On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Di Pe wrote: <snip>

Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------

* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.

From the science repo you can submit packages to Factory to become

I assume you are familiar with: https://build.opensuse.org/project/packages?project=science If you have anyone that could act as a maintainer, they can package and submit as many scientific packages as you want. If the quality of some of the packages is too poor for that repo, you could run a "home" repo of your own with whatever quality standards you want. (Legal issues still apply.) part of the next official release. Thus, potentially the biggest pro for openSUSE is that it is extremely easy for your team to join the active contributor team and get specific opensource software you need added to the distribution. (Note that only a subset of the online repos make it onto the DVD. That selection of packages for now is made by Novell employees, but getting into the online repos is relatively straight forward assuming quality standards are met.) Thus if you are willing to get involved, you can drive openSUSE to include all the opensource packages you need. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

When I first started to use Ubuntu, initially for the purpose of helping users,my sentiments were much the same as yours, everything seemed a pain compared to openSUSE. I built kernels the openSUSE way but none would boot. That was then. Today I use Kubuntu 11.04 on 2 x86_64 boxes and Ubuntu 11.04 ARM on a Beagleboard in addition to openSUSE factory on 3 x86_64 boxes. All quite happily. Neither distro presents me with difficulty. It's just a matter of understanding Ubuntu when you have a solid background and many years working only with openSUSE. I work daily with both. At times copying binaries I build on openSUSE over to Kubuntu and vice versa. I have built .deb packages on openSUSE and deployed them on Kubuntu. I've upgraded one box from Kubuntu 10.04 --> 10.10 --> 11.04 without problems, the second one from 10.10 --> 11.04 and the Beagleboard started out at 10.10 and has also been upgraded to 11.04, all without any hassles. I have been running other distros like Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, etc. under VirtualBox on openSUSE, so none of them are unfamiliar to me and I find no fault with any of them. Regards Sid. On 04/06/11 16:58, Alin Marin Elena wrote:

Hi dipe,

I have been using opensuse in a scientific environment for years now... around 7... and all this time I had to interact with other distros too, mainly ubuntu... usually to help my friends who despite having 0 knowledge of operating systems decided to put ubuntu on their laptops...

for example few years ago was a nightmare to install intel compilers on ubuntu... As a person used with opensuse admin I find ubuntu difficult at times to admin. For example the strange logic to put their libraries that makes compiling scientific packages sometimes a challenge.

i do not know where do you have the idea with better wifi encryption support for ubuntu? they use networkmanager, so for both is the same... I use on mine wpa enterprise2 (eduroam) and I have no issue...

distribution update in opensuse nowadays is a no-brainer, helped many people to do it over the irc... just yesterday I had to save one colleague who decided to update his ubuntu from 10 something to 11.04... we ended up re- installing...

on opensuse you can add as extra http://www.susestudio.com you can create your organisation branded and preset opensuse to make deployment easier...

number of packages does not mean quality... and in the scientific field is totally true... plus if you are interested in performance you have to compile on the specific hardware and packaged apps may be of no use...

when I used to work in a supercomputer centre, the fact that they used suse on the machine made my life much easier in migrating from my workstation...

last point I want to made is that is always better to stick with the distro with which you have the best experience..

good luck

Alin

On Sat 04 Jun 2011 06:51:12 Di Pe wrote:

...

This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say.

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.

In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages) KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better) package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here)

I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse)

We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing.

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.

after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct

Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------

* YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration.

* As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service)

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

* 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability

* Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu)

* openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers)

Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------

* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.

* Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’)

* Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year)

* 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date.

* Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation

* better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc)

* better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef.

Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc)

Thanks much for your input. dipe

-- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Senior Staff Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

Hi, I'll take a pass at this having worked in a similar environment. On 06/04/2011 03:51 PM, Di Pe wrote:

This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say.

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.

In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages) KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better) package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here)

Depending on what type of encryption _and_ authentication, this could be problematic on older KDE versions. 11.3+ seems much better with this. with OBS its trivial to add or upgrade packages you are missing provided you do not need to upgrade major libraries like libc or x-org

I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse)

Yup, it was painful for everyone involved. I find zypper equally usable as yum or apt-get and its very fast now. zypper is also very robust in not leaving your system in a broken state due to dependencies. From my vantage point dependency handling is solved with all three.

We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing.

One area where I definitely saw an advantage for both SLES and openSUSE in the HPC side was really excellent support for enterprise hardware. I can recall specific instances where the IT admins struggled for hours sometimes days to get both Debian and Ubuntu working on newer hardware -especially servers. Where everything worked out of the box for openSUSE/SLES. I mention specifically things like RAID cards, SAS, 10Gb networking and even specific drivers for hardware monitoring. I kept waving openSUSE isos at them mentioning the install took me 20 minutes on the same exact hardware :)

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.

after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct

Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------

* YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration.

* As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service)

That is extremely important IMO and if it were the opposite (similar foo with RHEL or Debian) I would be less less forceful in recommending you switch.

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

* 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability.

Very correct there. I remember admining some Ubuntu LTS servers which had squid ntp and dhcp package errors for months which would not likely happen with an openSUSE release.

* Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu)

I'm biased, but I think I've long held openSUSE has the best KDE experience anywhere. What is really good in the past few releases Gnome has equal footing, support in the distro and it also is very well polished. In the 10.x versions perhaps less so.

* openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers)

Moreover, via IRC, mailing lists you can directly contact many of the package maintainers who are also upstream maintainers. Eg Greg KH is the stable kernel maintainer and very active on many openSUSE lists. the GCC release manager and several other direct committers to projects like Samba not only work for Suse, but also are community members. So getting follow-up to bugs and feature requests are very short cycles. With OBS I've seen unofficial fixes in hours sometimes. Even better, with OBS and Susestudio you can tailor the distro to your exact needs. I think the key word for openSUSE is transparency. Via OBS you can see exactly what goes into the distribution packages and its trivial to create custom packages for your environment.

Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------

* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.

On the ISO's maybe, but when you add OBS, that becomes less of an issue. To be honest, I think Scientific Linux probably has more of a lead over anyone with specific Scientific apps, but there are a number of new packages coming into OBS which are pure science apps and languages. In addition, some packages need to have local compiles to ensure its tailored to the hardware.

* Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’)

I'm not sure which brands you source, but I have found HP, Dell and Lenovo's well supported. my new think pad worked perfectly out of the box with 11.4. On the server side, I am pretty confident openSUSE/SLES wins by a large margin.

* Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year)

I suspect as an academic institution you might qualify for discounts.

* 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date.

With OBS you can updated software easily when needed. For KDE and Gnome you can update to the latest versions pretty easily via OBS and the KDE repos are well tested, if not supported officially. Gnome 3 is a bit trickier at the moment, but I did not find it difficult to run latest 2.2x Gnome either on 11.2/11.3

* Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation

However, I think you will find the skill level and experience vastly better in the openSUSE community. The included docs for openSUSE and SLES are pretty well done IMO.

* better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc)

11.4 has AMI support out of the box and susestudio makes it dead easy to create all kinds of images needed in cloud environments. ISO, VM etc..

* better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef.

Perhaps less need for this with Yast. But it depends on your environment.

Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc)

Thanks much for your input. dipe

I would note some of the very largest supercomputers in the world run SLES. I suspect there is a good reason ;) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

Le 05/06/2011 01:22, Cristian Rodríguez a écrit :

Im going to get this straight ;)

:-) Notice that new openSUSE (from 11.3, at least) allows a much safer upgrade path than before. I already installed several 11.4 upon 11.3 and Factory/12.1 upon 11.4 with nearly no problem, that was not the case for 11.1, for example (just done, painfull). So now on, having to follow openSUSE should be pretty easy jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org