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Novell Releases SUSE Linux Enterprise RC3 38

Posted by timothy from the r-suse-d-2-c-three-pio dept.
MrHoolio writes "Yesterday morning Novell publicly annouced the free availability of release candidate 3 of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 products. Both the server edition and the desktop edition work with XGL out of the box. A serious step forward in the Linux desktop market, Novell claims this will go head-to-head to rival Windows on the enterprise level. It implements a whole new menu system on top of Gnome that is very well thought-out. It has incredible hardware support for a Linux distro."
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Novell Releases SUSE Linux Enterprise RC3 More

Novell Releases SUSE Linux Enterprise RC3

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  • A lot of praise. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Volanin ( 935080 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @10:14AM (#15627575)
    You can read some good reviews here [osnews.com] and here [infoworld.com].

  • "Incredible" (Score:2, Insightful)

    by the linux geek ( 799780 )
    It seems like "Incredible" is awfully vague. What I really want is out-of-the-box support for my nVidia card (common enough with non-FOSS distros) and my crappy Netgear WG111 wireless USB adapter. In general, wireless, sound, and to a lesser extent graphics support are what plagues Linux. Of course, Windows isn't really any better; they just have the advantages of actually having drivers developed for them by third parties, which is still relatively scarce in the Linux world.
    • Having just gone through the process of installing the nVidia driver it does seem strange that that nVidia doesn't release a script so you don't have to go out of x (the graphical system) and then go back into the graphical system manually. I find Intel is doing a better job of 3d graphic suport. Too bad all the decent cards are nVidia or ATI. I guess a little pain for the long term gain. Also, with OSS other graphic card campanies can become main stream easier. Hang in there Linux users the I can see t
    • The autoupdater in SLED 10 adds ATI and nVidia to the list of servers from which to pull updates. I have an ATI card in my work machine where I'm trying this new distro. It found and configured the card out of the box as you wished.

    • Re:"Incredible" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mrsbrisby ( 60242 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @11:07AM (#15627968) Homepage
      It seems like "Incredible" is awfully vague. What I really want is out-of-the-box support for my nVidia card

      Lots of people would like that. Contact nVidia and tell them this!

      (common enough with non-FOSS distros)

      Mac OS X is the only non-Free operating system that I know of that ships with nVidia's drivers. Windows users must install the third-party driver. Linux users may use the nv driver from Xorg, or they may sacrafice their freedom and install the third-party driver.

      What distros are you talking about?

      my crappy Netgear WG111 wireless USB adapter

      Lots of people would like that. Contact Netgear and let them know this!

      In general, wireless, sound, and to a lesser extent graphics support are what plagues Linux.

      Really?

      You can't get below 50msec latency on Windows without special sound cards and drivers, but I have no problem with this on ALSA and Linux.

      Wireless support is extremely poor throughout windows- it tells applications IP is down (causing lost connections) whenever there's a 802.11 signal problem- something that's almost certainly intermittent.

      Intel's own graphics drivers work better on Linux than they do on Windows, so what exactly are you talking about here?

      Of course, Windows isn't really any better; they just have the advantages of actually having drivers developed for them by third parties

      I'm not sure this is an advantage. Unless the driver was signed and "blessed" by Microsoft, it's quite often a very low-quality driver, and worse still- you're lucky if you receive any support on it.

      In fact, unless you get an OEM bundle of Windows, you're likely to have very poor hardware support from the get-go, and unless you take the time to find signed quality drivers, you're going to have problems.

      Of course, on Linux, there's a much larger source of high quality drivers- the sound drivers are much better than any of the Windows drivers (With some exceptions for some ASIO drivers), and graphics support is simply much better with Intel and Matrox boards. I'm told nVidia and ATI don't make particularly good drivers (for any platform), but it doesn't really matter to me because their drivers are non-Free.
      • Lots of people would like that. Contact nVidia and tell them this!

        No need to, it's already there in SuSE. I run SuSE 9.3 Pro still and the proprietary nVidia driver is right there in the auto-update list. I'm assuming that it's there in subsequent releases too.

        Bob
      • Mac OS X is the only non-Free operating system that I know of that ships with nVidia's drivers. Windows users must install the third-party driver.

        I'm not really sure about this. On at least one model of Dell that I have here, Windows update always finds a newer nvidia driver available. Of course, if you install that driver, the machine inevitably blue screens on the next reboot and the driver has to be removed. But it is available from Microsoft.

        • I'm not really sure about this. On at least one model of Dell that I have here, Windows update always finds a newer nvidia driver available. Of course, if you install that driver, the machine inevitably blue screens on the next reboot and the driver has to be removed. But it is available from Microsoft.

          I'd say it's Dell Windows at that point- it's an OEM bundle, and it's not exactly the same thing.

          Microsoft's official XP install disks don't include nVidia driver.
      • I'm not sure this is an advantage. Unless the driver was signed and "blessed" by Microsoft, it's quite often a very low-quality driver, and worse still- you're lucky if you receive any support on it.

        Sometimes, any driver is better than no driver at all.

  • DL.tv has a video of this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @10:23AM (#15627634) Homepage
    Check out DL.tv [dl.tv], an online tech show hosted by Patrick Norton (of former "The Screen Savers" fame") and Robert Heron. Episode 72 [dl.tv] shows off the function. It's pretty cool. It's a lot of eye candy, but it is pretty stunning. And supposedly, it's running on a not-too-state-of-the-art video adapter, illustrating how the implementation, unlike Windows Vista, doesn't require the highest-end hardware.
    • I have an ATI Radeon RV200, the GLX does indeed perform rather well on this old of a card. It feels a bit like Enlightenment did on my S3 911A back in the '90s.

      That said I turned off the eye candy as there are enough little annoyances to keep me from it.

      First it resolution is limited to 1600x1200 (or 1920x1200 for 16:9 displays). When one is used to 2048x1536, 1600x1200 seems so cramped. I also use the gconf-editor to modify the window control widgets to have the close X on the left (where it belongs) wi
    • They do reveal that they are running on an Nvidia 6800, which would at least meet (and depending on the model could substantially exceed) Vista's minimum requirements for Aero.

      While it does indeed look cool, I can't imagine a single useful purpose that would make me ever want to turn it on in either OS. I mean, the fade affect was bad enough, now new app windows can wobble too? I want my apps to open faster, not slower!

      • They do reveal that they are running on an Nvidia 6800, which would at least meet (and depending on the model could substantially exceed) Vista's minimum requirements for Aero.

        While it does indeed look cool, I can't imagine a single useful purpose that would make me ever want to turn it on in either OS. I mean, the fade affect was bad enough, now new app windows can wobble too? I want my apps to open faster, not slower!

        The 6800 was in the desktop running the Vista beta, the laptop running SuSE 10.1 with Xgl

  • I'm running it right now and posting this within xen virtualization. Most of this stuff is stuff you could already do with Linux anyway. However, I'm highly impressed at the integration of it all. I think with SLES 10-Final I'll finally convert all our debian and cent os boxen to SLES. SLES 9 wasn't ever really anything impressive to me but I used it because we are a Novell shop (however I found myself installing other distros when SLES 9 was too painful).
    • If I can get Sybase 12.5.x or Sybase 15 (the free ones for Linux) running on SLES 10 I will be all over this for a server.
      Oh yea, and if anybody is wondering what the hell I am talking about - Sybase ASE 15 [sybase.com] is free on Linux if you run a single CPU machine with other limitations (no more than 2G of physical memory allocated to the Sybase engine, and I think it limits the database size to 5G - but other than that no limits; you are even allowed to use it commercially last I checked.)
  • >> It has incredible hardware support for a Linux distro.

    That line makes no sense to me at all.

    Linux has had incredible hardware support for many years now, and it's all built in.

    We don't have to rely on drivers to be supplied by manufacturers with their products as is the norm in the two proprietary consumer operating systems. For the most part, everything just works as soon as you plug it in. It's been many years since I bought a PC accessory off the shelf in Maplins or from a mail-order box shift
    • The problem with Linux is that if it isn't supported out of the box, it isn't supported at all. At least with windows you can go to the manufacturers website and get the drivers. Granted, I think that hardware support will come with time. As Linux gets more popular, more hardware makers will support it. ATI and Nvidia already offer Linux drivers. They aren't the best drivers, but they are coming along, and getting better. I think that Linux has real promise, and even if you can get it up to 10% of com
      • >> I think that Linux has real promise, and even if you can get it up to 10% of computers running Linux, that many of the manufacturers will follow.

        Actually, I think that Linux's promise is not related to the provision of support by manufacturers at all. It may well be just the opposite --- support by manufacturers quite often holds back the direct support in (and hence the promise of) Linux.

        Look at both extremes of support quality to see this:

        On the good-support side, two quite obvious factors hold
    • >> It has incredible hardware support for a Linux distro.

      > That line makes no sense to me at all.

      > Linux has had incredible hardware support for many years now, and it's all built in.

      I too wondered about what was meant by that. Quite possibly is that the Linux distribution includes binary-only drivers to use hardware from hardware vendors that don't care about their users (NVidia, for instance).
      • Maybe it means that it has good hardware detection? I remember reading about Suse on a notebook before and they were impressed with the hardware detection of even a wireless NIC. Just a thought.
      • Have you ever tried to mount your cellphone to transfer files to/from it?
        Have you ever tried to sync an iPaq?
        Have you ever tried to get an ATI All in Wonder card fully working?
        Have you ever tried to mix ATI Radeon 7500 and 8500 or 9500 in the same machine using ATI's drivers?
        Have you ever tried to get an NVidia theater (their take on the AiW concept) card fully working?
        Have you ever tried to get a Hercules Game Theater XP fully functional, including full MIDI support?
    • The problem with Linux comes when it doesn't support your hardware. With windows you pop in a disk and the driver installs. On Linux you go without and hope someone will put you out of your misery by writing a driver. Mostly my experience has been good but I've had two occasions where I spent hours and hours of searching and googling, desperately trying to get a sound chipset to work and a wireless card. I managed to get neither of them to work although both were allegedly supported.

      Linux desperately need

      • "Linux desperately needs a decent binary driver layer, one which is common to all dists with a common packaging system so that manufacturers can ship a driver which works on all of them."

        The thing is, the core Linux developers don't want binary drivers. They want Open Source drivers so that bugs can be found and squashed by the Open Source community, just as other Open Source bugs are. Indeed, one part of the Linux creation legend (I believe) is that Linus originally created Linux, in part, because of a
        • The core developers don't have to be involved. Every major dist maintains their own kernel with patches. The Red Hats and Novells of this world could esily ensure that Linus et al never have to deal with a binary driver. They would write and maintain the ABI over the kernel and ensure that any differences were hidden from both sides. I doubt the kernel changes significantly in a major release cycle (e.g. 2.6) that they couldn't maintain and provide an ABI that did this.

          There are philosophical objecttions

          • "They would write and maintain the ABI over the kernel and ensure that any differences were hidden from both sides."

            Ah, but I have seen it argued (IANAL so I don't know if it's valid) that this is forbidden by the GPL.

            "... the reality is that many OEMs won't open source their drivers for very sensible business reasons."

            I tend to agree, although I'm neither a businessman (to know what I might want to hold confidential) nor a driver writer (to know if open-sourcing drivers would reveal said confidential
  • As long as the productivity apps are there (whether custom built or off-the-shelf), it can be used for 'enterprise level' workloads. Users can be trained to use something without having to understand how it works or what platform it works on. Hell, we had users working on OS/2 Warp 3 as of a few years ago.

    To me at least, enterprise level means management and deployment tools. Centralized patch management, remote administration, and policy/profile tools are really at the top of the list. Linux has alw

  • apps and peripherals (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zogger ( 617870 )
    All major distros install fine now, so what is left is how they deal with your hardware, that is the #1 important part now that really needs to be "fixed" in linux land, any distro. Any distro out there can function as a web surfer, email client and word processor,all that crap works now just fine, but how about printing and other various USB devices? How about all the other do-dads that the vendors are pushing now that come either USB or to a lesser extent firewire? I've been on a search for the best distr
  • Let me know when they add support for SELinux.
  • I was using a number of front ends for Linux and bought Mandrake 10 a while back. I am a (close your ears), Windows NT4 user for a long time. Had started with NT3 as a bug chaser. Those were the days. Along the way I was studying UNIX for simpler server control due to Windows memory managment - or lack of. Stumbled onto Linux and loved it, but had little spare time to realy get into the command line stucture. Heard the mumblings of Novell getting into the fray and thought - what the the heck, all's I can do

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