On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Langsley wrote:
Sorry for yet another dumb question, but there's been lots of, what seems to me to be, conflicting info about openSUSE, SUSE-10; what is Novell and what is community owned/controlled/created/designated/what ever.
First of all, there really aren't any stupid questions, just dumb answers.
Earlier we were told that openSUSE is just the name or the project and that the final product would be simply SUSE-10. and that it is a Novell Product. At least that's the way I understood it. Today Joseph Smith said: "Also, remember openSUSE isn't a "Novell product". It's a community Linux, that is supported by the Linux community. Again, much like Fedora. As a matter of fact, you don't even see openSUSE on Novell product list site!
When I first learned of openSUSE I assumed it would be somewhat similar to the Fedora/Red Hat offerings. That is, that there would be two separate and distinct distros. I don't see how one can have two separate distros with one name. Or is there genuinely an openSUSE distro either presently or planned for the future? Is there now a genuine community distro of SUSE or is the download version simply like other download versions of commercial distros? That is, basicly a less complete (for lack of a better term) version of the commercial product.
Let me give you a short explanation on the naming and the openSUSE project: - openSUSE is the development project to open up the development process used to create SUSE Linux to the community. - The distribtuion that we all are working on is called SUSE Linux. - SUSE Linux is available in two "flavors": * SUSE Linux OSS - a version of SUSE Linux that only contains open source software. This version is available for download on all the mirrors our there. * SUSE Linux - that's the retail version: It can be regard as a superset of SUSE Linux OSS, which also contains some proprietary bits, binary-only drivers and stuff like that. Not to mention end-user documentation, installation support and MP3 playback support. - Note: The packages that are in SUSE Linux OSS and SUSE Linux are binary-identical. Regards Christoph