opensuse to a slack user
 

hi,

for some unknown reason, a piece of major hardware at work is going to go opensuse, and I 'll be expected to interact with it.
I was wondering maybe there's a few slackware users out there who have to also play with opensuse,what I should look out for.

I'm pretty much expecting a Debian/Fedora culture, which means using compiled packages, I hope it's more Debian like than Redhat.

Any snippets of advice for this tremendous undertaking are appreciated.

cheers.

IMHO, OpenSuSE is an excellent distribution. I like it much better than any other distro, except Slackware, of course.

The question is, what version will be used. If it's 11.2, then there's a lot to like about it, once you get familiar with YaST, which is their central admin tool. You will use it for package management, starting and stopping services, email configuration and so on, as long as you don't have very specific requirements that will force you to edit the command line.

One of the best things about SuSE was always the excellent documentation that comes with it. Just read it, it will help you getting started.

It uses RPM for package management, but is totally different from Red Hat. It is user-friendly, but is very different from the *buntu bunch (which is a good thing).

I haven't tried 11.2, so far, but what I hear is, that the package management, which was a major issue in the recent past, hat greatly improved, and is now the best package management with dependency resolution on the market.

Also good: There is a huge and friendly, non-religious community, running excellent forums, one of them even here at LQ.

My opinion: If it's not Slackware, then it can only be SuSE. The concepts are as different as they can be in any two distros, but both concepts are well thoughtout and consistent. And in 11.2 not only the concepts are good (they were always), but also the implementation quality is finally back up to the level where it was before SuSE was acquired by Novell.

Have fun!

gargamel

Would you know how the "marriage" between Novell and the evil empire ( :) ) has affected SuSE, if at all?
Thanks.

I guess you mean the contract that protects both parties against being sued by the other partner because of patents, including a deal for cross-licensing.

To my knowledge the most noticeable effects are:

• More Linux users, as Microsoft "sold" several hundreds (or even thousands) of licenses for the enterprise edition of Novell/SuSE Linux
• You can run Gnome on OpenSuSE without any danger of being sued
• The Novell edition of OpenOffice.org supports import and export of Microsoft Office documents better than the standard OOo, including VBA etc.

From an end-user's or administrator's point of view only the last one is relevant. Apart from this you won't notice a lot of difference.

BTW, the seconde one is somehow funny. I rememberr, that Icaza once initiated Gnome because he didn't like the license of KDE. Now, anyone who is using Gnome in another environment than (Open)SuSE runs the risk to violate Microsoft patents, because it is based on Mono technology to a growing extent, which is an (IMHO pointless) effort to port .NET to *nix. A real open-source fan will avoid to use any Gnome technology, nowadays, including incarnations like XFCE or LXDE, therefore.

Or the other way round: If you like Gnome, your only safe option in terms of law is (Open)SuSE.

Even more funny: Recently, the OpenSuSE users voted in favour of KDE as the default desktop choice (that can be changed with one mouseclick).

In other words, from and end-user's or administrator's point of view, OpenSuSE is just what it used to be: A very complete and powerful Linux distribution with a highly sophisticated central system management tool and smart package management. And *if* you run SuSE, there's nothing you have to worry about regarding patents of 3rd parties.

Now, I should make clear that I am not in any way affiliated with Novell or SuSE, and that I don't get sponsored or exacted by "them". ;)

In fact, I have replaced my last SuSE installation with Slackware64 13.0 only a couple of months ago. Because as good SuSE is: Slackware is the best distro around (and I have explained in a number of other threads, why I think it is so unbeatably good).


gargamel

Forgot to mention: I guess, an admin in a large enterprise environment will find it easier to integrate SuSE in the existion (often Microsoft dominated) IT landscape than other distros. I am thinking of interoperability with MS Sharepoint or Active Directory. But to my knowledge, this advantage becomes evident in just a few, large-enterprise scenarios.

gargamel

Many thanks for the very informative replies. Greatly appreciated.
I noticed you differentiated between (Open) and SuSE. Has OpenSuSE become to SuSE, what Fedora is to Red Hat?
Thanks, again.

hi stabu,

i uses opensuse in my office machines (more than 10) and i suggest opensuse for all beginners. i personally prefer/use slackware. and compared to all other available linux opensuse is best (atleast the standard configuration files are in the correct place). in opensuse there are lot of packages available for scientific applications. for an end user i always suggest opnesuse. and the new version is expected this week.

somehow i hate ubuntu. fedora is junk. mandriva ok.

[rant]openSuse is ok. But YaST is so damn slow. Besides a lot of packages I use are not in any of their repos.[/rant]

gargamel, many thanks for calming my nerves.

this will be running on a cluster, so GUI considerations are not foremost and it will probably undergo alot of tweaking. Looking at top500, varying versions of SuSE seem to figure highly, which is mildly reassuring

If I want to to do a custom compilation of some source software, how easy is that? In slackware you just modify the Slackbuild. In Gentoo you use USE flags. What might be the approach in SuSE/YaST?

You needn't anwer that ... it's not urgent ... time for me to dive into the docs. Cheers!

P.S. ref. your windows compatibility comments, though they won't concern my situation, it's an interesting question. I'm sure there's some postings on the SuSE forums about that. That socalled "alliance" always smelt a bit political to me, i.e. good for MS marketing hordes, but of doubtful benefit to tech folks.

On second thoughts, maybe novel and MS tech folks were given time to write up some handy compatibility utilities. Dunno.

thanks for great comments gargamel.

Will look into docs ... actually never have (always used Gentoo Docs for alternative reading).

Mind you this will be SuSE on a cluster, so GUI concerns are not foremost. Saw in top500 that SuSE gives quite a run for its money there on the listings.

My nerves are calmed, cheers!

About that, yes. OpenSuSE comes with up-to-date software, but has never let me down regarding stability. The enterprise editions come with a reduced set of packages that have been even more thoroughly tested, and with long-term support.

gargamel

Yes, in version 10.0 up to 11.0 I agree, that package management with YaST was sometimes painfully slow. In 11.1 it got better again, and regarding 11.2 I read that it is now the FASTES RPM package management on Earth. Haven't tried it, myself so far, however.

gargamel

I wouldn't expect to see any big difference...

gargamel

Generally, you will need to learn, how to work with source RPM packages (SRPM), and how to create them, if your stuff is not prepackaged in this format. It's not too difficult and very well documented, although a bit more cumbersome than what you are used from Slackware.

The criticism was not, that there are no technical benefits for users of OpenSuSE and MS Windows, but that the benefits are not shared with other distros. This somewhat conflicts with the concept of open source, of course. But up to now it affects only areas that are relevant for a handful of administrators in large enterprises, not for the majority of users, anyway (to my knowledge, at least).

gargamel