Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs Open Sauce OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians
Our Blogs Open Sauce OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians | OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 27 June 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 2   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
With version 11, there is somewhat better news. Or maybe I should I say mixed news. First the good news. OpenSUSE has retained some of the good features it had back in the days when it existed as just one avatar - SuSE Linux. You can't strip away all the good oil in five years, even if you are a company like Novell. A second avatar of SUSE exists - something called SLED or SUSE Linux Enterprise Distribution, which is sold. Presumably Novell gets some development work done free by running the community project. Something similar to what Red Hat does. Version 11 has live CDs available; GNOME, KDE4 and KDE3 are the available options. You can also get a DVD which has a great deal more software. I downloaded the KDE4 and GNOME live CDs and installed both. To the zealots - this is NOT a review. Sundry observations follow, make of them what you will. OpenSUSE has a very long end user license agreement which one has to agree to before installation. Some of the terms in the licence for the betas are somewhat draconian; here's a sample: "The Software may contain an automatic disabling mechanism that prevents its use after a certain period of time, so You should back up Your system and take other measures to prevent any loss of files or data. Use of the Software is entirely at Your own risk." In the final release, this particular clause is absent. One wonders if this is by accident or design. OpenSUSE installs easily, almost as easily as Ubuntu does. After the first reboot one has a chance to tune various parameters - and, in some cases, extensive tuning is needed. For instance, I have an USB headset which is detected and usable every time I plug it into my regular workstation which runs Debian testing. The same happens with Ubuntu. Despite the headset being plugged in much before I began the OpenSUSE installation, I had to go into the set-up utility, YaST, and set it up manually for use after the installation was done and I had rebooted. After going through this process, with the KDE4 installation, I had sound; with GNOME, I had none. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
