java and who Novell has done business with but it works out of the box, has damn never everything I need and it has all the fluff that is nice to have. If you've got some ideological feelings, you'll be happier with FC12. Firefox is called "Firefox" in OpenSuse. I believe it has a webkit based browser now as well. Opera is in the non-OSS repo. It has a non-OSS repo.

      As far as comparing it to Ubuntu? It's RPM based. It seems like a very competitive product with Ubuntu but I couldn't say which is "better."

      It's a high quality, community driven distribution with all the bells and whistles.

    • The reason I run openSUSE is that they have great packages. Ubuntu's 9.10 release was like every other release they have, which is broken. Fedora also likes to push bleeding edge.

      openSUSE does live fairly close to the bleeding edge, but they have a lot of developers pushing upstream code, and making solid packages. Heck, I often run weekly development snapshots from them and feel pretty secure in knowing they won't break my box.

      They have arguably the best KDE 4.x desktop out there (Arch and Sabayon also bei

    • This is nice and all but that's a pretty standard distro release, can anybody tell me why i would want to switch from a similar distro, say ubuntu 9.10 or fedora 12 to openSuse?

      I've been running opensuse since 9.3 (when it was just SUSE 9.3). I don't know about switching from fedora, but opensuse 11.2 has a very nice kde 4.3 implementation. And you can run kde 4.3 without using pulseaudio which is a plus in my book since I don't see the need for pulse on my standard desktop. Of course YMMV.
    • by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @02:06PM (#30076928) Homepage Journal

      If you want to get actual work done, OpenSUSE is pretty much ready to go out of the box. Its achilles' heel has historically been poor wifi support (requiring a lot of tinkering, whereas Ubuntu has worked consistently well with wifi in my experience) but hopefully 11.2 fares a lot better in that regard.

    • I can't think of any "compelling reasons" to switch distros. Suse is nice, it gave me my "entry" into Linux because it worked on hardware that everything else balked at. But - I've actually moved away from Suse to Deb derivatives - mostly Ubuntu.

      As for testing everything - I've encouraged many Windows users to download and run LiveCD's. That advice might apply to seasoned *nix users as well. Curious, but not willing to go to all the work of installing? Test drive those LiveCD's!!!

      Oh yeah - I made a con

    • by cheros ( 223479 )

      I've slowly started to wonder that as well. WiFi support has always been, well, rubbish, the KDE4 mess wasn't really their fault but didn't help either, and you need to add other repositories if you want to download stuff like Asterisk - which usually isn't properly integrated so you end up hunting for libraries and the whole DIY show starts that you were trying to avoid in the first place. And that's before you try to run it 64bit. I used to actually buy the commercial version, but with OpenSuSE not wor

    • are you kidding? your Ubuntu is only at 9.10, while OpenSuSE goes all the way past 11!

  • I'm suprised to see they're only at 11.2. I honestly had moved away from SUSE/openSUSE towards Ubuntu after the zypper wars and teh KDE3/4 issues. (I succumbed to using GNOME on Ubuntu and am okay with it.) The last I used openSUSE was 11.1 almost a year ago, and I would have figured they to be at 11.3 or even 12.0 by now.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • A downloaded a brand new opensuse level around 20-December last year and am pretty sure it was 11.1. That is a l-o-n-g 8 months. I am grabbing it now and will put it up on my test machine when BitTorrent finishes.

      • Hey, Houghi! I see it used to be six months.

        I do have openSUSE 11.x running KDE 2.2 still...

        http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/20090522_kde22_opensuse11.jpg
    • They moved to an 8 month release. 8 months is almost a year. Are you suggesting that Ubuntu is superior because the increase the version number every 6 months as opposed to 8 months?

      What does a version number mean?

      • Nope! Wasn't suggesting Ubuntu is superior because of that. In fact, I miss the all-in-one functionality of YaST. Keep in mind, that I used SUSE/openSUSE from '05 until early '09. I only switched because of other issues I was having and the percieved instability of Novell to maintain both KDE and GNOME versions while trying to make zypper finally work (which it hadn't since replacing YPM in 10.x).

        Oddly enough, though I bashed GNOME heavily - and still find it's file open/save dialog lacking - I jumped into
  • by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:32PM (#30076320) Homepage Journal

    There you go again, egging us on to use such tools with no legitimate use for actual *legal* purposes.

    Somewhere, the CEOs of Comcast, Time-Warner, the RIAA, and AT&T have collectively felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if most of their objections to actual legitimate Internet use were suddenly silenced...

  • by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew.gmail@com> on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:44PM (#30076562) Homepage Journal

    Congrats first and foremost to everyone who worked on this release.

    I use and love openSUSE. I've been running betas of 11.2 for a while now.

    My only gripe is that openSUSE still apparently hasn't switched to Upstart, nor DeviceKit. I assume Novell's layoffs last year are the reason that openSUSE seems to be falling a little behind in feature adoption. I hope this isn't a growing trend.

  • huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Verify your download (optional, for experts)"

    how about:

    "Verify your download (mandatory, for everybody)"

  • I'd like to hear from users who have upgraded from the previous release (as opposed to performing a new installation).

    How did you perform the upgrade?

    How did it go?

    Did anything that was working before stop working?

    Is there anything in the new version that you like so much you don't want to go back to the old version anymore?

  • Or will they forever be classed as the gypsies of the Linux universe, shunned by most distros? If your
    webcam ever ever showed up in yast, then maybe I shall hold my tongue, and instead start singing
    hosannas to its superiority. In 11.0, 'Scanners' iirc showed up. Almost, but not quite.

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