SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9

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).

Some people would still consider RHEL3 WS edition to be capable of most server tasks. The only packages WS does not have that ES does have are some of the more advanced servers (amanda-server, arptables_jf, bind, caching-nameserver, dhcp, freeradius, inews, inn, krb5-server, netdump-server, openldap-servers, pxe, quagga, radvd, rarpd, tftp-server, tux, vsftpd, ypserv). Samba, NFS and apache are included in WS, so it may be suitable for many server tasks (and it has exactly the same kernel, so hardware support is identical).

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.

While servers may not have such a variety of hardware, they typically have hardware which very few people have access to. For example, consult the EMC hardware compatability list, and you will see that RedHat is certified for most combinations of server hardware, Fibre HBA, and software (ie clustering). It will be a long time before SLES9 appears on that list, becuase of their selection of a 2.6 kernel (and since SLES8 is only on the very basic sections of the list as it is, this is not good for people with enterprise storage requirements).

Now that we have established that, in terms of features and architectural support, SLES 9 is superior to RHEL 3

I don't see how you have established that, since you failed to list the architectures RHEL3 supports. At present, the list of supported architectures for RHEL3 is:

• x86
• x86_64 (both amd64 and the recently announced emt64 support)
• Itanium2
• IBM zSeries, POWER Series, S/390 Series

So, I don't see that SLES9 is ahead of RHEL3 in this area.

the "Switch User" feature first developed by Xandros

You don't mention how this is implemented, but if it is implemented the same way it was before in earlier versions of SuSE (via the Menu->Start New Session entry), then no, this feature was not developed by Xandros, it was developed by the KDE team, and is present on many other distributions (such as Mandrakelinux 9.2 and later, since all that is necessary to enable it is correct X configuration). Additionally, is uses a similar method to the one gdm uses (which has been available on Red Hat since about 6.2 IIRC).

I never know if your articles purposely include controversial information to increase the reaction to the article, or if you just don't bother checking your facts, but it does make it irritating to read unreasearched articles and to always have to post corrections ...