OpenSUSE 11.4 Released 87
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."
DOA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
+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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:1)
Looking at your blog, I noticed a third option missing in the logic of the death penalty, and a slight boo-boo:
You are comparing murder rates, not over
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
You are, of course, correct about the term "homicide". Thanks for the correction.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
What is this small government party you talk about...? I don't think we have one of those anymore.
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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] ...
Re: (Score:2)
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]
Re: (Score:2)
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]
That's pretty neat! Can we get the same figures from other distros.
Re: (Score:2)
Fedora does it too http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics [fedoraproject.org]
Not sure about other distros
Re: (Score:2)
Two or so years ago Canonical announced that Ubuntu has 8 million users (google yourself for the source). IIRC the number was based on update server connections.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Re:DOA? (Score:4, Informative)
Lebbux - 100% halal! (Score:1)
You mean it doesn't say in the koran?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Mono: I'm running 11.3 and there's no mono on either my laptop or my desktop. Just go to the package manager and remove the mono base library, and everything it depends on will also be removed :-)
Re: No kernel source on DVD: The DVD includes lots of desktops, lots of software, lots of tools, lots of applications, lots of servers, ... and lots of languages. The kernel source for 11.3 is 334.5 megs. Most people don't need to compile a kernel any more. Inc
Re: (Score:2)
Mono is not included in openSUSE by default because openSUSE defaults to KDE SC an no KDE application on the DVD is written using Mono (I know of no KDE app at all that's written using Mono).
openSUSE ships Mono as part of the non-default GNOME installation but so do Debian, Ubuntu,... and all other GNOME distributions that install Tomboy, Banshee,... by default.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Attachmate's Australian? Hmm, could make Brainshare more interesting.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I like Novell going to Linux. It just makes scents!!!
It smells?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
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?
What's Linux's future look like?
Well, I've heard that the Year of the Linux Desktop if right around the corner.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
What's Linux's future look like?
What's the world's future look like?
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
OK BUT WHERE IS THE APPLE TIE-IN?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Steven Jobs not even mentioned? What kind of slashdot is this becoming now?
Re: (Score:1)
-1 Incomprehensible Text By Fucking Retard
Re: (Score:2)
At least I talk in English you half-witted pile of dog crap.
Re: (Score:1)
That's because it's just debian with a few custom themes.
Installed (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Yast was pretty easy to use and overall I liked the user experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
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)
Looking at the bug reports it wasn't just us who noticed.
Re: (Score:2)
Where's your evidence supporting your claim that it's a myth. Even the other AC says:
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,
In case you don't understand, he doesn't say it isn't slow. He's giving an excuse for why it is slow.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
etc. etc.
Posted 2.5 hours ago and only 29 comments? (Score:1)
Not only did the entire openSUSE user base comment here, some of them more than once.
Clean update (Score:2)
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)
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)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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)
------------
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
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Advice for upgraders (Score:1)
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