Hi Al, Al Sutton <al@alsutton.com> [ Sun, 28 Apr 2002 13:52:11 +0100]:
My concern is that a number of products are advertised as "Working with RedHat",
I think this is mostly because of laziness and because RedHat has been very successful in making people think that Linux is RedHat. Many companies, specially on your side of the pond just don't care about the difference between Linux and RedHat. I guess for many products it would suffice to state the versions of libraries needed, but it's far easier to say 'works with RedHat'.
I had always seen this as pretty much interchangeable with "Working with Linux", but I'm now not so confident.
Yes and no :) Yes, it pretty much _is_ interchangeable but not always. The products may need special versions of libraries that are present on one distribution but not on the other. Or they use init scripts and RH and SuSE differ in where they place them. Or take Rational clearcase, which uses its own special file system and thus needs a kernel module. This kernel module will only work with an older RH kernel but not with one of the SuSE kernels and Rational just only supplies this one module. This is one of the main reasons why the LSB was founded: to create a standard base which allows ISVs to ignore the differences between distributions.
I have a SMC 2632W wireless LAN PCMCIA card. Under RH 7.2 I configured it as eth0 when it was plugged in, and it was treated under as a normal ethernet device. Under SuSE 8.0 I have been unable to get it work (I posted the error message to the suse-line-e list earlier today), and the only information I've found is in the unofficial FAQ (at ) is definatley not the procedure I want to have to perform on each laptop that needs to use wireless networking.
I'll try to get some information on that card. From all I know about wireless cards they all need some additional work. And it doesn't stop there because you need to use additional measures like using VPN to make them really secure.
Are you saying that all of the CDs & the DVD in SuSE 8 are free from copyright issues (Including the ones in th pay directory).
Besides the pay directory they are free from copyright issues (leaving aside the YaST license). But nobody forbids you to make images for backup purposes.
If this is true what does the extra money go towards when I buy the professional edition over the personal edition?
In that you get more than twice the amount of software? In that you can compile/develop with the professional edition?.
If this is untrue can you explain where the following error message comes from when I select Software -> Install/Remove Software under YaST2;
Package nfs-utils interferes with: nfs-server, This is usually not a serious problem, but if you experience undesired behavior, you might need to remove packages manually.
This is, because you need either own *or* the other. To quote the information from the package nfs-server: ------------------------------------------ There are 2 NFS Server: the userspace NFS server and the kernel NFS server. This package contains the userspace NFS server. The utilities for the kernel NFS server can be found in the "nfs-utils" package. ------------------------------------------ Maybe the names are a bit misleading, as you only need nfs-utils if you use the kernel NFS server. In this case nfs-utils *do* conflict with nfs-server because both provide a NFS server.
The hassle is the apparent error message which doesn't tell me if it's OK to procced or not. If it doesn't cause a problem why am I warned?
It *could* cause problems, but more if you installed from DVD and later decide to use the CD. But YaST2 can't decide if it could cause problems or not. It can only tell you that you're using a different set of disks, so to speak.
If some machines only have the CD it means you get the error message, which is concerning to users.
I can understand that, but it should be easy to tell those users to just ignore the message. Once again, we do have to mark them differently and providing YaST2 with the knowledge what is harmless and what is not would be way more work then possible.
Have they cerified SuSE 8.0?
Not that I know. The base of their certification is our SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and there currently one that's based on SuSE Linux 8.0 .
server being different from the version on their machine when it's not.
But it *is* different. Philipp