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SuSE Businesses Software Linux

SUSE 10.0 OSS Released 263

O0o0Oblubb!O0o0O writes "Today, Novell released SuSE 10.0 OSS for download. Product highlights include kernel 2.6.13, gcc 4.0.2, glibc 2.3.5, improved boot times and Xen 3. Torrents are available for the i386, ppc and x86_64 versions. The downloadable OSS edition lacks some packages for licensing reasons of which some, like Java, can be installed via package repository."
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SUSE 10.0 OSS Released

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  • Stability (Score:3, Insightful)

    by michaelzhao ( 801080 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:29PM (#13735021)
    With SUSE releasing one suite after another. I sometimes wonder about stability. When was 9.3 released? Wasn't it only a few months ago? I wish SUSE should find a way to follow Slackware's model of stable releases without sacrificing too much market share.

    Also, the software is getting way to bloated. Why all the software packages SUSE?
    • Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      SuSE has always included lots of packages -- it's a feature, not a bug!

      No, really. You aren't required to install all of them, after all.
      • In fact, unlike Slackware, SUSE doesn't even recomend that you install every package.
        • Unfortunately, thats the way Slack best worked for me. Install everything but the Y "disk set" (games), and for all updates, upgrades, custom installs, etc. compile from source and target /opt/packagename-version. When new Slack releases came out, back up /etc real quick and follow the instructions on the disc. Went from 7.0 up to 9.1 that way.

          Now I've gotten lazy and just use Debian.


    • Because a DVD holds a lot of data - same for hard drives.
      Doesn't matter if people actually use any of the provided
      software - really ;)
    • Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:32PM (#13735056)
      software is getting bloated because customers are asking for features. It happens to almost all software.
    • Re:Stability (Score:2, Informative)

      by MikeB90 ( 857499 )
      If you want stsble long time, corporate quality distrib you buy Novell Linux Desktop or SLES/OES. Suse 10 is for hobbyists, and like the Suse Pro 9.x releases is a quarterly release cycle roughly.
      • Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sloanster ( 213766 ) <[moc.emarhpniam] [ta] [nafgnir]> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:52PM (#13735214) Journal
        If you want stsble long time, corporate quality distrib you buy Novell Linux Desktop or SLES/OES. Suse 10 is for hobbyists, and like the Suse Pro 9.x releases is a quarterly release cycle roughly.

        I'm not sure what you mean by "hobbyists" but it sounds vaguely insulting.

        IMHO it would be more accurate to say that SuSE 10 is a full-featured distro for linux power users, while the more verticalized sles/nld are meant for the corporate market, managers who don't mind things being a little stale, and who want to have an 800-number to call, any time, should they ever have any questions.

        OpenSuSE is in some ways analagous to fedora, except that you can't get a boxed set of fedora linux, nor fedora manuals, nor any fedora support from the vendor, while with SuSE, you have the option of downloading and freely using OpenSuSE, or purchasing SuSE 10.0 retail, which comes with all the extras -

        BTW I know of several small businesses running their networks and services on suse linux professional servers, and are quite happy with it. No "hobbyists" they!

        • Totally agree . The only real difference would be the support contracts , everything else can be handled by the admin as per a custom install of all that is required .
      • Semi-Annually, actually. Last release was in March/April of this year.
    • I've seen it in smaller distros and I'd like to see it in bigger ones:

      Customized ISOs where you choose your packages THEN download the ISO.

      Heck, if disk space is a problem these "ISOs" can even exist only virtually on the web server, with the "iso" being created on the fly from component files. Hmm, if there's not already a program out there to do that then I should get started writing one :).
      • by taylork ( 91100 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:45PM (#13735155)
        Suse usually has a "network install" which is pretty much like this.
      • by bytor4232 ( 304582 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:46PM (#13735160) Homepage Journal
        Well, with Debian you can download an iso image thats right around 50 megs, and everything else is installed via the web. Similar concept, no?
      • You'd need a reasonable server with enough RAM to hold the entire distribution's packages in a RAM disk and probably an extra couple of Gigs. Even 10GigE would not be able to hose a good Quad opteron box with hypertransport so you'd probably be able to get away with having a reasonable number of concurrent connections.

        I'd recommend snagging the source of mkisofs and changing the code for the output stream to point to something apache can forward or, whip up a small web server that does nothing but handl
        • by cortana ( 588495 ) <samNO@SPAMrobots.org.uk> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @06:49PM (#13735588) Homepage
          It makes more sense to create a program, we could call it Jigdo [debian.org], that downloads the debs you want and constructs the iso on the client machine. ;)
      • This is what HP's Linux COE [sourceforge.net] is all about (well, that and custom network installs). The link is for the software needed to set up such a site, you can't build ISOs from there. (If you're on HP's internal network you can use the internal Linux COE site, which works great for this purpose, with multiple distros.)

        As another poster mentioned, SUSE already lets you do a network install from an ftp or web server.
    • Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sloanster ( 213766 ) <[moc.emarhpniam] [ta] [nafgnir]> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:38PM (#13735111) Journal
      With SUSE releasing one suite after another. I sometimes wonder about stability. When was 9.3 released? Wasn't it only a few months ago? I wish SUSE should find a way to follow Slackware's model of stable releases without sacrificing too much market share.

      Also, the software is getting way to bloated. Why all the software packages SUSE?


      As has been the case for years, suse releases an upgrade about every 6 months, so I'm not sure I understand what your objection is. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade - and if you prefer Slackware, run slackware.

      As to the software getting "too bloated", nobody is forcing you to install anything - you can easily install a bare bones system, without X-windows if that makes you happy. It's all in the install menu, these are all very basic concepts.
    • Re:Stability (Score:3, Informative)

      by beetle99 ( 695933 ) *
      I think that they (Novell) looked at the approach that Red Hat has used and thought that it makes sense. RHES has less frequent releases, designed to be more stable, while Fedora is updated much more often. Novell is just doing the same thing with SLES and SUSE Linux 10.0.
      Compare:

      SUSE Linux 10.0 Comparative Features and Benefits [novell.com]
      Enterprise Linux or Fedora? [redhat.com]

      So if you want a more stable release, then both Red Hat and Novell want you to pay for it. If you use the free versions, you get new features more
    • Also, the software is getting way to bloated. Why all the software packages SUSE?

      Only in the OSS community would someone complain about getting too much value for their money.

      Let's talk bloat for a minute. Bloat might have been an issue when you were running DOS 3.0 on a 486 w/1Mb of RAM from a 5 1/4 in floppy, but when you're talking about installing 3 Gigs or so of software on a 4+GHz machine with an average 512MB RAM and an 80Gb Hard Drive then 'bloat' is a figment of your anal-retentive frigg'n imag

  • PPC? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anubis350 ( 772791 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:32PM (#13735052)
    I had been under the impression that SuSE had not had a ppc release in a while (since~7.2?). Glad to see they're back with it, it might just tempt me to migrate my apple-debian servers to SuSE ppc (I love SuSE's config tools).
    • I don't know about PPC but suse has certainly released suse 9 for power5 IBM platforms..http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/o ffers/lp/demos/summary/l-pow-installsles.html [ibm.com]
    • I'm currently running SuSE 10.0 RC1 on a Mac Mini (I tried Darwin, couldn't stand it and frankly YaST surpasses any other linux config tool IMO) and find it to be pretty smooth. One hiccup that I hope has been fixed in the 10.0 final was that they had included a bastardized yaboot that didn't really work right.

      I ended up installing YellowDog, then installing SuSE over top of it. Otherwise, it hasn't had any major issues.

      It even includes OpenOffice 2.0 for PPC.
    • I used to have SuSE installed on my PPC 604-based Power Computing machine. I eventually got a G4 and after OSX I haven't looked back, but of all the ppc-based distros I installed I liked SuSE's config tools the best too. But the best part about installing SuSE was changing the name of the distro on the bootup screen and login environment so it greeted me with "Welcome to DuDE Linux."
  • by TypoNAM ( 695420 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:32PM (#13735055)
    Damnit. I just received my SuSE 9.3 Professional DVD from Novell last week and it's already outdated. I can never seem to keep up to date on software these days. :(
    • It is pretty, but it really looks just like any other KDE centric distro, there's honestly nothing unique about how it looks. What I'm waiting for is Enlightenment [enlightenment.org] to be actively supported, developed and set as the default desktop by one of the big distros.
  • by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:34PM (#13735075)
    Per subject. I've done testing at my place at work using the release candidate (we're interested in Xen3 on x86_64... once SLES10 comes out and it's fully supported, of course), and it wasn't exactly successful. It did give me a chance to file some bugs, and Novell reported one of them fixed in their bugtracker -- but I still was unable to start up a DomU.

    Hopefully the release will be more effective. As for me, I'm playing with the 10.1 alpha, which I hear is what will eventually become SLES10.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:35PM (#13735085)
    Seriously, is there any software out there that is like version 18? Well, I guess emacs is at 21....
  • by claes ( 25551 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:38PM (#13735103)
    Is there anything in particular that motivates the jump in major version, or is it just a marketing thing? I purchased 9.3 - will 10.0 bring me anything that is new and interesting, or just more recent packages of the same software? For example, exactly how is the faster boot process accomplished? Are there new configuration modules in Yast? New features in package managment? New freedesktop standards implemented, new LSB standards implemented.. what is really interesting about this release, what should make me jump to upgrade?
    • Read about it a while back, I believe they took the way gentoo boots (starts processes on seperate threads so machine is in a usable state before everything is loaded, non-priority stuff continues to load in background as you log in andd start to work, etc), and some more efficient boot options on the kernel (from fedora?).
    • by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:59PM (#13735264)

      gcc-4.x is a big, big step. If I were a distro, I'd make a major version bump just for gcc's major version bump if for no other reason. You want your clients to be very aware of all the potential fallout from the gcc upgrade, especially this early.
      • I am considering upgrading from SuSE 9.1, but I'm not sure if it's worth taking the risk with the newest version of GCC... I don't know enough about the newest release, although I've heard about problems compiling KDE, which may or may not have been fixed. Any thoughts?
    • With version 10.0 they opened the distribution to the community, or at least they have started the process. This version had the first ever public beta test for Suse Linux. I think that is quite revolutionary when you compare it to how things used to be.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      100% evolutionary. This makes sense with openSUSE's new rapid development schedule, 10.1 alpha is already out and had been for about a week before 10.0 gold was released. I've been using various flavors of SUSE since the beginning of this year and I can say each release has been a healthy speedup in terms of boot time as well as user feel. Newer releases have just seemed faster. I can attest that 10.0 RC 1 was a decent spead increase over 9.3. Partly KDE improvements and partly openSUSE bloat removal.

      In ter
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • _THE_ DISTRIBUTION (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cies ( 318343 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:45PM (#13735153)
    okay, okay... we all still have to test it. but this has good potential to become _the_ distribution. It performs we on both the server side with (with standards, service, licencing, training, certifying, oracle, etc. etc.), and on the desktop side (with loads of UI improvements, YaST, quicker booting, suspend to disk, automatic network configuring).

    And it seems that also the doing well on both the corporate (Novell Desktop, SuSE entreprise) and the freesoftware side with this glorious new release.

    i really whish OpenSuse the best, yet im not installing right now since 9.3 still does all i need and i have a lack of spare time already. but i will be soon!

    if you are installing make shure to check out:
    http://www.suseforums.net/ [suseforums.net] -- all things suse inlcuding community support, and
    http://packman.links2linux.org/ [links2linux.org] -- the missing (some times not fully legal) mulitmedia packages.

    g'luck,
    Cies Breijs.

  • Xen 3.0 (Score:5, Funny)

    by samj ( 115984 ) * <samj@samj.net> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:47PM (#13735171) Homepage
    This is the best news I've heard all day - I can't even get Xen 3.0 from Xen [cam.ac.uk], so I guess they've thrown in TimeTravel 1.0 as well.
    • Re:Xen 3.0 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jonastullus ( 530101 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:59PM (#13735273) Homepage
      yeah, and when having a closer look at their feature list:

      http://www.opensuse.org/Xen3_Status_and_Updates [opensuse.org]

      we can see that they have package a far from ready "xen 3.0" with their supposedly stable release of their distribution. maybe it really IS a more-or-less stable branch of the "still in development" xen cvs tree, but the xen developers don't see it fit yet to be released, so why should novell/suse?

      i mean, maybe some of these "limitations" are really non-features/problems in the final xen3 (when it comes out), but this seriously doesn't sound all that great:

      • Graphics (AGP, DRM, 3D) don't work or even crash the machine
      • Hardware support is still limited (e.g. no PCMCIA)
      • ACPI support in Domain-0 is limited (e.g. no cpufreq)
      • 32 Bit kernel is not PAE enabled
      • Full virtualization on VT not well tested
      • Other Operating System support on top of Xen and VT not tested

      • Xen is (currently) primarily for servers where those missing features won't be too badly missed (except, perhaps, for PAE).
      • I just want to learn assembly programming and Xen looks perfect. Problem with just a single mistake is that it can freeze your whole system. With Xen I just freeze my session if I screw up some assembly code and I do not have to log in as root.

        Still if you want great virtualization for free with all these things than solarisx86 or opensolaris might be your thing. Containers are really cool but I understand its not full virtualization but rather another virtualized instance of solaris. still cool though
    • Time Travel 1.0 is proprietary Apple technology.
  • by TooMuchEspressoGuy ( 763203 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:48PM (#13735174)
    "O0o0Oblubb!O0o0O writes..."

    ...frankly, with a name like that, I wouldn't be able to write much of anything.

  • by Darune ( 716587 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @05:50PM (#13735195)
    No disrespect to O0o0Oblubb!O0o0O, but when I first glimpsed the article I thought CowboyNeal was having a heart attack. ;p
  • I love my Suse (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nrgy ( 835451 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @06:00PM (#13735277) Homepage
    I was a on and off suse user from 7.0 to 8."something". Then I left windows and stuck with suse from 9.0 to the present. I love suse for a noob distro. I like the fact that if you want to not worry about the core workings you dont have to, or if you want to not worry but still be able to learn you can. I've gradualy learned to work in the terminal more, do alot of things in the command line, compiling my applications and even started programing my own little tools in c and c++.

    I'm a whatever tool works use it kinda guy and the same applys for distros. It's good to see all linux distros being updated and offering newer and better linux experiences. It's a shame Microsoft already took the slogin "Where do you want to go today?" because thats what each new version of Suse makes me think.
  • OSS version? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @06:12PM (#13735362)
    From this page [novell.com] at Novell titled "Packages on the retail version and not the OSS version of SUSE Linux 10.0". It lists packages that you would get if you bought the retail version because those packages are not OSS? I have not looked at the whole list yet, however, a few big ticket-items (to me) stood out:
    eclipse-gtk2-3.1-4.i586.rpm
    eclipse-jdt-3.1-4.i586.rpm
    eclipse-platform-3.1-4.i586.rpm
    eclipse-scripts-3.1-4.i586.rpm
    Since when did Eclipse become non-OSS? According to www.eclipse.org [eclipse.org]
    Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.
    There is another one I noticed:
    bitstream-vera-1.10-169.noarch.rpm
    I thought the Bitstream Vera fonts were release under an OSS license? I know I have enjoyed those excellent fonts under Fedora for a while now. Why doesn't SuSE OSS offer them in the OSS version?

    Did anyone else notice other OSS software in the list that SuSE left out of the OSS version claiming that it is NOT OSS when in fact it is?

    • And OpenXChange (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @06:15PM (#13735382) Homepage

      Many of them, I think, are missing because of their dependency on (non-open-source) Java, which is not included. (In other words, Eclipse itself is OSS, but since it relies of non-OSS Java, they leave it out too.)

      I have no idea about the bitstream vera fonts, though - that makes no sense to me at all, since I was sure they were distributed as open source...

    • > bitstream-vera-1.10-169.noarch.rpm

      These fonts are under a special license. It is fairly open and specifically allows for distribution; however, it may not have met Novell's licensing requirements for their "Open" SUSE version.

      License for Bitstream Vera:
      http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ [gnome.org]
  • Torrent mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by zeth ( 452280 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @06:15PM (#13735378) Homepage Journal
    I tried downloading the torrents from the ftp a while back and it was bogged. I have a copy of them, if their servers get bogged down again at http://johnny.chadda.se/2005/10/06/suse-100-finall y-released/ [chadda.se]

    By the way, I have tried the 10.0 RC1 and it was really great. The only thing not working is my P910i sync, but I'll work on that. :)
  • And not the eval? I can't stand having to burn and insert, take out, insert etc etc 4 or 5 CDs just to install an OS. Put the DVD in, set it up to install, go for coffee, come back, all done.

  • Really admire SUSE and have used it for several years now. I only wish Novell admired the tremendous care and hard work put in by the SUSE engineers, but if you go to the front page of http://www.novell.com/ [novell.com] you'd be pushed to know Novell even have SUSE. This new version and the new OpenSUSE initiative are things to shout about, one might think. Sigh. Novell are their own worst enemies.

    Will be installing OpenSUSE and Gnome over the weekend. From the sound of it, this new SUSE is faster than previous vers
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @07:49PM (#13735919) Homepage
      Really admire SUSE and have used it for several years now. I only wish Novell admired the tremendous care and hard work put in by the SUSE engineers, but if you go to the front page of http://www.novell.com/ [novell.com] you'd be pushed to know Novell even have SUSE. This new version and the new OpenSUSE initiative are things to shout about, one might think. Sigh. Novell are their own worst enemies.
      SuSE Linux and SuSE Enterprise Server are listed under Products directly on that page. They receive no special attention but then they aren't hidden either. There's also a rather prominent Flash add detailing 10 reasons to choose Novel Linux solutions.

      As for Novell 'shouting out' about OpenSuSE, please keep in mind that Novell is a corporate entity doing business with other corporate entities and is much more likely to tout the products that it sells, thus generating revenue which can then support community projects like OpenSuSE. OpenSuSE is not a make or break for Novel, it is more a gesture towards the community and a thumb in the eye of RedHat/Fedora. I am more impressed with Novel's decision to continue offering a supported consumer version of SuSE rather than abandoning the consumer market like RedHat.

  • by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @07:03PM (#13735658) Homepage
    I received my copy of SuSE 10 today but have yet to install it. One thing I noticed is that the source DVD is no longer included. Version 9.3 Professional included 5 CDs and 2 DVDs, one DVD containing the source code. Hopefully it won't require me to go to SuSE's FTP site, which has always been notoriously slow (hopefully some of the mirrors will have the source code).

    As it is right now, I do not see the source code on their FTP site, nor do I see how they can fit everything for both the 32-bit and 64-bit and the source code on a single DVD unless they have cut back significantly on what's included.

    The reason I'm looking for the source code is I want to see if they have added the Gentoo patch to Xorg to support the event interface for the mouse so I can take advantage of the extra buttons on my Logitech MX1000 mouse. I patched earlier versions of SuSE's X, but without the source I won't be able to do it with this version.

    If I can apply this patch and if the kernel is more responsive on my Athlon64 I'll finally be able to switch my new desktop machine to my Athlon64. SuSE 9.3 tended to stutter at times when using the GUI. Also, hopefully some of the issues I've run into with V4L2 with my pcHDTV tuner card will also be addressed by the new kernel.
  • Once again, the Slashdot Torrent Enhancement Subsystem takes over and makes downloading a large distro a broadband breeze.
  • Iv'e tried SuSE and other Linux distro's before, but I keep running into what is (for me) a major problem. Multi monitor support. Specifically, 2 monitors (a 17" LCD and an 19" LCD), both being driven from my nVidia 6800. In Windows, it works perfectly. I can drag my mouse/apps between both screens, and can maximise apps to one screen or the other (apps recognise that there are in fact 2 screens, and not one really wide one), and apps remember which window they were opened on previously and default back to
    • I set this up for my brother last weekend with the RC version of 10.0. I had to download the ATI driver for him and do the setup but I had the desktop stretched over both screens. Of course the work I had to put in it was exactly why I don't find Linux ready for the masses.
    • Oh yes, easy, provided you don't mind editing a config file. Basically you need to add Option "TwinView", Option "Metamodes" with the resolution combinations, Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" and Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" with appropriate values to the device section in your xorg.conf. For apps to recognise it as two screens you need to have it giving xinerama info, but I think that's enabled by default.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • a YaST config utility that works as well in xterm/tty (ncurses) mode as it does in graphical mode. This is quite unique;

    Urpmi works from command-line; apt-get works from command-line. Are they talking about an ncurses interface? Anyone ssh'ing in to update stuff doesn't want an ncurses interface, they want a command they can script with. While I'm on this topic, can all you distributions (at least the ones that rely on precompiled packages) PICK A DAMN PACKAGE MANAGER. You don't have to standardize the
  • I've been eager to try SUSE for a while, and their OSS release seems like the ideal time.

    I understand the reasoning, but for most Linux distros it's becoming harder and harder to install without a CD (whether it be net install or full CD install). My laptop is usually very low end for its time, and so far I've never had one with a reliably-functioning CD drive (my current laptop doesn't read CDRs reliably). Not that floppy is much better, but this laptop won't boot from PCMCIA CDROM (at least the one I ha
  • by seguso ( 760241 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @01:47AM (#13737503) Homepage
    Here is a guide for adding sources to Yast and installing proprietary applications (java, realplayer, codecs, dvd capabilities, acrobat reader...) : http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178 /42/ [thejemreport.com]

It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers.

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