02.21.09

Novell News Summary – Part I: OpenSUSE 11.1 Reviews and Regrouping

Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

SUSE Linux 6.0

Events

LAST week was a fairly quiet one, maybe due to FOSDEM ending. Some recordings of FOSDEM are now available and this is announced in the OpenSUSE Web site.

This year Juergen and me (tom) went to FOSDEM to do the video recordings of the talks in the openSUSE developer room. Last year we had some problems with the sound quality, so this year we brought some more equipment, amongst others 2 head mics for the speakers, one mic for the audience, an 8 channel mixer and speakers for the audience.

Zonker ought to be giving a talk at SCALE 2009 right about now.

Recent setbacks have not been treating OpenSUSE so well (nor has Novell), which led to unrest. Adding to these problems, download.opensuse.org was going down for several hours today, as Peter informed colleagues and others in the opensuse-announce mailing list:


download.opensuse.org is undergoing database maintenance today (Saturday
afternoon morning, 21st of February).

Since I don't know when this message will be moderated, I may already 
be finished when you read this.

Basic functionality is there, but if you encounter some errors please
just retry in a few hours.

Please contact admin at opensuse.org with any queries.

It’s all back now.

There was very little more that we could find about OpenSUSE apart from an HOWTO here and there.

Reviews

The GNU/Linux-hostile Jim Lynch reviewed OpenSUSE 11.1 and so did Jason Brooks, Eric Mesa, and Jack Wallen. Snippets below from each in turn:

It’s been quite a while since I’ve played with openSUSE. Back in the day it was pretty much my favorite Linux distribution. Oh sure I flirted with other distros and I enjoyed using them, but openSUSE always had its own special appeal. As a result, I couldn’t resist downloading openSUSE 11.1 and giving it a shot.

As in previous SUSE releases, OpenSUSE 11.1 seems to err on the side of complexity (or bloat, depending on your point of view) when it comes to packing in its desktop-focused features. For instance, my OpenSUSE installation gave me more configuration options for setting up my display settings than I’m accustomed to seeing from Red Hat or Ubuntu releases, but I had to use a combination of two separate, partially overlapping display settings tools to arrive at my desired setup.

After reading through LXF, I tried loading openSuse 11.1 with the failsafe settings and it worked in VirtualBox. So I’ll now be reviewing openSuse 11.1. Here’s the screen as it booted up.

[...]

So, openSuse is a good distro to check out. Their release engineers are doing a great job. As with last time, the only cause for hesitance is their pact with Microsoft as that may be a deal-breaker for some users out there.

If you are looking for an enterprise-ready Linux distribution that is primed for migrating users from Window to Linux, Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is the perfect solution. But one issue you will have to prepare to over come is the installation. Creating an automated installation with AutoYaST will become a necessity if you are planning on doing any large-scale roll outs. Outside of that, you can not go wrong with SLED as your next enterprise desktop operating system.

Miscellaneous

~~Novell’s~~ OpenSUSE Weekly News came a lot later than usual.

In this Week:

* Special Edition about FOSDEM2009
* OpenOffice_org 3.0.1 final available
* Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel: Product Creation with the openSUSE Build Service
* Henne Vogelsang: Fosdem talk about collaboration features and Contrib
* kamilsok: installing 64bit Java on openSUSE 11.1

News from the past week should be assembled soon as it’s not there yet. The above is for the week prior to the last, so there’s catching up to do. █

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