Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (671 mails)

[Dave Howorth <dhoworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tejas Guruswamy wrote:
> On 04/06/11 14:51, Di Pe wrote:
> > We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part
> > time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE
> > and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a
> > compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a
> > unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted
> > home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE
> > 11.2 or 11.3.

I was used for over a decade to setup and use NFS-mounted home
directories (and NFS mounts between machines in America and Europe and
other nonsense). More recently I've found it more convenient to use
local home directories with symlinks to NFS-mounted subdirectories (e.g.
Documents). With the increase in system components using
dot-directories, I find that is more convenient for login on multiple
hosts and for convenient OS upgrades as well as being more resilient
against network problems. JMHO.

> > We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly
> > ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for
> > being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE.

I don't know much about it, but you might want to also consider
Scientific Linux http://www.scientificlinux.org/

> > Advantage openSUSE
> > ---------------------------------
> >
> > * Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS  (~$50k - $100k
> > for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu)

I'm not sure how you calculate your migration costs?

> > Advantage Ubuntu
> > --------------------------
> >
> > * About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including
> > scientific applications.
>
> Have you seen the OBS (build.opensuse.org / search via
> software.opensuse.org)?
> If you have packages you want missing from openSUSE, you can very easily
> package and deploy them yourself, or just ask for help from the hundreds
> of buildservice packagers. Even if they're not in the official distro,
> it's exceedingly easy to add packages to openSUSE via the Build Service.

I agree with this advantage of Ubuntu. I'm not an administrator and I
find it very confusing and irritating to have to search multiple
repositories of variable reputation for well-known packages. It creates
a lot of hassle to avoid loading dubious packages. Consider wikis, for
example; there is *no* wiki software in the standard opensuse repositories.

FWIW, I use both. opensuse on my desktop with an ubuntu box available on
the network.

Cheers, Dave
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