OpenSUSE 11.0 Released

Nate D writes "It's here: a new major release of Novell's community-supported distro is now available, and can be downloaded from the mirrors. Linux Format has a hands-on look at the new installer, SLAB menu and Compiz Fusion, and weighs up whether the distro can fight competition from Ubuntu and Fedora. Is this the start of a new era for SUSE?"

SuSE's firewall is best

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used all three (U, F, & S) and keep going back to SuSE because of the SuSEfirewall2 configuration feature. It gives you one straightforward (fairly) easy to understand text config file that governs how the iptables rules get set up.

The Yast system manager is pretty good too, especially the software management section, but then again Ubuntu's Synaptic and apt-get from Debian totally rocks too! I'd love to have OpenSuSE with both Yast and Synaptic together, but I'm too lazy to try to install the Debian tools into SuSE so I'll just use whatever software manager that comes with whatever distro I'm presently using.

Re:Probably not

[chill]

SuSE is a proponent of AppArmor, whereas Red Hat is big into SELinux. If you're big into security, this is a major difference.

http://www.novell.com/linux/security/apparmor/selinux_comparison.html [novell.com]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux [fedoraproject.org]

Re:I will not

[Ilgaz]

While you joke, I checked the Novell CTO's blog about what he would say about new SUSE.

"Hanging out at Microsoft
I will be at Microsoft on Thursday and Friday, and only have meetings on Thursday afternoon.

I would love to meet other hackers. If you want to meet, discuss, talk, drop me an email:

Posted by Miguel de Icaza on 18 Jun 2008"

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jun-18.html [tirania.org]

What is it called if something is so sad that you can't even risk joking about it?

Re:New Era?

[Ilgaz]

If something is coded in a true multiplatform framework, it ships on _every_ platform that Framework supports. Mono gang is just being abused by Microsoft to claim their junk is multiplatform.

Want to see a multi platform framework? http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

If Nokia had brain to use a true multiplatform framework, that "Maps downloader" could work inside ANY BROWSER of ANY OS. It is so sad that MS manages to trap people even in age of 2008. Of course, some must be clever and get paid for it. I am worried about the actual naive ones thinking MS would produce or let produce anything equal to their pyramid scheme named Windows.

Re:Probably not

[morgan_greywolf]

Any reason you can't install AppArmor into Red Hat and SELinux into SuSE?

No, didn't think so.

Re:why do you need a firewall

[setagllib]

Firewalls are 100% useless against Flash, which loads via outbound HTTP just like the rest of your web content. I recommend disabling Flash entirely or using an open source implementation like swfdec (which is only slightly more functional than just disabling Flash :P)

Re:New Era?

[fejjie]

As was already mentioned earlier in this thread, if Nokia's software uses native (rather than managed) libraries to build their .NET 3.0 program, then they clearly didn't care about it being cross-platform.

If they built it purely in managed code and it doesn't work under Mono, then it is just a bug in Mono - file a bug so that we can fix it.

No need to insult us.

Re:Probably not

[PReDiToR]

I personally find YaST package management easier to use than Synaptic.

Other than that, as has been said, all features are available on all distros, so it is just down to personal choice, and what you are used to working with. RPMs and DEBs are very similar once you get them on your machine, you can even use alien to install them.

Been with (open)SuSE since v8.0 so I know my way around this particular distro better than the *buntu boxen that I admin.

Should we also dump reality? Or competition?

[SplatMan_DK]

The only way SUSE will start a new era is if they dump Microsoft as a partner.

I respectfully disagree. I know many people have an almost religious crusade against Microsoft any company they are associated with - but I think there is a wider consideration which many people forget. Novells core business is connecting technologies which are for different reasons not already connected. And for the most part the products they connect are a mixture of (F)OSS and classic closed-source commercial software.

While you may disagree with their goals, and be almost religiously in opposition of them, I think they do more good than bad. They ultimately ensure that the customer/consumer has a wider choice in products and technologies, and they are IMHO they key to breaking the monopolistic world domination which certain vendors enjoy.

I honestly don't understand why some people believe Novells projects (for example Mono and Moonlight) are "bad" while similar cross-platform initiatives (such as WINE and SAMBA) are "good". I also don't understand why people see IBM's investments in Open Source projects as "good" while Novells are "bad".

In a free market, the users and customers benefit from having the widest range of products to choose from. Any company or community who is engaged in software projects which enhance portability and interconnectivity are "good" the way I see it. Especially when they release them under open source licenses - like Novell does.

Given the allready widespread use of .NET applications, being able to run them on a Linux cluster ensures that Linux can be a more attractive choice in a given scenario. The ability to provide end-users with Linux desktops which can run Win32 apps (WINE), read PDF documents, browse webpages created with Silverlight and use homepages full of fancy Shockwave Flash elements, makes it easier for a large Enterprise to choose Linux (any distro) as a client platform. In my view that enhances the competition - which is (almost) always good for the customers.

:-)

- Jesper

Re:Probably not

[chill]

Red Hat's support for SELinux is superior to SuSE's. They are much more active in the development of SELinux than AppArmor. The opposite is true regarding AppArmor. SuSE is much more active in the development and support than Red Hat.

Yes, you can add either to the other. But there is far more expertise for AppArmor at SuSE considering they acquired it when they bought Immunix. And there is far more expertise for SELinux at Red Hat, considering how deeply they are involved with it.

And then there is this http://blog.gnist.org/article.php?story=RHEL5-SELinux-Benchmark#AppArmor [gnist.org]:

Immunix created AppArmor as an alternative to SELinux, which was considered to hard to administer. Immunix was later aquired by Novell, and included in Novell Suse. Creating and maintaining AppArmor polices is user friendly, and that has led other Linux distributions, like Ubuntu and Mandriva, to include it in the default install. The overhead using AppArmor is said to be around 2% [Cowan].

In a surprise move, Novell laid of most of their AppArmor devlopers in September 2007 [news.com] [linux-magazine.com]. Making the future of AppArmor more uncertain and depended upon the open source community to continue the development. One indication of popularity can be seen in Google trends.

Re:Probably not

[PReDiToR]

In a lot of opinions, it is.

When I changed over (full time) from XP to openSUSE 10.2 I could happily leave my PC on for days, use suspend (RAM and disk) many more times than under XP without a reboot to "freshen up" and I haven't yet seen a SEGFAULT that couldn't be fixed with a rc<service> restart.

In short, my experience is not the same as yours. Have you got odd hardware or an overclocked system?
Full speed BIOS settings, AMD/VIA, ATI GFX (8xAGP, 256M), ATA133 (x6) and everything runs peachy. Under XP having the AMD/VIA combo would cause the OS to crap itself regularly no matter which drivers I used, and I have tried a lot of them.

Now I have a copy of Win2K in VirtualBox running seamless mode for when I need Photoshop. With the recent v1.0 release of WINE I may even lose that ...

And to top it all, Linux has the free edition of NX [nomachine.com] that is far quicker and immeasurably more secure than VNC.

From a Noob's point of View

[Corpuscavernosa]

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a Linux noob. I've played around with countless distros to find a great solution for my older (1.6GHz, 512M RAM, 40Gig HD) laptop, but I have almost zero command line experience and I wanted something that was easy to configure and just worked. I downloaded the beta version of OpenSUSE 11 and it just straight worked. Autoconfigure was great, wireless was perfect right out of the gate, etc.

For a Linux lover but amateur, I loved it for it's simplicity and ease of installation.

Re:New Era?

[Dog-Cow]

Apple may make a big stink about patents, but they actually point to the patents they hold. MS just handwaves and spreads FUD.

Only an Apple hater would think Apple would purposefully expend developer time just to break an open source project that undoubtedly sold more iPods.

Re:Probably not

[BPPG]

Mod parent up Whether or not this is strictly true, it does affect people's perception of SUSE

Re:SuSE's firewall is best

[clampolo]

I've used all three (U, F, & S) and keep going back to SuSE because of the SuSEfirewall2 configuration feature. It gives you one straightforward (fairly) easy to understand text config file that governs how the iptables rules get set up.

Not sure if it is what you are looking for, but FireStarter is a pretty easy way to configure you iptables.

Re:Probably not

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent down. FUD is FUD is FUD.

Apple and iTunes

[SEMW]

Only an Apple hater would think Apple would purposefully expend developer time just to break an open source project that undoubtedly sold more iPods.

I'm afraid you're in denial. It is well known that Apple have consistently and deliberately added layers of hashes, obstufication, and DRM to successive versions of the iPod in order to try and stop it being accessed from third party players. For example, to quote from a BBC news story about it [bbc.co.uk]:

There seems to be no reason for this change except to break the functionality of alternative jukebox software. It will not limit copying or restrict attempts to strip digital rights management code from tracks. It will not stop people adding non-DRM files they have downloaded from the internet to their library. All it will do is stop the third party players working and force anyone with an iPod to use iTunes.

Independent enough for you? The BBC are hardly "Apple haters". And crying "Why would they do this if it sells more iPods?" is short-sighted: iPods are a low-margin product; most of the money Apple makes from the iP+iT Ecosystem comes from the iTunes Music Store, which is locked to iTunes.

Re:Probably not

[HermMunster]

I do fresh installs of Windows XP for customers. Even with a recovery CD one has a huge amount of time to commit to doing one.

For instance, the recovery can take about 45 min to an hour (or more). Then you have to clean all the trial-ware junk off it. Then install programs such as an antivirus, adware-spyware detection and removal tools, a real firewall, probably a replacement for the browser (Mozilla Firefox). Then because the computer can't do much more than browse the web without the trial-ware crap I install open office, google earth, pidgin, and a slew of other open source products. After that I have to spend the next two hours installing updates (install reboot, install, reboot, install, reboot, etc). Then of course you do the stuff that everyone else does--set up mail, copy over backed up data, etc.

With a regular install of XP you can skip the removal of the trial-ware crap but you still have to do all the other stuff mentioned above. And that takes hours.

With Linux it takes about 15 minutes to get the install done (that includes repartitioning the drive to dual boot with Windows, and the installation of those same Open Source programs. Then it takes about another 15-20 minutes to download the updates from on line.

From that you configure things just like you like them. Only with Linux it's more fun and the options are always free. I don't have to worry about paying some company money to add some nifty ability to my desktop. And I don't have to worry about virus protection nor about whether I have good firewall protection. Security is pretty sound unless you go opening up the doors to everyone and the way linux is designed it helps to protect you from yourself.

I say the winner for speed and capabilities goes to Linux, any day!

Re:New Era?

[Ilgaz]

I have picked Nokia Maps downloader on purpose since it as a 22 MB download results in 70-80 MB .NET 3.0 download which (forget Linux!) doesn't even exist on Windows 2000. The Windows 2000 which you can happily run Java 6 even faster thanks to the less bulk of XP/Vista.

Nobody sees that scheme of Microsoft? If someone at Nokia finally figures their high end customers who owns $400+ smartphones (that can run Maps) doesn't give a shit to how cheap Windows PC is and near 30% of them runs Mac OS X, what is needed? rm -rf NokiaMaps and start from strach since there is no way to run .NET 3 on OS X.

It is actually a pyramid scheme like thing.