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Operating Systems Software SuSE Upgrades Linux

OpenSUSE 11.4 Released 87

Posted by timothy from the gott-sei-dank-fuer-release-names dept.
MasterPatricko writes with good news from SUSE: "'We are proud to announce the launch of 11.4 in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. The 11.4 release brings significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. Combined with the appearance of new tools, projects and services around the release, 11.4 marks a showcase of growth and vitality for the openSUSE Project!' This release is available now (direct download and bittorrent) as installable DVD or KDE/Gnome LiveCD images, as well as being installable over a network or as a live upgrade from a previous openSUSE release. Highlights include Linux kernel 2.6.37, improved package management, KDE SC 4.6.0, Gnome 2.32 with a preview of Gnome 3, Firefox 4.0, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and the debut of a rolling release project called Tumbleweed. 11.4 images are also already available for customization on SUSEstudio, and you can build your own packages for 11.4 and other GNU/Linux distros on the openSUSE Build Service."
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OpenSUSE 11.4 Released More

OpenSUSE 11.4 Released

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  • DOA? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by socceroos ( 1374367 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @05:26PM (#35448086)
    What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mackil ( 668039 )
      I hope not. It's the only Linux distro I can make work with my funky hardware straight out of the box.

      • +1, its the only distro that doesn't give up during boot and displays a blank screen, flickers after suspend to RAM (Ubuntu Lucid) and doesn't crash while working (Fedora 14).

    • Re:DOA? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @05:36PM (#35448182) Journal

      What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

      According to distrowatch it's number 5, with about half the hits per day of Ubuntu which is number 1. I can't tell you it's future, but I do think this distro is high quality and arguably undervalued. If it fails it will be due to politics rather than on technical merits. It's good to have good technically competent alternatives (though possibly not as many as we have now!!!). It's certainly not a distro I want to see disappear.

      • Re:DOA? (Score:4, Informative)

        by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara@hudson.barbara-hudson@com> on Thursday March 10, 2011 @06:03PM (#35448416) Journal
        The problem with distrowatch numbers is they don't tell you how many people actually do installs, how many people keep their installs, etc. It's just a record of page hits.

        For example, I've been using OpenSUSE since 9x ... and I didn't hit distrowatch even for that.

        So, I went over to distrowatch, and it gives the OpenSUSE number as ~1200. Right now, I see 1,300 seeders and 2,200 leechers off the i586 and x86_64 dvd torrents, for a total of 3,500 - that's well over the number of people even looking at the ubuntu link, never mind actual downloads.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by syousef ( 465911 )

          I grant you distrowatch is far from perfect, but it's a better indication than none at all. If you know a better way to compare, I'm all ears.

          • Re:DOA? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara@hudson.barbara-hudson@com> on Thursday March 10, 2011 @06:21PM (#35448552) Journal

            I grant you distrowatch is far from perfect, but it's a better indication than none at all. If you know a better way to compare, I'm all ears.

            Grab the torrents for each distro, and see how many people are downloading it at any one time. Maintain totals over the year, and that should give you a half-decent number. You'd be surprised at how OpenSUSE and Fedora are still quite active even late in their release cycles.

            It works for the **AAs.

            • I wish I had modpoints, but I wasted them all on some stupid story when drunk (still drunk, so perhaps thats not a good comparison :-))

              I'm making a note here to implement this soon (too good of an idea to simply forget); how should I credit you for it? "Tom Hudson"? "tomhudson (43916) from slashdot post, March 11-2011"? Let me know.

              (ps. Yes, I actually am a researcher, but maintain my own blog of trivial research - see my sig for a link; perhaps you won't want your name associated with the type of tri
              • I'm glad you like the idea ... as for the credit, if you want to give credit, that's fine. Barbara Hudson, with either a link back here or to the site in my profile (xmlsucks.com), works for me :-)

                Looking at your blog, I noticed a third option missing in the logic of the death penalty, and a slight boo-boo:

                1. The death penalty does reduce crime^Wmurder rates.
                2. The death penalty has no effect on crime^Wmurder rates.
                3. The death penalty increases murder rates.

                You are comparing murder rates, not over

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by AK Marc ( 707885 )

                  It also ignores euthanasia (/me dons flame-retardant panties), which can be classified as a separate category of crime, a homicide, or not a crime depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.

                  Euthanasia is homicide. Homicide is the act of killing another. It may or may not be a crime. Where I grew up, there was no crime named "homicide." Instead, Texas has a heading of "criminal homicide" encompassing those types of homicide which may be crimes. http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/PE/htm/PE.19.htm [state.tx.us] I use that rather than where I currently am because having lived so long in TX, I've pretty much read all the statutes through at least once, often more. Though the point is homicide is o

                  • A carefully reasoned, correct, non-inflammatory comment - are you sure you want to post this on slashdot? :-)

                    You are, of course, correct about the term "homicide". Thanks for the correction.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by TheLink ( 130905 )

                    Where I grew up, there was no crime named "homicide." Instead, Texas has a heading of "criminal homicide" encompassing those types of homicide which may be crimes

                    Not surprised that Texans are less likely to confuse homicide with criminal homicide, after all they're more familiar with the phrase "needed killing" :).

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by pnutjam ( 523990 )
                    Less chance for scope creep after capital punishment. If you have prisoners lying around, things are going to expand and change. Change is the real problem for conservatives.

                    What is this small government party you talk about...? I don't think we have one of those anymore. :-(

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              This doesn't work for rolling release distros like Arch Linux. They are downloaded once and then never again, my installation is three years old and wouldn't count.

              • Good point, but the same can also be said about distros like OpenSUSE that let you do an in-place upgrade over the net. The way I figure it, we won't get absolute numbers (after all, one download probably equals more than one install), but the ratios should be a start ...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by syousef ( 465911 )

              Grab the torrents for each distro, and see how many people are downloading it at any one time. Maintain totals over the year, and that should give you a half-decent number. cycles.

              Not everyone uses torrents so that's no better than distrowatch.

            • That assumes that torrents are a good indicator. I don't think they are.

              Ubuntu encourage people to download from the main server and don't show the torrent links on the front page, wheras SUSE do. Also, Ubuntu's standard distro is a 600MB CD, wheras SUSE have a 4.5GB DVD, so there's more incentive to use the faster Bittorrent option.

              • No indicator is perfect, and SuSE actually encourages people to do in-place upgrades over the net (change the repositories, upgrade), not full re-installs. SuSE also offers downloadable CDs as well, and these too will also let you download additional packages, same as everyone else.

                It is what it is - another data point :-) Unless you want to go back to the spyware that Ubuntu tried to slip in with the canonical-census package [slashdot.org] ...

            • There's an even better way than that - measuring the number of unique IPs which hit the update servers to download security and bug fix updates.

              Opensuse has done this for years: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Statistics [opensuse.org]

          • We could have all distros install a voluntary package to send installation records to distrowatch servers.

            Whether or not anyone would actually chose to install that package is anyones guess.

            Maybe the linux counter could keep distro usage?

          • Re:DOA? (Score:5, Informative)

            by MasterPatricko ( 1414887 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @07:03PM (#35448814) Homepage
            There are some statistics based on unique IPs asking for updates on en.opensuse.or/Statistics [opensuse.org]. Obviously YMMV with those numbers.

          • You mean it doesn't say in the koran?

        • Even though it's 5 months since Ubuntu 10.10 came out, there are 4000 seeders of i386 and 1800 of x86-64, plus of the alternate install cd 800 for i386 and 600 for x86-64. Your SuSE loosEs 8D
          • Wait a few days - the opensuse numbers will climb. Not everyone downloads the first day.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kr0m ( 900780 )
      Novell isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Furthermore, SUSE would continue to live on even if Novell went down under. It has a wide community and a strong presence in the enterprise environment. Plenty of other companies would be more than interested in buying the operating system even if just to keep the duopoly with Red Hat. Excellent products come out with SUSE continuously and it would be hard to replace it's place as it has proven to be a very usable desktop aswell as a solid server.

      • Novell isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Furthermore, SUSE would continue to live on even if Novell went down under.

        Attachmate's Australian? Hmm, could make Brainshare more interesting.

        • When I was I going to college back in 2000, the flavor being pushed by Baker College, Michigan, was Netware 5.0 & 5.1, exclusively for Computer Networking. Netware was a DOS based Network Operating system (NDS) They preached that DOS was the most stable "bottom end" to build your NET OS on for your business! I thought, DOS???????? I knew of MS and their affiliation with DOS and I found that extremely troublesome. NDS "IS" what AD 'copied' from. At the moment I am a retired Family Man that became a Red

    • What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

      First of all I don't know if Novell is dying. Novell is Acquired by Attachmate Corporation [novell.com].

      Secondly the openSuSE community is very big and is operating on more or less independently from Novell.

      Even if Novell would dying I think other companies would by the SuSE part with SLES. As SLES quality is also due to the openSuSE quality I don't think a owner of SLES would not support openSuSE.

      I as a openSuSE packages still foresee a bright future for openSUSE [opensuse.org] and SLES also because the community around openSuS

    • openSUSE is very much alive and kicking. It is less buggy and faster than Fedora. Proprietary hardware support is good and plus if you add the Packman repositories, you get tons of free packages ranging from games to media players.

      I've been using openSUSE 11.2 x64 for more than a year now after a decade of experience with Fedora and a considerable experience with Ubuntu; and have found that it is a grossly underrated distro; at least outside Germany.
    • Considering that we are working on a Foundation and Attachmate has been very positive about openSUSE (even had some attachmaties join our marketing channel during the launch) I'd say we're going nowhere else but forward ;-)

  • OK BUT WHERE IS THE APPLE TIE-IN?? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Steven Jobs not even mentioned? What kind of slashdot is this becoming now?

  • I'm not a big fan of [Open]SUSE, since I think there's always something missing in every version, but I installed the KDE flavor in my personal laptop and I will rollback to my old Debian again. Slow installation (I already had a /home partition and it took about 10 minutes only "preparing the configuration" with a heavy I/O load), slow package manager as usual (compared to synaptic. Zypper is quite good in contrast), KDE is once again a bloated monster (Akonadi stole 200MB of my home directory and the netw

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nzac ( 1822298 )

      Slow installation (I already had a /home partition and it took about 10 minutes only "preparing the configuration" with a heavy I/O load), slow package manager as usual (compared to synaptic. Zypper is quite good in contrast), KDE is once again a bloated monster (Akonadi stole 200MB of my home directory and the network manager looks cool, but has too many unnecessary stuff.

      I remember the installer interface lagging when installing RC1 and 11.3 but the config has never taken more than 30 secs. Your sentence is confusing but i would not call zypper slow (slower mirrors and lzma decompression might influence it though).

      You can turn network manager off in yast and set it up to use 'ifup' which works well if for my desktop with a wired connection. If you really care about resources you can install the latest xfce.

      • What I meant was: Yast is low as zypper frontend but zypper from the command line works like a charm (why are the repositories marked to refresh automatically by default on Yast? why are there a lot of suggested packages marked to be installed?). The network manager has a lot of unnecessary stuff (1/4 of the screen? WTF!). Anyway, I installed Mint-Debian and I'm very happy with it.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by nzac ( 1822298 )

          I suspect that if you installed from the live CD the 700MB limit was too small and they thought you might need some more packages (libre office is pretty big to fit on a live CD). You might be able to click undo and does not say again.

          I would think that network manager would be useful if you have so many wireless options to take up a quarter of the screen. After you have picked the network you want you never have open the drop down menu again it will just default to the last used.

    • For me OpenSUSE was the easiest to install on my old PC during my first try of linux a while ago (10.4?). Perhaps the bloat allows for installing on many different hardware configurations that a user could trim down once installed, whereas Ubuntu would just hang during install after multiple CD burn attemps, versions, etc.
      Yast was pretty easy to use and overall I liked the user experience.
      • I've been using openSUSE intermittently since version 8.2 (the SuSE times) and yet easy to install and configure (Yast is a great tool) it always lacks or something or just fails with the basic. I'm not really saying OS is bloated, but KDE. I was a KDE die hard user, but in some point (4.0) they lost their way (Activities? Plasma? Amarok 2.x?). Sorry, but I will stick to OpenBox/GNOME.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The reason SUSE's package management is so slow is that it essentially does the equivalent of an apt-get update *every time* it initializes, unless they've changed it in 11.4. It's a good system if you use third-party repositories that update rather frequently, as a lot of people end up doing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        From 9.x to 10.x I remember yast taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory just to check for updates. It was very very slow.Yast was almost a swear word in our dept ;). I believe at some stage we switched to another package manager.

        Looking at the bug reports it wasn't just us who noticed.

        • Zypper was largely rewritten for openSUSE 11.0. It's lightning fast since then.
          Whenever a new openSUSE release comes out, the server are hammered. They are likely the bottleneck if anything appears slow but that's nothing in the package manager's hands.

  • Netcraft confirms it: OpenSUSE is dying (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    etc. etc.

  • Not only did the entire openSUSE user base comment here, some of them more than once.

  • I upgraded a couple of machines from 11.3 to 11.4 and everything went very smoothly and just worked. I've found OpenSUSE to be fairly stable and I like the fact that out of the box it has full LVM and RAID support and easily recognized my LVM setup from before.

    The installation went quickly and seemed faster than 11.3 when I installed off of a DVD. It feels faster than 11.3 as well.

    -Aaron

  • SLES/openSuse installs are everywhere (Score:5, Informative)

    by bored ( 40072 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @11:51PM (#35450122)

    Just not in your moms basement. I have yet to see a copy of ubuntu running in a corporate environment. On the other hand, i've seen openSUSE on peoples desktops, and SLES running in data center after data center. Look at the large OEM's linux support list. Usually its RedHat and SLES, and there is a reason. Part of that has to do with the long support cycles, the rest has to do with testing and support of "enterprise hardware". For example, zSeries mainframes, 10G ethernet, SAS, fibre channel, 300+TB RAID arrays, you quickly find that the "popular" distributions don't work. For that matter, the last time I installed ubuntu it took 20 minutes to convince it to work properly in a vmware session, it kept disconnecting the network because it's MAC detection layer wasn't working properly with the vmware adapter. Heck probably 50% of the hardware I own won't run ubuntu. (50% of my personal hardware is non x86, cause i have POWER, sparc, ARM, etc machines).

    Plus, as I posted in another thread, modern Yast is actually quite good. You can configured pretty much the whole machine from it now. From basic stuff like network, disk/LVM/RAID, iscsi, etc to nearly every service the machine ships with like Samba, and Bind. While many of the configurations are basic and need further tuning, it gets the beginner most of the way down the road without having to drop to a command line or editor. The package management is just as good as anywhere else with yast/zypper, so much so I can't remember the last time i had to compile something.

    Finally, SUSE's binary driver story is a lot better than anyone elses, so a lot of "proprietary" hardware just tends to work. Like say, multihead with openGL support sufficient to run blender...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sodki ( 621717 )

      I have yet to see a copy of ubuntu running in a corporate environment.

      That's funny, I'm looking at a few dozens right now. We probably don't work at the same place...

    • Long-term support? Are we talking about the same OpenSuSE? The one that drops its repositories 1.5 years after the release date? Now RHEL, yes, that's long-term support, and even Ubuntu LTS has patches out for three years after the release date. OpenSuSE not so much.

      I've had no problems installing Ubuntu on VMware, and have several customers who, yes, run Ubuntu in a corporate environment. Which versions (of both) were you running? Ubuntu 8.04 went into an ESX 3.5i host painlessly, and the 10.04 in

      • If you're gonna compare with RHEL, you have to compare to SLES, not openSUSE. openSUSE is the Fedora equivalent. And SLES has a similar support lifecycle to RHEL.

        As an aside the community is experimenting with a long-term support version of openSUSE as well - look for project Evergreen [opensuse.org]

        .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      IMHO, the beauty of Yast is you can run it from the command line and get the same thing as running it from the GUI. There is a web version also, so it works much better for headless servers.

      ------------
      On Ubuntu...
      When you look up directions for doing anything on Ubuntu, it is 9/10ths of the time, someone showing you how to do it via the GUI, useless for headless servers. And while the ubuntu user base is kind to help each other, you can often tell the people writing the tutorials know less then you

    • I am tempted to download it and try it out.

      Novel's crippling of fonts due to its deal with Microsoft made me abandon it. I use Fedora on older hadware and like it. I just can't get used to KDE and Yast.

      Is it worth trying again or am I supporting SCO and MS by trying it out? The politics of this make it painful for me to consider

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Be advised that upgrading a running system with zypper dup with the installation DVD as the source will break the package manager halfway [novell.com]. I've spent a few hours sorting out the mess left by the upgrade from 11.3 (which is actually quite little) and it seems to work pretty well (most of the other problems were due to having too small a boot partition; make it 100 MB instead of 50 MB). Phonon is still failing to use my sound card, but I disable most of the KDE system sounds anyway.

    Performance seems to have i

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