Anybody using SuSE?

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005, Chong Yu Meng wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I just downloaded and installed the newly-release openSuSE Linux (SuSE 
>9.3, actually) on a spare desktop at home. It's very different from what 
>I initially expected, I guess because I am so used to the Fedora way of 
>doing things (ok, I've got my flame suit on now, so flame away !). For 
>one thing, SuSE seems to use apt instead of yum, and it looks more like 
>a complete and "unified" operating system than Fedora which seems to be 
>a collection of stuff from all over the place (though I find that rather 
>endearing, to be honest).

We've been using SuSE since version 8.0 when we had to find a
replacement for Caldera, largely because it seemed to me that
SuSE is the best engineered Linux distribution available for
commercial applications.  It shouldn't be too surprising that
many of the Caldera developers are now at SuSE.

I would strongly recommend using the ``Professional'' versions of
the SuSE packaged software, not the ``Persona'' as the personal
version is missing many of the development libraries necessary to
build your own software.  You can build the development packages,
but have to do it from the SRPMS since they're not provided on
the personal versions.

One major change we made when moving from Caldera to SuSE is that
we're now using the OpenPKG.org portable packaging system for
pretty much all our server applications as well as a few desktop
applications that we use extensively (if you can consider mutt a
desktop app :-).

>Anyway, I'm having some difficulty installing XFCE and getting my head 
>around apt, which seems to be the only automated installer that can 
>handle the XFCE RPMs, short of manually installing them. Specifically, 
>how does one configure apt to look into a specific repository and 
>install the RPMs there? I know where the SuSE RPMs for XFCE are located, 
>but I can't seem to be able get the repository recognized and install 
>XFCE from there.

Have you tried using SuSE's YaST software installation?  Enter
the Search mode under Filter, type xfce, and you will see xfce
and a boatload of xfce programs and plugins -- at least I do on
my SuSE 9.3 Professional system I'm typing on now.

FWIW:  We're in the process of rolling out some application
servers using SuSE Linux Enterprise Sytem 9 (SLES9) largely
because Novell/SuSE promises long-term support for their
commercial Enterprise servers so it's not as much of a moving
target as their retail packages.  The pricing is pretty
reasonable if you consider the costs involved of upgrading
systems every four to six months.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

If you want government to intervene domestially, you're a liberal.  If you
want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.  If you want
government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.  If you don't want
government to intervene anywhare, you're an extremist -- Joseph Sobran