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SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9

Without much fanfare, Novell unveiled its SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 in early August during the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2004 in San Francisco. Surprisingly, the new release has yet to attract any in-depth coverage in the Linux media. Despite that, SLES 9 is possibly one of the most significant Linux product releases of the year, with a potential to become the only enterprise-class Linux server distribution able to effectively compete with the current runaway market leader - Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Before we examine the features of SLES 9, let's take a look at the product's pricing structure. The cost depends on the processor architecture and the number of CPUs, with the cheapest option being a $349 subscription per server with up to 2 CPUs, per year. This happens to be exactly the same price as one would pay for the Basic Edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, which is the cheapest of any server products made by Red Hat (excluding Fedora Core). The two products differ in the level of included support: while the RHEL Basic Edition offers a 30-day installation and basic configuration support, SLES 9 comes with one year of installation support (a rather dubious value given that most users won't take a year to install their newly acquired operating system). As always, these products tend to have complex pricing structures, so consult the SLES 9 price list and the RHEL pricing and support options for more details. Interested parties can obtain a free 30-day evaluation edition of SLES 9 from Novell.com.

One noteworthy advantage of SLES 9 over RHEL 3 is the 2.6 kernel. SLES 9 ships with kernel 2.6.5, which brings significant performance and scalability advances to the end user. While some will argue that the 2.6 kernel series has not matured enough to be considered reliable and well-tested for deployment on mission-critical production systems, this is probably more of a concern on desktops and workstations rather than servers, which typically are less demanding in terms of hardware and driver support. In contrast, Red Hat's first kernel 2.6-based distribution will be RHEL 4, which is not expected until the first quarter of 2005. (Of course, it should be noted that the 2.4 kernel shipped by Red Hat includes a great many backported 2.6 features).

With SLES 9, Novell has also expanded its support for different processor architectures. Besides the commonly used x86 processors, the distribution is also available for AMD64 (Athlon and Opteron), Intel's EM64T, Intel's IA-64 (Itanium), and IBM's Power, zSeries and S/390 processors.

Now that we have established that, in terms of features and architectural support, SLES 9 is superior to RHEL 3 (unfair, as it may be, to compare two products whose respective code bases were finalized 12 months apart), many system administrators and IT decision makers will be asking: what does the $349/year SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 offer over and above the $90 SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional? Wouldn't the cheaper edition be adequate for our needs?

While most small businesses would indeed be better served by the Professional edition, many large enterprises will find valid reasons for going the SLES route. As an example, SLES comes with a range of features designed to protect data privacy, including encrypted file systems and Certificate Authority (CA) management. The latter can be set up during installation and it has been integrated into YaST as a module that allows creation and management of a public key infrastructure using X.509 certificates and Certificate Revocation Lists. These can be stored either on a hard disk or on a LDAP server. Large organizations with remote offices and telecommuting employees will find Virtual Private Networks with IPsec indispensable: they provide tools for secure connections from remote locations or untrusted networks. Companies with a large number of servers will be pleased to know that SLES 9 offers support for Novell's ZENworks Linux Management Server, a tool for setting up an in-house update server for an entire network. These are just some of the many features described in detail in this SLES Technical Feature List (in PDF format).

SLES 9 is based on SUSE LINUX 9.1. The standard installation includes a full graphical environment with KDE, although other options, such as minimal, minimal graphical (with FVWM2), and full installation options are also available. Interestingly, SUSE has adopted some of the features found in certain competing products: the "Switch User" feature first developed by Xandros, and the update notification tray icon present in all recent Red Hat and Fedora releases are now integrated into SLES. There is a also device management tray icon for a quick access to hardware configuration modules. One noticeable change, reflecting Novell's increased branding influence, is a new KDE start button - the original SUSE chameleon on a green background has now been replaced with a bright red letter "N" (see screenshot).

Overall, there is little doubt that Novell has brought out a serious contender for the enterprise server market, a product that has a potential to make a dent in (or at least slow down) Red Hat's impressive financial performance of the past year. SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 is a solid product, with a feature list that won't be matched by Red Hat until we are well into 2005. But perhaps most importantly, Novell's new product means that, for the first time, Red Hat has a sophisticated, powerful, and high-profile competitor on the North American market. And that can't be a bad thing.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Project has sent out a release stating that it will be unable to include the patented "Sender ID" technology in its distribution.

The Debian Weekly News for September 7, 2004 covers a Debian translation party in Milan, an updated lessons document on project management, Debian used by the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association, sparc upgrade problems, testing migration scripts, and more.

Preparation for the third stable (woody) revision, v3.0r3 is ongoing. Here's a status report.

Here are some details about the inner workings of the testing scripts that are used to help the preparation of the upcoming sarge release.

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Mandrakelinux Community Newsletter

The latest Mandrakelinux Community Newsletter is out, with a look at GlobeTrotter, the release of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Beta2, and more.

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Gentoo Linux - Resigning GWN editorship

Yuji Kosugi has resigned from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Thanks go to Yuji for all his work on GWN.

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Red Hat upgrades security (News.com)

News.com reports that Red Hat has released an update to its enterprise product with security upgrades, support for IBM Power5 servers, new driver support and bug fixes. "The security upgrades in Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 include Exec-shield and Position Independent Executable (PIE) features to protect against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows and other exploits that involve overwriting data structures in memory. No-execute (NX) support will now be available for Intel x86, Intel EM64T and Advanced Micro Devices AMD64 processors."

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Fedora

Fedora has kudzu updates available for FC1 and FC2. These updates rework the network device detection in kudzu and fix various reported bugs.

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Slackware Linux

The slackware-current changelog shows upgrades to hdparm, zsh, GNU m4, glib, gtk+, gnupg, lftp, nmap, ImageMagick, GNU bash, minicom, GNU aspell, openshh and fluxbox, plus other bugfixes and lots of recompiling with the new glib.

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Minor distribution updates

Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has a security release of stable 4.023. "Changes: This Up2Date fixes the recent Apache DoS (CAN-2004-0748) and some flaws within IPSec."

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Lineox Enterprise Linux

A third update of Always Current Lineox Enterprise Linux 3.037 is now available. Click below for additional information.

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MEPIS Releases SimplyMEPIS 2004

MEPIS LLC is now shipping SimplyMEPIS 2004. SimplyMEPIS 2004 utilizes a foundation codebase from the Debian Project for reliability and includes the KDE 3.2.3 desktop, OpenOffice 1.1.2, Mozilla 1.7.2, Skype, GIMP2, Xine, and many other applications to give the desktop user everything needed to quickly become productive in the SimplyMEPIS desktop Linux environment.

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New StartCom Linux systems released

StartCom Ltd. has released a new Linux Operating System designed for software developers. The StartCom Developer Edition DL-3.0.0 (Pharaoh) incorporates the best of StartCom Enterprise Linux, with the addition of the Eclipse IDE. There is also an updated release of StartCom Enterprise Linux available. Click below for the announcement.

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