OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here

lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."

Took them quite a while...

[IANAAC]

for an update compared to other distributions. Then again, Opensuse has always been super stable for my uses.

Glad to see Rosegarden gets a mention... it's great program. Spideroak... eh - at least for the free verison. Haven't played with it, but Dropbox had this covered long before Spideroak. And I can use Truecrypt with dropbox. That and the client is 75 megs. Rather large for my tastes.

I'll have to give this a try on one of my machines (currently have 11.2 installed on one).

Re:Does anyone....

[Rydia]

http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com]

Build your own image with USB as your target. The process is simple and streamlined (and they have videos).

Re:Does anyone....

[oatworm]

Because OpenSUSE's KDE implementation tends to be less buggy and better integrated than most, it's frequently used as a reference distro for KDE reviews. Basically, if there's a KDE function that doesn't work on OpenSUSE, it's assumed that it doesn't work anywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth.

Plus, YaST is a fairly intuitive and exhaustive system management console. It admittedly gets a little buggy when you start bumping into corner cases, but, if you're not into hand-coding your config files, it's vastly superior to dpkg-configure. Though I certainly don't begrudge anyone that's willing to wade their way through the command-line and their system's config files, it's nice to have some tools that help you go in the right direction when you need to do those one-off configuration jobs and don't require a fully functional LAMP installation (Webmin, phpMyAdmin, and so on).

Re:Does anyone....

[Rydia]

The software management module is just a frontend to zypper, which works pretty much identically to apt.

Re:Does anyone....

[luther349]

i used to love suse as my distro. but the patent deal made me turn away from it. as well as much of the community. i started with redhat and loved it then it turned into garbage with fedora. so i moved to mandrake i found it to buggy. then ran suse for a long time. patent deal moved me to ubuntu and thats where i still am. debs are also alot easer to manage then rpms when it come to cleaning the system of old librarys on software you remove.

Re:Does anyone....

[ducomputergeek]

We use SuSE Studio to create pre-configured linux distros of our POS application and Database Server. It's stable and works. I can't say we've had that experience with Ubuntu as Ubuntu broke stuff from 8 to 9 and then from 9 to 10 with our point of sale system. Sometimes it was hardware support that was suddenly buggy, other times it was buggy libraries causing the problem. We've never had that problem with SuSE/OpenSuSE. Plus SuSE Point of Service is the linux supported by NCR on their equipment and is supported by HP retail equipment.

Re:Does anyone....

[ustolemyname]

dd if=imagename.iso of=/dev/usbdevice bs=8M

Works on any of the live CD downloads. Needs to be done as root. usbdevice will typically be sd[a-z]. setting the block size to 8 MB just makes it go faster.

Detailed instructions here. [opensuse.org]

Re:Update in place?

[baileydau]

Can I update V 11.2 , 11.1 in place and expect not lose what I have ?
Likely?, Yes ?, impossible?

    or no?

Yes you can. With 11.2 you can either do it via the updater (zypper ) or do an upgrade from the appropriate CD / DVD. I can't remember if 11.1 can do a dist upgrade via zypper or not.

I normally just do the upgrade from DVD, and have always done so. I've never had any significant issues in the past. I normally do some testing on OpenSUSE releases and that is the thing I concentrate on, making sure that upgrades work (NB. I was a slacker this time and didn't do any testing on 11.3)

Re:Does anyone....

[Anonymous Coward]

YaST sw_single is the GUI interface to ZYpp
zypper is the command line interface to ZYpp

And ZYpp, with its mathematically perfect dependency resolution algorithm (http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf) is far better than APT.