SuSE 11.0: Winning me over quickly, Jul 22, 2008

I am on a roll here with reviewing distros, so I thought I would take the advice of my readers and add SuSE to the roll call. I went into this with little expectation simply because I have had less-than-stellar experiences with SuSE in the past. This time, however, my experience was much, much different. And if I ever doubted the power and useability of SuSE, I was very wrong.

Today Novell makes a play for Linux users new and old with the release of its openSUSE 11 distribution.

rPath has entered a pact with Novell that makes creating a virtual appliance easier for developers – and corporate lawyers

I use, on a daily basis, three different Linux distributions: MEPIS 6.5 and 7, OpenSUSE 10.3, and SLED 10 SP1. So, when I saw that Frank Ohlhorst, my colleague over at The Channel Insider, had gotten his hands on a ThinkPad T61 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1, I was interested in what he would find.

Say, you're a software developer. Say, you want to write an easy-to-install program for any Linux distribution. I'd say, "You have a problem." OpenSUSE, however, has improved upon its solution for this problem: the openSUSE Build Service, which now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

Open-Xchange, a German open-source groupware company with long ties to SUSE Linux, is changing its top management team.

Life has been better for Red Hat. First there was Oracle pitching customers on its own fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and now SAP is recommending Novell's SUSE Linux as its preferred platform.

Federico Mena-Quintero, the last member of the first openSUSE Board being interviewed on the ‘People of openSUSE’, is a full time GNOME ‘bug-fixing’ hacker, and one of the founders of the GNOME Project.

Novell has recently decided to start setting openSUSE free from direct Novell oversight by setting up the first openSUSE board of directors.

Beneath its slick graphical polish, the latest SUSE is still a hobbyist's OS at heart.

Linux users don't accept criticism of their chosen distribution easily - that's probably why a number of reactions to my last piece about openSUSE tended to be somewhat short of making a point.

These days when you download a Linux distribution and burn it to CD, you would expect that it would not take too much of an effort to have a look at it. Unless, of course, it's one of three distributions which are aimed at so-called geeks - Gentoo, Debian and Slackware.

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, the openSUSE project provides free, easy access to the world’s most usable Linux distribution, openSUSE. openSUSE is released regularly, is stable, secure, contains the latest free and open source software, and comes with several new technologies.

Today we will see what exactly is new in openSUSE 10.3’s KDE 4 applications and we’ll also be talking to Dirk Müller, a long-time openSUSE and KDE core developer.

The openSUSE Team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2.

The open source openSUSE development project behind Novell's commercial SUSE Linux distributions has its second birthday this month, and Novell is celebrating by touting its improved build service for openSUSE and by shipping the first beta of openSUSE 10.3.

Today all but a handful of the secretaries, lawyers and legal assistants use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

There's room for argument over which Linux desktop is the best. When it comes to integrating a Linux desktop into an already existing Windows-based office, though, there's not even a discussion. SLED 10 SP1 is by far the best Linux business desktop around

Novell's openSUSE project has launched a new initiative dedicated to advancing the public awareness of the popular Linux distribution in the educational community.

Could Dell's embrace of Ubuntu Linux signal the start of a rush for PC manufacturers to offer open source operating systems on their machines?

Novell openSUSE project has had a recent history of trouble with its update programs. Now, to make updating openSUSE more pleasant, the project is dropping its support for ZENworks and opening up YAST to community development.

OpenSUSE announced today the release of the third public alpha of OpenSUSE 10.3, which boasts a 2.6.21-RC5 kernel, a choice of GNOME or KDE desktops, and its usual complete roster of application packages.

Novell today announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell is now available from Sun Microsystems on Sun Ultra Workstations.

Novell today released openSUSE 10.2, claiming that the latest version of its operating system is the most usable Linux distribution ever produced.

Novell has released its latest free version of Linux, OpenSuse 10.2, fulfilling a promise to change its default file system software.

Novell's openSUSE 10.2 is an exciting desktop operating environment that includes or supports nearly every program you need for work and play.

Sooner than anyone expected it, Novell Inc.'s openSUSE community Linux distribution project has delivered a new version: openSUSE 10.2.

Despite loud arguments over Novell and Microsof's relationship, and attempts by Ubuntu to talk openSUSE developers into coming over to their distribution, openSUSE 10.2 has arrived sooner than expected.

With all the big news about new Linux releases -- Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 -- the release of the first beta of OpenSUSE 10.2 might easily be missed. The latest beta of this popular community-based Linux distro emerged Oct. 26.

A very pleasant surprise awaited me at the PO box today, my very own Linux T60p Thinkpad (loaner) from my new best pals David Churbuck and Jeff Witt at Lenovo.

Teradata this week fleshed out its plans to offer support for Linux in its database and data warehousing products at its annual Partners user conference.

When we say Linux is ready, we mean that from our side we are ready to present it in the market with all features and functions. Above this is SUSE Linux 10 Desktop which clearly shows that Linux is ready for desktop users.

As expected, Novell has renamed its free version of Linux OpenSuse to avoid brand confusion. The former name, Suse Linux, was based on the OpenSuse collaborative development project, but was to too close to the Suse Linux Enterprise product naming.

Finally. For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It finally happened.

"We love openSUSE, but we hate openSUSE's package management problems," Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, DesktopLinux.com's resident Linux curmudgeon, reports from his vacation. But there's good news: a fix is coming soon, he says.

Kent Police has cut the cost of running its major criminal investigations system by 90% using Novell Open Enterprise Server, the company's version of SuSE Linux.

Novell has unveiled a SUSE Linux Enterprise training course contained on a portable USB drive, which it says is an industry first.

Is the channel ready for a Linux desktop as a replacement for Windows? Or better yet, is a Linux desktop ready for the channel? Novell has a head start in this race, with its Linux desktop expected to hit the streets by mid-July, whereas Vista is slated for general release in January.

We asked Andreas Jaeger, Project Manager at SUSE Linux, about his experiences with managing a massive and complex software project, and to give us some hints about the next SUSE release, the development of which is scheduled to start in just a couple of weeks.

Novell's OpenSUSE 10.1 operating system wears many hats well, but management tools can use some smoothing.

My current favorite desktop Linux is OpenSUSE 10.1. I can say all kinds of good things about it, except when it comes to the package manager. Unfortunately, the package manager, which the administration tool YaST uses for adding new programs and updating old ones, currently has serious problems.

After two months of delay, the OpenSuse project has released version 10.1 of Suse Linux.

Get your FTP and BitTorrent clients ready—OpenSUSE 10.1 has arrived!

"SUSE Linux 10.1 Final will be released on Thursday, 11th of May," a Web site which coordinates development of the software currently states.

This is one really, really cool and solid distribution. OK, before I go any further I should point out that SUSE 10.1 (code name: Agama Lizard) isn't actually released yet. I've been kicking the tires of the first SUSE 10.1 "Release Candidate."

Novell has released developer builds of the next iteration of Suse Linux, version 10.1. Developed in collaboration with the OpenSuse community, the new version will include the latest Firefox, OpenOffice.org 2.0 with support for Visual Basic macros, XGL, and an integrated desktop search engine when it is released near the end of the month.

A final version of Novell's Suse Linux 10.1 is expected to be ready later this month

The latest version of SuSE Linux will include a series of graphic features built into the client version which have only been seen in high-end workstations.

If you miss the older days of fiddling with your operating system, or you enjoy getting your hands a little dirty, you can't do better than this. And if you have reasonably conventional hardware, you can probably be up and running out of the box in no time, with several software suites.

When SuSE Linux founder Hubert Mantel announced his resignation from Novell ast week, he became the third former SuSE executive to leave in the past six months. There was much speculation as to why Mantel left, which was sparked, in part, by the manner of his leaving. He announced his resignation via a Linux e-mail discussion list, claiming that SuSE had changed so much it was no longer the company he had founded 13 years before.

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