[SATLUG] Somewhat OT: SuSE & Novell

[Al Castanoli]

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 15:06 -0800, Alex Bartonek wrote:
> So yea I'm fixing to install openSuSE 10.2 but am
> disappointed that they made a deal with the devil. 
> I'm hoping I do not find any Microsoft (c) or logos on
> this install or it will be the last install of SuSE I
> will do.  I'm disappointed.. on the flip side, I dont
> like RH/Fedora either.. LOL.  So I'm kinda SOL unless
> I use (k)ubuntu, Mandriva etc..
> 
> I'm thinking SuSE's days are numbered ever since this
> deal happened.
> 
> Alex

Folks were saying Sun's days were numbered when they allowed Internet
Explorer to run on Solaris 2.5.1, but not only are they still around,
they've open sourced the SunOS kernel and Java.  I'm playing around with
Belenix and KDE on the OpenSolaris 10 kernel, and it's pretty
interesting.  There was a time when Sun producted NT 4.0 computers on a
PCI slot board, too, and even though they've not been continuing that
technology, they have been working closely with vmware on future
releases.

I still prefer Linux, though, and don't think the Novell/MS agreement is
going to do much to trash SUSE.  I'm running OpenSUSE 10.2 on this box,
and it makes a great vmware host for my Belinux, Fedora6, and Kubuntu
guests.  My kids are booting the Windows guest OS less and less because
they find OpenSUSE a lot easier to use.

That said, the Debian apt-get utilities still seem to run better than
the rpm tools on SUSE and Fedora, but in a business environment, my
customers prefer the support provided by Novell and Red Hat to just
having an open source community for support.  At least Fermilab and CERN
start their installs with completely open source Scientific Linux
distros.  I find the Selinux tools a lot easier to configure than the
myriad of security hardening tools used in Tru64UNIX, Solaris, HP-UX,
and AIX.

Regards,

Al Castanoli