[plug] SuSE Linux

[Bernd Felsche]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 09:51:40AM +0800, Derek Fountain wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 March 2003 08:52, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> > Some people expressed an interest in SuSE Linux at the PLUG workshop
> > last night when I briefly showed it working on my "portable". I
> > apologise for having misled them about the price of the distro.

> I've been using SuSE for years. I wasn't at the meeting last night

I've been at it since 6.2. First saw it on a friend's machine in
Germany while on holiday in 1999.

> (I was killing myself on the volleyball courts next door), but I
> can give some input on this.

> > Both everythinglinux.com.au and lsl.com.au are taking (pre-)orders
> > for the 8.2 "Professional upgrade"; for less than $120. The German

> Yes, it's relatively pricey, coming from Europe, and with a
> company with a business model which might have them survive for a
> while. You also pay for a really good and well maintained
> distribution. When it comes to engineering - cars or software -
> that Germanic attention to detail really makes their products
> stand out as top quality.

Far be it from me to dispell that illusion... it's mostly hype.
SuSE deliberately aim their product at the "professional/hobbyist"
so their product appears to be better than most other distributions
that are aimed more at the "techo".

Of course SuSE have always made loads of money on support services
and other products such as Enterprise Server and Linux Office
Desktop. Part of the volume products' strength comes from them being
the basis of the more-expensive "business" products.

As for pricing, I think it's not too far away from the other
mainstream commercial distributions... Redhat RRPs are priced around
the same as SuSE's for nominally-comparable products.

> The best way to get it cheaply would be for a group of people at
> PLUG to chip in and buy it for the library, then make copies of
> the CDs as required. 

DVDs - two of, in packet, plus 5 CD. I assume that the 5 CD's
contain the most-frequently-used stuff - and the DVDs contain plenty
of other fruit.

> Not-for-profit redistribution is allowed.

Yep. I make my customers buy their own. :-)

> > OK, OK... If 8.1 (and 8.0) are anything to go by; their online
> > update "wizard" sucks dirty swamp water through a crinkled straw.
> > It's painfully slow. (There's a free, faster alternative "fou4s"
> > that I've been using for months now, at 4 different sites.)

> I've heard this, but never had a problem with it. Yast Online
> Update (YOU, as it's called) has always worked absolutely
> flawlessly for me. It even updated my glibc package automatically,
> something I'd very rarely let an automated process have a go at. I
> use the local iinet FTP server's SuSE mirror as the source, and
> it's plenty quick enough for me. No download costs either. :o)

> > And YaST is very memory-hungry. Many tasks cannot be done with less
> > than 128MB of RAM, plus 512MB of swap.
> 
> Really? Like what? I run SuSE-8.1 on my firewall box - 32MB RAM
> with 128MB swap. Apart from a bit of a job getting it installed on
> a box with no CD drive, I've never yet hit a problem.

I have a 7.3-based firewall. YOU fails unless I add another 128MB or
swap, and it then takes the best part of an hour to update even the
most-minor of packages; not including the painfully-slow download
time.

fou4s does that in 32MB RAM plus 128MB swap (though I doubt it
swaps, expect on the big packages) in about 5 minutes plus the
download time - which is also much faster than YOU.

BTW: If you're using SuSE and not running fou4s, you're likely
wasting plenty of time and effort.
	http://fou4s.gaugusch.at/
As well as being smaller and faster than YOU, once can "quarantine"
specific packages against being updated automagically.

But you have to get out your filthy text editor and change a config
file! :-)

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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