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."
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.
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.:)
Even geeks on slashdot refer to it as [...] "SuSE Linux."
Then they must hand over their card as soon as possible. It is openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise for some time now. The latter is the 'official' Novell one and is also called SUSE. openSUSE is community based where Novell is a very important part of the community.
Here on Slashdot today, not only did two people make a joke about an obscure techincal configuration option of the Linux kernel, we both made the same joke, and we made it one minute apart. This place is terrifying.
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.:-)
I also welcome it. Many people have already used it and seened to be happy with it. I will wait till 11.3 till I use it. Although by then I hope to be just using my own distri that I will be making on http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com]
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
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.
Only you can tell. If you are happy with what you have, stay where you are. (This also goes for Windows users.) If you are interested in trying out, download it and try it out. I use it as I like YaST and zypper. I also like to use it to combine it with the repositories I can make myself on https://build.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] and I like it because I can easily make my own distro based on it on http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com]
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday November 12, @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
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.
And it's problematic if you do like editing config files. At least when I was using it (Suse 10.0 or 10.1?) before I switched to Kubuntu, Yast didn't play well with config files I had hand-edited and tended to overwrite my changes. Package management was god-awful in the Suse 10 release too, but I'm assuming that's been fixed by now.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Explorer - as I use it daily in expee, Vista and Win7 - is not as well-designed as either Nautilus or Konqueror. I find it lacking on many counts. As for me "pretending that" Linux can do everything Average Joe wants, I don't. It does what I want, it works for my mother. It works for my two boys.
There are things that are needed - for those I run VirtualBox:
It's almost like you blame Linux for the fact your hardware vendor tries so hard to lock out 3rd party support.
You're right. Some people do. Because Linux "evangelists" like to say that Linux can do everything Windows can do...except better, AND it's more secure, AND it's free, AND it has a GREAT community.
MOST of which is true. It may or may not be better, it is more secure and it's free and it does have a good community (there are plenty of Windows communities as well, of course).
But it does not do everything Windows can do, because not everything runs on Linux. And most people do not want to lose hardware that works well for them for the sake of switching to Linux. Like iPods and iPhones.
Sure, blame Apple and not Linux for the actual hardware issue (interesting: Apple is a great company at Slashdot until it is convenient for it not to be a great company at Slashdot:) my experience, anyways)... but blame Linux fans for claiming things that either aren't true or are only true if you are more committed to using Linux than using your existing proprietary hardware. Some people care more about their existing hardware that works well and that they like than whether or not it works with Linux. And it's a perfectly valid reason, too. Doesn't mean Linux is bad, it just means some people have different priorities.
Isolated, learning one new way to do something is an acceptable cost. But Linux is to many death by a thousand cuts when it comes to that. I dabbled with Linux for ~7 years before I finally decided to switch and there was many reasons for that. But one of them was the total lack of any familiar application, even though I was fairly convinced Linux probably had some sort of application like that (in retrospect, sometimes a doubtful conclusion) but it was always too much new. I can set off some hours to learn
http://software.opensuse.org/112/en [opensuse.org] which will point you to a mirror automatically, to bittorernt, metalink or a mirror you can select.
If you have a bit of experience, you can go with the Network version. Otherwise go with the GNOME or KDE version. Only if you will be installing on several machines should you download the DVD.
After installation there is no difference between the different versions, except for the obvious difference between KDE/GNOME. The CD versions are live versions can be run from USB sti
Ext4 has been mature and stable for at least 3 years now.
No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28 [h-online.com], which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.
Ext4 is merely an extension (that is mostly backwards-compatible) of Ext3. Ext4 was born out of patches that were intended for Ext3. In 2006, the decision was made to split some of the newer features being pushed into Ext3 under the namespace of Ext4. It isn't like they started development on Ext4 in 2006. In 2006, there was a usable file system from the day it was annouced as a "new" project.
It was pretty damn stable then, and even more stable now.
I've been running it for 3 years. The age of a product does not always equate directly to stability. There are old releases that aren't very stable, and then there are projects that are well designed, and are stable pretty much from day 1.
Ext4 is one such project. However, if you're terrified of Ext4 eating your dog, you're welcome to run Fat32 if it makes you feel better.
However, if you're terrified of Ext4 eating your dog, you're welcome to run Fat32 if it makes you feel better.
Don't be obtuse. FAT is a horrible file system. He's going to stick with ext3.
A simple Google search [google.com] shows that many people and many different distros have experienced data corruption and data loss and it has been attributed to anything from bugs in ext4 to the kernel not behaving as the ext4 developers were expecting due to specific configurations made for a given distro. Some people are very pa
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
And you're right. I shouldn't have suggested he run Fat32 if he is paranoid that newer filesystems are inherently unsafe. He should run Fat16 to be sure.
Certainly, an older file system that doesn't have the nicer, fine-grained journaling (and journaling controls) which be much safer.
Ext4 is a wild, data-eating beast that just can't be trusted.
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE, any system crash could lead to zero byte files in almost any application. It broke an extremely standard way of writing a new version of a file by writing it to a new file then renaming it in place of the old.
You have a file foo.txt You write foo2.txt You rename foo2.txt to foo.txt
Now your machine could crash for up to half an hour (I think, a long time), and you'd have neither the old or the new file. Unless you didn't explicitly fsync() the write,
KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD. Most file systems have delayed writes and caching at some level.
In an extreme sense, some were concerned that Ext4 could delay a write for up to a minute. It wasn't 30 minutes. The operation should still be in the journal. It should be recoverable.
And before you get all upset, you should realize that these delayed writes also exist in Ext2 and Ext3.
NTFS also supports OS-level write caching. Even worse, Windows Server will often e
After a clean reboot pretty much any file written to by any application (during the previous boot) was 0 bytes. For example Plasma and some of the KDE core config files were reset. Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...
-- Bogdan Gribincea
The files that were zeroed when my machine hardlocked I'd imagine were the ones that were in use; my desktop env is Gnome and I was running a game in Wine. Wine's reg files which it would have had open were wiped and also my Gnome terminal settings were wiped.
-- Ben Hodgetts
I'm using 2.6.28-8-generic and a crash just zeroed out a _load_ of important files in my git repository which I'd recently rebased a patch series in.
-- Peter Cliffton
Ack... had a power outage and ran into this one today too. Several configuration files from programs I was running ended up trashed. This also explains the corruption I've seen of my BOINC/SETI files when hard-rebooting in past weeks.
-- 3vi1
I did mix up 30 minutes and 30 seconds. But that's just an example of tons of different applications, databases, source files, Gnome settings and whatever cleaned out by this BUG. Why you keep denying it I don't know, but at least you earned youself a foe rating for it.
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE
You're right: it's a common application programming error.
At what frequency does a bug cease to be a bug?
I wish I'd known that I could promote myself up out of the rank of `amateur' just by pointing out that there were plenty of other people who weren't any more skilled than I was--that would have obviated all of these years of study and hard work.
IIRC, they neglected to call fsync when writing out configuration data, and the POSIX spec states that unless you call fsync, there's no guarantees that the data actually hits the disk right away. Combine that with the fact that ext4 extended the delay between write() and physical write out to disk (which, I believe, they've changed, although I could be wrong about that), and a sudden crash can result in data loss/corruption due to blocks having never been written out.
The beating heart... (Score:4, Funny)
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." :)
Re:The beating heart... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The beating heart... (Score:4, Insightful)
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. :)
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Then they must hand over their card as soon as possible. It is openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise for some time now. The latter is the 'official' Novell one and is also called SUSE. openSUSE is community based where Novell is a very important part of the community.
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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...
Re:The beating heart... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The beating heart... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah; the others have the tick(er)less kernel.
--- Mr. DOS
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Re:The beating heart... (Score:5, Funny)
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Finally (Score:4, Informative)
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. :-)
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I also welcome it. Many people have already used it and seened to be happy with it. I will wait till 11.3 till I use it. Although by then I hope to be just using my own distri that I will be making on http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com]
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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
Why switch to openSuse? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Don't! It is made by Novell so this is actually a M$ Linux and thus evil!!11one
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Re:Why switch to openSuse? (Score:5, Interesting)
Only you can tell. If you are happy with what you have, stay where you are. (This also goes for Windows users.) If you are interested in trying out, download it and try it out. I use it as I like YaST and zypper. I also like to use it to combine it with the repositories I can make myself on https://build.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] and I like it because I can easily make my own distro based on it on http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com]
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Re:Why switch to openSuse? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:Why switch to openSuse? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Why switch to openSuse? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
Re:Why switch to openSuse? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Only 11.2? (Score:2)
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Every 8 months there is a new version (used to be 6). So 11.3 will be out in 8 months. I can't wait. :-D
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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?
"or just grab the torrents " (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Upstart, DeviceKit, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
"Verify your download (optional, for experts)"
how about:
"Verify your download (mandatory, for everybody)"
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No (it's a Linux distro)
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Really? (typing this on my Fedora Core laptop)
It's been my desktop for nearly 10 years...
Re:Who...cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
(I tend to think the other way: How can I run Nautilus, KTorrent, KRDC, and GMountISO in Windows.)
Parent
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As for me "pretending that" Linux can do everything Average Joe wants, I don't. It does what I want, it works for my mother. It works for my two boys.
There are things that are needed - for those I run VirtualBox:
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/virtualbox_xp_vb6.jpg
and can do such tasks as Visual Basic 6.0 development on XP machines. The rest can pretty muc
Re:Who...cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
So not being able to run native apps to buy from iTunes, sync my iPod and iPhone
It's almost like you blame Linux for the fact your hardware vendor tries so hard to lock out 3rd party support.
Parent
Re:Who...cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's almost like you blame Linux for the fact your hardware vendor tries so hard to lock out 3rd party support.
You're right. Some people do. Because Linux "evangelists" like to say that Linux can do everything Windows can do.. .except better, AND it's more secure, AND it's free, AND it has a GREAT community.
MOST of which is true. It may or may not be better, it is more secure and it's free and it does have a good community (there are plenty of Windows communities as well, of course).
But it does not do everything Windows can do, because not everything runs on Linux. And most people do not want to lose hardware that works well for them for the sake of switching to Linux. Like iPods and iPhones.
Sure, blame Apple and not Linux for the actual hardware issue (interesting: Apple is a great company at Slashdot until it is convenient for it not to be a great company at Slashdot :) my experience, anyways)... but blame Linux fans for claiming things that either aren't true or are only true if you are more committed to using Linux than using your existing proprietary hardware. Some people care more about their existing hardware that works well and that they like than whether or not it works with Linux. And it's a perfectly valid reason, too. Doesn't mean Linux is bad, it just means some people have different priorities.
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Re:Who...cares? (Score:4, Funny)
You are saying as if it is a bad thing.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are saying as if it is a bad thing.
Isolated, learning one new way to do something is an acceptable cost. But Linux is to many death by a thousand cuts when it comes to that. I dabbled with Linux for ~7 years before I finally decided to switch and there was many reasons for that. But one of them was the total lack of any familiar application, even though I was fairly convinced Linux probably had some sort of application like that (in retrospect, sometimes a doubtful conclusion) but it was always too much new. I can set off some hours to learn
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You really should have bought a real mp3 player. I hope you learned something.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://software.opensuse.org/112/en [opensuse.org] which will point you to a mirror automatically, to bittorernt, metalink or a mirror you can select.
If you have a bit of experience, you can go with the Network version. Otherwise go with the GNOME or KDE version. Only if you will be installing on several machines should you download the DVD.
After installation there is no difference between the different versions, except for the obvious difference between KDE/GNOME. The CD versions are live versions can be run from USB sti
Re: (Score:2)
*booop beeep* INSERT COIN
Re:Ext4 makes me nervous as Hell. (Score:4, Informative)
Ext4 has been mature and stable for at least 3 years now.
No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28 [h-online.com], which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.
Parent
Re:Ext4 makes me nervous as Hell. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ext4 is merely an extension (that is mostly backwards-compatible) of Ext3. Ext4 was born out of patches that were intended for Ext3. In 2006, the decision was made to split some of the newer features being pushed into Ext3 under the namespace of Ext4. It isn't like they started development on Ext4 in 2006. In 2006, there was a usable file system from the day it was annouced as a "new" project.
It was pretty damn stable then, and even more stable now.
I've been running it for 3 years. The age of a product does not always equate directly to stability. There are old releases that aren't very stable, and then there are projects that are well designed, and are stable pretty much from day 1.
Ext4 is one such project. However, if you're terrified of Ext4 eating your dog, you're welcome to run Fat32 if it makes you feel better.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be obtuse. FAT is a horrible file system. He's going to stick with ext3.
A simple Google search [google.com] shows that many people and many different distros have experienced data corruption and data loss and it has been attributed to anything from bugs in ext4 to the kernel not behaving as the ext4 developers were expecting due to specific configurations made for a given distro. Some people are very pa
Re:Ext4 makes me nervous as Hell. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
And you're right. I shouldn't have suggested he run Fat32 if he is paranoid that newer filesystems are inherently unsafe. He should run Fat16 to be sure.
Certainly, an older file system that doesn't have the nicer, fine-grained journaling (and journaling controls) which be much safer.
Ext4 is a wild, data-eating beast that just can't be trusted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE, any system crash could lead to zero byte files in almost any application. It broke an extremely standard way of writing a new version of a file by writing it to a new file then renaming it in place of the old.
You have a file foo.txt
You write foo2.txt
You rename foo2.txt to foo.txt
Now your machine could crash for up to half an hour (I think, a long time), and you'd have neither the old or the new file. Unless you didn't explicitly fsync() the write,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You misunderstand.
KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD. Most file systems have delayed writes and caching at some level.
In an extreme sense, some were concerned that Ext4 could delay a write for up to a minute. It wasn't 30 minutes. The operation should still be in the journal. It should be recoverable.
And before you get all upset, you should realize that these delayed writes also exist in Ext2 and Ext3.
NTFS also supports OS-level write caching. Even worse, Windows Server will often e
Re:Ext4 makes me nervous as Hell. (Score:4, Insightful)
KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD.
You sir, are an idiot.
Read the bug report [launchpad.net].
I'll give you some quotes:
After a clean reboot pretty much any file written to by any application (during the previous boot) was 0 bytes.
For example Plasma and some of the KDE core config files were reset. Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...
-- Bogdan Gribincea
The files that were zeroed when my machine hardlocked I'd imagine were the ones that were in use; my desktop env is Gnome and I was running a game in Wine. Wine's reg files which it would have had open were wiped and also my Gnome terminal settings were wiped.
-- Ben Hodgetts
I'm using 2.6.28-8-generic and a crash just zeroed out a _load_ of important files in my git repository which I'd recently rebased a patch series in.
-- Peter Cliffton
Ack... had a power outage and ran into this one today too. Several configuration files from programs I was running ended up trashed. This also explains the corruption I've seen of my BOINC/SETI files when hard-rebooting in past weeks.
-- 3vi1
I did mix up 30 minutes and 30 seconds. But that's just an example of tons of different applications, databases, source files, Gnome settings and whatever cleaned out by this BUG. Why you keep denying it I don't know, but at least you earned youself a foe rating for it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE
You're right: it's a common application programming error.
At what frequency does a bug cease to be a bug?
I wish I'd known that I could promote myself up out of the rank of `amateur' just by pointing out that there were plenty of other people who weren't any more skilled than I was--that would have obviated all of these years of study and hard work.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, they neglected to call fsync when writing out configuration data, and the POSIX spec states that unless you call fsync, there's no guarantees that the data actually hits the disk right away. Combine that with the fact that ext4 extended the delay between write() and physical write out to disk (which, I believe, they've changed, although I could be wrong about that), and a sudden crash can result in data loss/corruption due to blocks having never been written out.
So, that said, it's absolutely true th