LWN: Comments on "SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming"

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

wjl — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:12:27 +0000

> I've been using SuSE since 7.0.
> SUSE are definitely getting it together.

Hmmm ok. I used SuSE Version 4 sometime in another life. Then I thought: ok, let's go with the market leader, and changed to RH.

It was when I first tested FreeBSD tho, when I thought: hey, this is something to watch! Their ports system clearly was a winner compared to RPM hell of those days.

To make it short: after dealing with SuSE versions 7.x again, because our hosted server had that preinstalled, I tried several other approaches and found (tadaaaa): Debian.

I have never again looked at something else (ok, besides the occasional look to Debian-based Live-CDs). Whenever you ask network admins or anyone who has work to get done with, you will get these same answers. It is unsurpassed.

Who cares about the latest and greates features of what-havent-you-seen when you actually *have* seen it in Sid or Experimental? Servers are happy with Woody or - if the hardware is really bleeding edge - Sarge anyway.

Ok; I acknowledge that they (SuSE) are contributing back. Things like Beagle and so on are great - but I lived so long without them now, that I can wait another month or two (or compile them myself if I *really* need them), until Debian has them. Btw: there is more reason of preferring Debian than only because of apt-get of course: here @ work, I use 'main', and that's it. No 'contrib' and esp. no 'non-free'.

So while you guys with your Enterprise-whatever *still* have at least to think about licenses, I get my work done - as well as so many other people I know.

SuSE? Red Hat? Anything? Oh yeah - we actually *do* have and use and pay for one commercial product, and that's the Astaro Firewall.

So for SuSE 9.x: thanks; not for me...
kind regards & peace (no offending meant),
wjl aka Wolfgang Lonien

Novell should ditch Suse name

Sergio1704 — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 00:09:48 +0000

It seems that the US customers are keen to use the name Novell (I knew somebody who used it even before the takeover was finalized), but it wouldn't seem that European users want to ditch the name "SUSE"

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

mightyduck — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 19:16:35 +0000

My impression is that there testing ever went downhill since they were
acquired by Novell. SUSE 9.1 was a f*cking disaster because we have a lot
of systems with XFS (we use XFS also for root partitions) so we couldn't
install it at all at the beginning. And SUSE 9.2 has at least 2 serious
bugs which affect us, the nscd is crashing immediately if you use LDAP as
name service (which I could imagine a lot of enterprise users do) and the
cups-polld is dying if you restart the print server it is polling. I
agree that these bugs don't really affect home users but they should've
tested 9.2 at least at some enterprises. That's what you get with a
public beta.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

JohnBell — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 16:20:20 +0000

I've never understood why the "purple hair" crowd has trouble with SuSE. I am running 9.1 Pro right now. I am running it using both ext3 and XFS (using XFS for the multimedia work). I don't use ReiserFS because for many moons it was the most unstable flaky POS under-performing file system I had ever seen. Sounds like it still is.

If you're going to dye your head three shades of purple and stick your chest out to show off your KMFM t-shirt on a daily basis, go all the way and rice out your box with Gentoo. Fedora Core 3 a step up from SuSE Pro? Whatever floats your boat...

Novell should ditch Suse name

freddyh — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:43:20 +0000

I cannot speak for the US, but here SuSE still seems to have a very good name. I see it being used by quite a number of customers (all for products, none for desktop). They all are very pleased with the stability and the way it works out of the box.

I have been using SuSE since 7.2, a few of my colleagues since 5.1. We seem to agree that 9.1 was a bit a pity, but all other versions we have used in between (including 9.2) seemed perfectly stable.

I guess it all depends on what hardware you are using ;)

Yours,
FreddyH

Novell should ditch Suse name

b7j0c — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 04:50:44 +0000

Seriously, most North American customers don't even know how to pronounce it. Novell should digest the best of what the old Suse inc has to offer and then just call it something like Novell Linux. Given the relative weakness of many recent Suse releases this won't be a big loss in any case, and I suspect the hardcore hacker community in Europe that once proudly touted Suse as a homegrown success have moved on to the community distros (Debian,Gentoo,Ubuntu,etc). In short, the Suse name is commercially dead and the individual in charge of branding at Novell should just put it out of its misery. If Novell wants to seriously challenge Red Hat (they aren't so far), it can't afford to float any detritus from acquisitions that doesn't provide a useful future investment.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

lurk546 — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 04:22:51 +0000

I switched from Redhat 9/FC3/RH Enterprise 3 to SuSE 9.2 over the past couple of months. FC3 was relatively nice, but not as nice as SuSE 9.2 - especially on the laptop.

I'm not very fond of the short life cycle of the FC products, and the Enterprise life cycle is a lot longer than I want/need. Enterprise 4 was a non-starter on my quad opteron compute server, but SuSE 9.2 is working flawlessly.

I must sheepishly admit that we went back and tried installing the 32 bit versions of the OS's over the Enterprise 3 x86_64 we had on the compute server. I just haven't had time to debug my application on x86_64. I'll get to it before too long.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

publius — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 01:20:38 +0000

My 2 (very biased) bits: I've been using SuSE since 7.0. I've had a host
of problems with every installation (and there have been many installs),
until I got 9.2 pro. I unpacked a brand new Dell laptop (which
presumable shipped with XP on it), stuck in the DVD and let 'er rip. It
installed flawlessly (first time for everything), even though I radically
rearranged the default partitioning and file systems and dumped in every
development tool that would fit. Only problem was the weird, extra-wide
aspect ratio of the display, which the SaX2 utility refused to fix.
Still, compared to previous disasters, SUSE are definitely getting it
together.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

lesceil — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:07:33 +0000

Entirely not my experience.

I installed SUSE Pro 9.1 before on my server, and was surprised that something as simple as burning an audio CD would completely lock up my machine. Good betatester program? WTF - and also remember that people using XFS filesystems lost data because it apparently had also not been tested.
Thank god I had recreated my filesystems with reiserfs and so did not run into this issue.

Now when SUSE 9.2 came out I was thinking 'this time they must have gotten it right'. I could not have been more wrong. First messup: I changed the initial package installation to include some developer packages like the usermode kernel package. Admittedly that might be a little off-mainstream but still it should not have removed the original kernel from the grub config in /boot and replaced it with a usermode kernel that is entirely useless for initial booting. It took me a while of playing around with the rescue cd to correct that and get access to my new installation.

My old harddisk I had changed to hdc, and the new one I installed SUSE 9.2 on is hda, with a brand new reiserfs, all seemed to be fine. Until I tried to mount my exisiting old reiserfs partitions of /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc2.
The system immediately locked up AGAIN.

Thats when I threw SUSE 9.2 into the trash and installed Fedora Core 3. It has it's own annoyances but at least it is not as terrible an experience as Pro 9.X - I will definitly skip 9.3.

Michael

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

einstein — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:31:50 +0000

That's a new one on me. I moved from fedora to suse specifically because I found that everything works for me, out of the box on suse, while fedora takes a lot of tweaking and home-made scripts to get things working right.

Suse has a fairly decent beta test community, composed mainly of more technical users, and the betas get a good shaking out before the final version is released.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

maceto — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:00:58 +0000

how good it`s so well tested by users OUTSIDE suse/novell compared to e.g Fedora.. If Suse works i works but it has bugs that one don`t find i debian/fedora