On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Walt Frampus wrote:

On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 05:36 +0200, houghi wrote:

...

Oh, please do, because people already talk about wther they should use SUSE or openSUSE and they talk as if openSUSE is the distro, not just the comunity. And that is also how I personally feel it. I am part of a comunity that drives the openSUSE distro with a website openSUSE.org

I think Novell should have just released the OSS version at this time and if you wanted the full version, buy it. I am running the EVAL version until my boxed set is delivered. (but if the EVAL version is the same , why bother buying it..) If it truly was an Eval version, it should have a time limit on it. People are confused about openSUSE and Suse Linux. Maybe only the purchased version should be called Suse Linux and the downloaded version OpenSUSE.

Again, it is an eval version because it has 3.5 GB software whereas the full retail version has about 6 GB software for each architecture (yes, 2*6 is 8.5 because of noarch packages). And no, no SUSE Linux version will ever contain any time bomb, neither the whole version nor single packages in it! Martin -- Dr. Martin Sommer Product Manager Consumer Products SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, D-90409 Nürnberg Phone: +49 (0) 911 740 530 Fax: +49 (0) 911 740 53 575 Email: martin.sommer@suse.com ----------------------------------------------------------

Monday 10 Oct 2005 13:33 samaye Jan Karjalainen alekhiit:

Maybe naming it LE, which could stand for Limited Edition or Light Edition?

Ye Gods who make SUSE, note the support for my suggestion! See my post of 10-10-2005 13:29 UTC+0530 under the thread "Eval version of Suse Linux 10.0".

Richard, On Monday 10 October 2005 17:02, Richard J. A. wrote:

Why even buy it if you can get it as an eval version

'Cause there's no such thing as a free lunch. If end users don't support the production of high-quality releases such as SuSE, the for-profit companies that are now housing those efforts will conclude (correctly, from their perspective) that it is not a business they should be in and will retreat from this activity. Then where will we be? Face it, SuSE's distribution is the best, and the people at the core of the effort to produce that distribution do it as their day job and they must be paid. It's up to us to produce the revenue stream that will support their work. It's the cathedral and the bazaar. Open source software requires the contribution of the masses of programmers, designers, graphic artists, content providers, Web designers, etc. all of whom provide the grist for the mill. But at the center we need dedicated professionals to keep a distribution coherent and reliable. A free-for-all will never cut it. An operating system (writ large: kernel, libraries, servers, utilities, applications, etc.) is much too large and complex to be made to work through the efforts of volunteers alone.

Richard

By the way, it's a sign of how good the distribution is that we're arguing about the name and not dealing with problems in the essence of the thing. Even the overloaded servers are what an old boss of mine would have called a "success problem." Randall Schulz - Paid purchaser of most SuSE Linux releases since 7.x

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Peter Flodin wrote:

On 10/10/05, Randall R Schulz wrote:

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Face it, SuSE's distribution is the best, and the people at the core of the effort to produce that distribution do it as their day job and they must be paid. It's up to us to produce the revenue stream that will support their work.

SUSE Linux is a home-user distribution, and I think Novell already have plans not to make their money selling SUSE Linux, but instead use it as a loss leader for keeping market share against Ubuntu, Fedora etc (and the obvious MS options). Users that use SUSE Linux are much more likely to use, prefer & recommend Novell Linux Deskop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server etc.

That's most certainly part of their plan. The idea behind their recent openSUSE move is definately to grow the community, which is more or less the only weak point for SUSE Linux because it is smaller (and speaking of the packager side, *much* smaller) than with other mainstream distributions, although it definately has a lot of assets the others don't. Nevertheless, SUSE Linux *does* generate a revenue stream for Novell. To me, if you can afford it, support their work. That's all. I bought every single release since 5.0 because I care about the hard work of the SUSE staff to make this excellent system I use every single day to get the job done (and have fun fiddling around with). I really second what Randall wrote. There are real people behind all this. And they need to be paid. cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDSgI+r3NMWliFcXcRAjhdAJ9eoX9hnAYejP7Sg9bS4Pjzf4aoVwCgjjlZ DAxdCf+qqbtAtFngqTUbvGI= =erLF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Shriramana, On Sunday 09 October 2005 23:23, Shriramana Sharma wrote:

Monday 10 Oct 2005 11:25 samaye Pascal Bleser alekhiit:

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the community, which is more or less the only weak point for SUSE Linux because it is smaller (and speaking of the packager side, *much* smaller) than with other mainstream distributions,

I don't understand this. How are you saying the community is the weak point for SuSE? Please expand on this. If you think others might not be interested, offlist is okay.

I think what Pascal meant is of all the strengths and weaknesses of SuSE Linux, its relatively small user community is a significant weakness. I don't know numbers, but surely they do not reflect the true relative quality of the various distributions. Fedora has far more cache / traction than SuSE, yet from what I hear it is distinctly inferior to SuSE. You may or may not know that Pascal spends considerable time making available the latest and greatest in RPMs for versions of SuSE back to 9.1. He is without any doubt committed to the success of SuSE and he puts his time into it. He's the person behind Guru's RPM Site: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/. Pascal is certainly not slamming the user community his own actions serve so well. Randall Schulz

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 12:16:01PM +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote:

Anyway, how exactly do we know that SUSE has a relatively smaller user community? You concede that you don't have numbers, and neither do I. But until such stats are available, we can neither claim that SUSE has a small or large user base. Isn't that right?

Pascal was not talking about the USER comunity, he was talking about the comunity from a packager point of view. This means not so much a user comunity, but more an active comunity. What I understand he is saying is that there are much less people actively working in the development of SUSE then there are with RedHat. I can imagine that to be true. Take away the suse.de people from this list and not much will be left of people who are really developing things for SUSE. So I asume he was not so much talking about users, but about people who realy are contributing and thus forming the openSUSE comunity. I think the reason for this is that SUSE uptill now always has been a product and either you liked it or you didn't. People who wanted to improve things on a distro had more and faster results with e.g. Debian or RedHat. Up till now, SUSE thought for the users and the users were merely waiting for SUSE to deliver another great distro. This has now changed and I am sure more people will start to participate. The amount of downloading that is going on shows that there is a huge interest and although a lot will just try and move on, some will linger around and change. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Shriramana Sharma wrote:

Monday 10 Oct 2005 12:00 samaye Randall R Schulz alekhiit:

...

I think what Pascal meant is of all the strengths and weaknesses of SuSE Linux, its relatively small user community is a significant weakness.

Yes, I definately meant the _size_ of its community, not its quality ;) Neither did I meant the quality of the distribution. I believe SUSE is superior to the other Linux distributions for most things.

Hmm. I thought second to Red Hat SUSE was the most widespread distribution?

It definately is... in a corporate environment. RHES and SLES are the most widespread enterprise distributions.

Aren't RH, SUSE and Debian the big three in the Linux world?

Yes. There are several distributions based on Redhat/Fedora. Same goes for Debian, Ubuntu & co. The SUSE Linux user community is smaller than the two above, although the quality of the distribution is superior in most areas. The first has a number of reasons, from my experience: 1) SUSE Linux was always tagged as being "commercial", "not open source", evil, whatever, by Debian-alike FOSS "extremists" (not necessarely negative, we also need that kind of people). That, again is because of three things: a) SUSE Linux used to be available only as a boxed set, had to be bought for money, and only came out "for free" on FTP servers 1 month after the release of the box. b) YaST2 wasn't GPL until recently. c) some people are stupid, and rumours stay for long, even when wrong 2) SUSE Linux was an european (german, actually) distribution, whereas Redhat/Fedora is an american one. While this is not true as of today, Novell having bought SUSE, I think it was a cause in the past, because people in the USA are rather protective and use US products first. Note that this isn't a criticism by itself, one of the reasons I always used SUSE is that it was an european distro ;) (or rather, engineered by europeans, which is still true as of now) SUSE Linux has a very strong community in Germany (I'm talking about numbers), but outside of it, it comes behind Fedora and Debian. But the openSUSE move is a good one, and that situation will most definately change soon. Let's work on it ;) And as far as packagers are concerned, the difference is huge. Besides the Packman team, James Ogley's, 5 or 6 suser-* repositories on gwdg.de and mine... there's near nothing as 3rd party repositories for SUSE Linux. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's not much more to it. Believe it or not, but having a large number of good packagers has a direct impact on the size of the userbase.

And possibly the one reason for RH being more spread out than SUSE is that RH is based in the US where there are possibly many many more companies, especially those relating to computers, than in Europe? [If I've got my figures mixed up please don't hit me on the head too harsh! :)]

I'm talking about the community, not businesses. Businesses don't make up the user community, and they mostly buy enterprise distributions (RHES and SLES).

Anyway, how exactly do we know that SUSE has a relatively smaller user community? You concede that you don't have numbers, and neither do I. But until such stats are available, we can neither claim that SUSE has a small or large user base. Isn't that right?

10 years of experience with Linux. That's why I can claim that.

...

You may or may not know that Pascal spends considerable time making available the latest and greatest in RPMs for versions of SuSE He's the person behind Guru's RPM Site: Wow! I didn't know that. I've never even seen this site before. Looks great, however!

Thanks :)

...

Pascal is certainly not slamming the user community his own actions serve so well.

Definately not ! I'd be the last to do so :) Sorry if someone got my previous mail wrong, I meant the *size* of the community.

Of course not. I was just curious as to what the exact reason is that Pascal said what he said.

Believe me, it's a while I'm on the Linux and FOSS bandwagon. I really think my statement is accurate ;) cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDSqdEr3NMWliFcXcRAolWAJ9q7IzbSvEVsW+tmrlN0p6RxhprsgCaAtFl kWGCNtvrX+Sgworpf9MRLoQ= =a+xJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Pascal Bleser wrote:

It definately is... in a corporate environment. RHES and SLES are the most widespread enterprise distributions.

I don't know from where you see this. I hope so :-), but the things I find are not. for example, in netcraft, I see this: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/requested.html in the first page, many servers are "mdk", so from Mandriva (ex Mandrake). I couldn't find on netcraft a real per distribution survey, but many heavy loaded servers are still *bsd, even some of the best uptime are microsoft (however a three years uptime let me think, kernel security updates are more frequent than that) jdd -- pour m'écrire, aller sur: http://www.dodin.net http://valerie.dodin.net http://arvamip.free.fr

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 07:09:00AM +0100, James Ogley wrote:

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Why even buy it if you can get it as an eval version

Because the people who produce it have to eat.

That is unfortunatly not enough of an incentive. Now what is interesting is that for the beginner you used to get two great books. Unfortunatly that has now been reduced to one. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

Another question, if it's possible to have an answer. As you can read here: http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/downloads/suse_linux/instructions_e... "When delivered on a single DVD ISO, SUSE Linux 10.0 required one download of 4.5 GB" but when you actually download the iso, or click on the mirror location, going here: http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/downloads/ftp/eval.html you have: Germany ftp://ftp.suse.com/ (Nuremberg) * DVD ISO image (64bit, 3,6 GB) * DVD ISO image (32bit, 3,6 GB) So, what's missing ? -- .~. Nicola -=KOOLINUS=- Losito /v\ http://www.koolinus.net // \\ /( )\ Linux Registered User #293182 ^^ ^^ icq:62837984 * Jabber-ID:koolinus@jabber.linux.it