Hi. I am thinking about buying SLED 10.1 for my laptop. I was looking at the cost, and wondering if I was interpreting it correctly. It seems that you have to pay 50 dollars for it, and then an additional 50 dollars for each year that you want to get updates. This seems really expensive, and it can't be right, can it? You pay for Windows once, and updates are free. Am I reading this correctly? Thanks.

http://shop.novell.com/servlet/Contr...goryID=2871900

This is what the $50 a year is forI think if you want to do it yourself, the updates and patches are freely available from the Novell website. In fact Novell recommendsI have three boxes running Linux and FLOSS. Total software cost for me...$0.

SLED is more of an enterprise distro and for most companies, the cost of SLED/SLES is probably a fraction of what they pay for windows. The cost of SLED also includes some sort of technical support, so I personally think its value for money.

Hola!

to answer your Question in short:
You can buy it for $50, and choose NOT to pay for their added support. So you only pay $50. The End.
there you have it!

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Now without even reading the link, i can tell you this:

there is no such thing as "SLED10.1"

There is "SLED10" and "SUSE 10.1"

SLED10 is "targetted" more for the Corporate Business. (and Novell gives businesses the option of paying them "$50" for Novell support)

SUSE 10.1 is "targetted" for the normal home PC user (and you get all the updates Free, just not from Novell).

Basically, these are the same products... except one just has more bells & whistles included by default.

So which is Which, right?

SUSE 10.1 is the loaded version.

SLED10 is based on SUSE10.1, but does NOT have all the bells and whistles. (remember its "targetted" for the Corporate Business envirnoment. So why would business want their employees playing with all these toys?? they want their employess to be Working!)

but like i said, its only a "targetted" audience.
you are Free to use whatever product you want.

But if you are going to pay $50, why would you NOT get the LOADED version with the FREE support??

= ]

SLED10 also has a MUCH longer supported lifecycle than (open)suse, I believe it's 4 years.

Personally, I run SLED and OpenSuse (and others), I find that I'm using SLED more and more, it just seems more polished.

And, you can get basically any of the additional software that comes with OpenSuse to run on SLED very easily.

O.K. Thanks for everyone's help!

FYI, my Red Hat subscription was $169/yr.

Dennisk