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Taking openSUSE 11.4 for a spinTaking openSUSE 11.4 for a spinPosted Mar 16, 2011 10:57 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)Parent article: Taking openSUSE 11.4 for a spin
>openSUSE 11.4 really contains few major updates specific to the distribution itself.
A sign of maturity of the current state. Changing everything everytime would be a major nuisance.
>One thing that users may find off-putting about openSUSE is the number, or lack thereof, of packages available
I just counted, not all that much. The "missing 5000" may just be those packages to have a quality like a 1999 instance of sendmail.
Which in itself makes me wonder how Debian can claim to have 29000 packages in squeeze when their entire FTP pool merely returns 17k. Well, thanks to the reference in its Wikipedia page, it turns out that they like to boast using the number of binary packages, rather than source, which obviously gives you a high number if you put each library into its own package (cf. for example SUSE Shared Library Policy).
(The scripts used I have put up at http://jengelh.medozas.de/files/dist/ )
>it's not unusual to get a 32-bit only DVD or CD from magazines
Don't trust what magazines ship. Especially the tabloid kind of computer magazines have advertised betas (now known as milestones) as the final product, which is certainly wrong and misleading.
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packages available, versus Ubuntu Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:16 UTC (Wed) by mcoleman (guest, #70990) [Link]
About a year ago I looked at the packages available for Ubuntu, versus openSUSE 11.3, and noticed that quite a number that seemed interesting were missing (from 11.3). Looking again just now, the situation has improved somewhat, but there is still quite a bit that's missing (as determined by 'zypper search' on an 11.4 box). Some of these may be false positives due to different naming, but I suspect most really are absent:
xymon/hobbit, cacti, rancid, smokeping, ipplan, mediawiki,
This list is by no means all-encompassing--it's just a list of packages that interest me. Based on this, Debian and Ubuntu still seem to have a significant lead in package assortment.
packages available, versus Ubuntu Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:41 UTC (Wed) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475) [Link]
I think the Contrib repo is making a big contribution to fixing this. Especially with the freezing of Contrib:Factory at some point for a release.
As an example, for Haskell, there's a repo that will give you ghc and the such ( http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/language... ), but the maintainer hasn't gone in and said it should build for 11.4, so it works for 11.3 and factory, but not 11.4. Repos not building for 11.4 is actually the biggest problem I face with upgrading. In some cases, I might just branch the package and tell it to build for 11.4.
Taking openSUSE 11.4 for a spin Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:35 UTC (Thu) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]
"A sign of maturity of the current state. Changing everything everytime would be a major nuisance."
If you accept that the "current state" is as good as openSUSE can get, sure. I don't really accept that, though.
"Don't trust what magazines ship. Especially the tabloid kind of computer magazines have advertised betas (now known as milestones) as the final product, which is certainly wrong and misleading."
I think you've mistaken my point. I don't get openSUSE from a magazine. But a lot of new users have, and probably will in the future. The advice "don't trust what magazines ship," is fine - but pretty unlikely the users in question are reading LWN to see this. And my main point was that I *like* that openSUSE supports >3GB of RAM on 32-bit, not whether magazines are a reputable source of media in the first place.
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