On Fri, 10 May 2002, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
A small hint about the "works with RH" stuff you may see. If it works on RH..then you have a 9-10 chance it's going to work with SuSE. They are binary compatible. The problem you might run into is that RH tends to put things in goofy places ..they muck about with the file structure, but with the LSB becoming quick the standard by which Linux distributions are judged. This won't be a problem much longer.
As far as the major differences between RH and SuSE...well. SuSE is much more LSB compliant then RH and SuSE uses the current standard GCC compiler so you won't run into as many issues. RH uses 2.96-RH while SuSE uses 2.95.3 which most other Linux distributions and other Unices use as well. Others can put up further differences.
It works both ways... SuSE's change this release from /etc/rc.config to /etc/sysconfig/... was to conform to the LSB. My RedHat-using friends are saying 'it's about time!' Yes, the LSB will make it easier for third-party applications to install on any distro. And sometimes the standards committee is declaring the 'RH style' to be the direction to go. Eventually, all distros will have an equal level of 'goofiness' in their FHS implementations. Rick Green