Novell sees lower profit and revenue

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Collins Richey wrote:
>> On 8/28/05, Net Llama! <netllama at linux-sxs.org> wrote:
>> > On 08/28/2005 10:57 AM, Bill Campbell wrote:
>> > > Novell also appears to be making serious efforts to encourage ISVs,
>> > > appliance systems developers, etc. to work with SuSE Linux.  A significant
>> > > aspect of this is aggressive pricing for SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise
>> > > System) which has much longer support cycles than the standard SuSE Linux
>> > > retail packages.  The longer support period makes it feasible to install
>> > > commercial systems without having to deal with the Release-of-the-Month
>> > > issues.
>> >
>> > Sure, as long as you're not using reasonably recent hardware.  Then
>> > $DEITY help you as you hit every bug that's been fixed in Linus's tree
>> > for the past 6+ months.
>> >
>>
>> Longer support cycles does not mean that the vendor does not provide
>> critical fixes from Linus' tree. At least that's the way it works in
>> RH land. Reasonably recent but not still smoking new hardware should
>> be quite well supported.
>
>Exactly.  SuSE seems to be clueless in this regard.

I find that statement rather strange since one of the things that the SLES
series includes is driver fixes and updates for hardware that may well not
be in the most current releases.

I've been installing SLES9 on quite modern hardware with SATA hard drives,
on-board video and NICs, using autoyast configuration and VNC to monitor
the installations.  The only thing I've had to do on some hardware is to
figure out what NIC drivers are required since all our installsions are via
NFS from a local server.

I must admit that I often cheat to find the NIC by booting the machine off
a Knoppix CD, then using ``lsmod'' to see which modules it used.

We put the ``info'' file and modules on any USB device (e.g.  floppy, flash
card, or external hard drive), and boot off the first installation CD to
start the autoyast installation.  The autoyast rules file, and everything
else is on the NFS server which gets around problems identifying which
pseudo scsi device is assigned to the USB device with the ``info'' file.

Bill
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