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Operating Systems SuSE Upgrades Linux

OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here 156

Posted by timothy from the lovely-little-lizard dept.
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."
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OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here More

OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here

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  • Wow (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Captain Splendid ( 673276 ) *
    Story's been up for almost 15 minutes and no comments. Is linux dying?

    Just kidding. Suse rocks.

  • Does anyone actually use OpenSUSE anymore? For an all purpose Linux distro, Ubuntu and Fedora seem to have the market cornered. (speaking non-commercially that is)

    • Yes (in Europe) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Sits ( 117492 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:37PM (#32918214) Homepage Journal

      I was at a European conference a week ago and there were quite a few attendees with laptops running some version of openSUSE. A previous UK computer science department I was in also used openSUSE as its distro.

    • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rydia ( 556444 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:38PM (#32918228)

      I use openSuSE, as do most of the people I know. It doesn't have the warm fuzzies that people seem to get off Fedora and it doesn't have the nerd chic/new hotness feeling that Ubuntu has (which many, many others have had before, I might add), but it is a very well-maintained and established distro with probably the best configuration/installation (yast is very nice) of the lot, and has benefited from closeness to both the GNOME and KDE projects.

      It's a nice distro.

      • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@gmSTRAWail.com minus berry> on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:56PM (#32918530) Homepage Journal

        It isn't as bleeding edge as Ubuntu, but the releases aren't nearly as broken.

        openSUSE has give us Compiz, Moonlight, Office 2007 support in OpenOffice, Exchange support in Evolution, Samba, etc.

        It is my distro of choice. And I also really like that they focus on putting out both really solid KDE and Gnome desktops.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by malzfreund ( 1729864 )
          openSUSE is def more aggressive than Ubuntu in integrating the latest packages. Just compare the kernel or gcc versions they've shipped vs Ubuntu on DistroWatch. Among the major distros, openSUSE is less bleeding edge than Fedora. But which major distro isn't? Also, iyam, openSUSE releases are buggier than Ubuntu releases. FWIW, I was a SUSE user for seven years. After I dealt with small inconveniences after every SUSE release (altough I didn't encounter any showstoppers in years), I recently made the swit

          • Ubuntu shipped Upstart first. Ubuntu shipped grub2 first. Ubuntu shipped ext4 first. Ubuntu shipped PulseAudio first.

            openSUSE has tried to let many of these bake and stabilize first. Even in this openSUSE 11.3 release, Upstart and grub2 are optional.

            The weird thing is that in the last Ubuntu LTS release, they didn't want to ship a bleeding edge Xorg release, but they wanted all the bleeding edge features, so they tried to backport them all and just broke things.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by pnutjam ( 523990 )
            I'm the opposite, I used OpenSUSE for a long time and switched to Ubuntu because there were more packages available. However, Ubuntu had constant problems. Every how-to (for Ubuntu) assumes you are running a GUI, so it was difficult to figure things out on my headless installs. The showstopper for me was support for a second monitor, OpenSUSE supports switching monitor to projector or adding a second monitor almost seamlessly. I went back and I love OpenSUSE.

            I especially love that I can use the same ad
      • My favorite distro. YaST is the big difference, IMHO -- other distros have nothing like it. I've got OpenSuse 11.2 installed on my daughter's laptop (and Ubuntu on my wife's, but I much prefer the former); if my daughter can have all she needs to on it and not complain too much, they're definitely doing something right.

      • I've found that those of us using OpenSuSE do so because it generally works and stable so we can be working on fixing other problems.

        • I've found that those of us using OpenSuSE do so because it generally works and stable so we can be working on fixing other problems.

          +1 to that if I had modpoints. That's been pretty much my experience.

      • "yast is very nice" ?

        My god, man, keep your masochistic tendencies out of my face.

    • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jodosh ( 1260096 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:41PM (#32918270)
      I for one do (and it is still in the top 5 on distrowatch). YaST is a wonderful tool if you have never used it. One place to edit just about every config file and deal with system admin is very useful. Also their integration with KDE is by far the best of all the distros I have tried in a long time.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by eldepeche ( 854916 )

        Meh, I couldn't get YaST to work my 2 monitors properly. Fedora works.

        • Out of the box? Were you running the same video drivers?

          Fedora tends to be running bleeding edge snapshot builds of Xorg, Mesa, etc. lately so that might have something to do with it.

        • Hmmm, that's odd. I'm running a triple head configuration across two video cards. Which drivers are you using?

      • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:51PM (#32918458)

        YaST is a wonderful tool if you have never used it.

        .. and once you have used it, it's not so wonderful? :)

        • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by pkbarbiedoll ( 851110 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @03:47PM (#32919220)

          On a non-production system I made the mistake of editing the httpd file through Yast2. Yast "helped" "fix" my conf file so that Apache would not longer work. I learned not to edit important configuration files through gui tools.

          I haven't looked at SuSE linux in almost 4 years.. SLES 9 was very stable.

          Ubuntu is on all of my workstations & laptops now, and RHEL is on the servers.

          • On a non-production system I made the mistake of editing the httpd file through Yast2. Yast "helped" "fix" my conf file so that Apache would not longer work. I learned not to edit important configuration files through gui tools.

            I haven't looked at SuSE linux in almost 4 years.. SLES 9 was very stable.

            Ubuntu is on all of my workstations & laptops now, and RHEL is on the servers.

            Same story here. You either always use the GUI, or always just edit the files like normal. If you try mixing the two, then you are asking for pain. Strangely enough, Red Hat seems to have gotten this right. If you use their gui tools, your prior config is not torpedoed.

        • YaST is a wonderful tool if you have never used it.

          .. and once you have used it, it's not so wonderful? :)

          I would agree.

          Yet Another Shitty Tool?

      • YaST is a good enough system overall, but the software management feels like an last-minute addition. The only system I've used that's slower and more frustrating for me than openSuSE's is "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows. It just can't compete with apt or portage, on any level.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Rydia ( 556444 )

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

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by jodosh ( 1260096 )
            To go along with this, YaST package management was horrifically slow near the end of the 10.X series. With all the work done on zypper, package management has improved a ton. Their is still work to be done, but it isn't something that is too slow to use like it once was.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by pnutjam ( 523990 )
              yeah, zypper is great, try:

              sudo zypper ref
              sudo zypper up

              updated your system, or:

              sudo zypper se package
              sudo zypper in packagename

              that is the easiest way to find and install a package, aptitude lets you do something similar from the commandline, but apt-get does not have a decent search interface, if I recall correctly...

        • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          If you are seriously comparing YAST and portage that proves that you are clueless beyond all hope. And FTR, yes zypper used to be horribly slow, much like yum. It has since improved and currently, you know the state we should be interested in unless someone is trolling, I'd say it's on par with apt.

      • Yes, I agree. Yast is a wonderful tool if you have never used it.

        I have, however, and I've still got nightmares.
    • Yeah, runs my web/fileserver, and does a great job. The windows equivalent (in my case, Windows XP), needs to be rebooted once a day at this point.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grommit ( 97148 )
      Yes, quite a few people use OpenSUSE. It's one of the few distros with a decent KDE implementation out of the box.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zach978 ( 98911 )
        Yep --- I'm a long time KDE'er and just recently gave up with kubuntu and am really liking OpenSUSE.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 )

      Yep; where I work (small university dep't) one of the faculty members has it on all his desktops.

      My main grumble about OpenSuSE is that, at least until 11.2 -- I'm still fuzzy on the details -- you couldn't actually do an upgrade [sherrillmix.com] from SuSE itself using zypper; you had to boot from the DVD and upgrade. I'm used to CentOS and Debian where this sort of thing isn't a mix of hope and prayer [opensuse.org] or a feature request [opensuse.org].

    • Re:Does anyone.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by oatworm ( 969674 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @03:09PM (#32918740) Homepage
      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).

      • Don't forget that Yast offers multiple different user interfaces, depending on what you're using. QT3, QT4, GTK, and ncurses (handy if you don't have X, if it's not working, or if you're on SSH). It looks and functions almost identically on each, but always feels "native" and doesn't require that you install the libraries for something you're not using.

    • Yep. It's on my office mate's machine.

      I'm using Ubuntu though.

    • I've found OpenSuse to install on a wider range of hardware with fewer problems to troubleshoot than Ubuntu.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        OpenSUSE has hardware compatability better then any other distro, I originally started using it because I could setup wireless cards with ease, now wireless is less of an issue on other distros, but OpenSUSE still rocks!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mattcsn ( 1592281 )

      I'm a very satisfied openSUSE user. I cut my teeth on Slackware back in the day (and still run it wherever stability is really important), and was never really happy with any of the auto-everything distros until I discovered openSUSE a year ago. It has the same balance of reasonably-stable and reasonably-up-to-date that I like about Slackware, combined with a sane out-of-the-box configuration. My MSI Wind U100 netbook is currently running 11.3 right now, and I've had zero problems. If it stays that way for

    • What is this market you're speaking of? There are lots of linux markets that Ubuntu/Fedora don't serve. SuSE and now OpenSuSE have a much larger presence in Europe. For myself I've been using SuSE for almost a decade and have always found it to be a stable, well designed distro. No other distribution focuses as much love and attention on KDE, yet manages to keep that quality for every desktop they support.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by luther349 ( 645380 )
      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.

    • Does anyone actually use OpenSUSE anymore? For an all purpose Linux distro, Ubuntu and Fedora seem to have the market cornered.

      I used to use Mandriva but decided I wanted a distro with a more assured future (Mandriva's financial problems were worrying). Off the top of my head here's some reasons why I chose Opensuse:

      * Proper KDE support - Kubuntu was just crap when I tired it, Fedora ok but not as good as Opensuse
      * Excellent package manager and large amount of packages available - Ubuntu is on par or better

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NotBorg ( 829820 )

      Care to cite a reference, troll? While it's probably fair to say that Ubuntu and Fedora are the two most popular distributions, it's also probably fair to say that openSUSE is within the top 5 most popular distributions and hardly irrelevant.

      Also, if popularity were the only significant metric for choosing an OS then we would all be using Windows. Although Arch and Gentoo are even farther down on the popularity chart, I think they are both very interesting choices. I certainly wouldn’t mock anyone

    • naw...

      Just the red hat users who've jumped ship....

      um...wonder how it got to be 2nd largest user base given no one is
      using it...

      gotta wonder who's sayin' what...

  • Top features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:33PM (#32918134) Homepage Journal
    A bit, imho, far more relevant ones, are described in Top Features [opensuse.org]. Support for Btrfs, and the visual interface of Meego for netbooks, sound to me a bit more interesting, apart of the usual incremental improvement over previous versions.

  • Took them quite a while... (Score:3, Informative)

    by IANAAC ( 692242 ) on Thursday July 15, 2010 @02:37PM (#32918192)
    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).

    • I believe openSUSE made a decision to move to an 8 month release cycle where as many other distros are doing 6 month release cycles. They feel they can pack in more features, and have plenty of time to test.

  • SpiderOak? Rosegarden? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, can't people who write software choose meaningful, easy-to-remember names for their programs?

    How the hell is 'rosegarden' supposed to make me think about editing audio files? And that 'SpiderOak' name is a joke, right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by IANAAC ( 692242 )

      How the hell is 'rosegarden' supposed to make me think about editing audio files?

      As an aside, Rosegarden isn't really an "audio editor" as wound commonly be thought, a la Audacity. It's a full blown music studio, including, MIDI, audio and (somewhat) basic notation. It's actually pretty decent.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by e9th ( 652576 )
      How is "Firefox" supposed to make you think of browsing the web?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kent_eh ( 543303 )

      Seriously, can't people who write software choose meaningful, easy-to-remember names for their programs?

      How the hell is 'rosegarden' supposed to make me think about editing audio files? And that 'SpiderOak' name is a joke, right?

      Y'mean like Acid [sonycreativesoftware.com], or Abelton [ableton.com] or Pinacle [avid.com] or Pro Tools [avid.com]?

      Tell me that someone new to the field would have any clue what type of software those names represent?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by selven ( 1556643 )

        And Slashdot. With the slashing and dotting, it sounds like an MMORPG. Well, with the achievements system and the karma system and the friends/foes system, Slashdot basically is an MMORPG.

  • Well Alrighty Then... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <flyingguy@gm a i l .com> on Friday July 16, 2010 @12:42AM (#32923380)

    The EVIL Novell has done it again! OpenSuse which by the way is free as in $0.00 USD. Patches and updates are free as $0.00 USD. If you want Novel's SLES product, guess what it is free as well AND includes 60 days worth of updates and if you want it out farther then it costs you around $30.00 USD a month The NERVE! Those fuckers from Novel hell gaul selling support AND pushing all their changes back to the Free Version they are such bastards!

    You folks need to get that stick worked out of your collective asses. Novel's rock solid support of the Linux Community is on-par with Red Hat and all the rest of them and in many ways it is better.

    How many distros come with an Oracle option ready to role? Yast may not handle all the various Apache configuration strangeness the way you might like it, but if you use it as designed it works damn fine. It could have a much better Firewall config utility but they are getting there. I have installed it on many many different versions of hardware and in 99% of the cases it has just found all the parts bits and pieces and handled them quite well. I even put it on a ancient IBM Thinkpad and the only glitch was a display setting and one quick google search solved that problem.

    The SLED Distro is a great desktop OS and handles prety much anything you want to throw at it and then some and does it better then most any other Distro. So all you zealots can have a tall cool glass of Shut The Fuck up. And as for giving people a reason to migrate to MS, that's funny since I just moved an entire company ( 100 Desktops ) from Windows XP to OpenSuse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rydia ( 556444 )

      You, sir, have done more to help linux gain respect and use than any of those haters have. Bravo!

  • It needs a fun nickname like Ubuntu releases (Score:3, Funny)

    by Artifex ( 18308 ) on Friday July 16, 2010 @09:48AM (#32926148) Journal

    I know, we can call it "Bitterface," because of the experimental Btrfs support [arstechnica.com].

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