I've bought the last 4 boxed sets that SuSE has released, and I'm thinking that this is getting starting to get expensive. While I'll still probably get my company to pony up for 9.3, I'm starting to think about getting a burned copy from one of the distro knock-off places. (Not many offer the real SuSE DVD, but I did find one.) The whole thing brings up something I've been stewing over for several months now. I recently installed Gentoo on my box, and I really, really like it. I like is that I have access to just about ANY software package in the open-source world, and it integrates into the system in the same manner as everything else on the system. I don't care about the supposed performance gains of strenuous optimizations. (I think this has been refuted well enough by people like Havoc Pennington.) However, I really, really hate the idea that it's going to take 3 days to recompile the whole system when some new version of libtool or gcc comes down the wire (which I've read on their planet is coming soon). And for old (think Celeron) "servers," this just gets unwieldy. It might be possible to use one machine to build everything at a base i586 level, and distribute the packages, but this sounds like a lot of extra work. I've also installed Ubuntu on a VMware machine. It's alright. It gets back to making most interesting open-source software available as a native package, but, under the covers, it's still Debian. And unstable Debian at that. I've had several app crashes just in the short time I tested it. And there's the confusion of where all of that Debian-based stuff is going in the future. Ug. What a mess. (If you know what I'm talking about, great; if not, this isn't the place.) I've said all of that to get to this: in my thinking, I'm back to favoring SuSE. I'm installing the CD version of 9.3 in a VMware machine as I type this, and I notice that there's no postgres server. According to Roger's notes, this is available on the DVD. It begs a couple questions: 1) When will the FTP version of 9.3 be available? 2) Will the FTP site have even more "stuff" than the DVD? I think there's an opportunity here for SuSE to take even more mind-share. I really think there's an opening for an "extras" repository for the enthusiast. Things like James' ULB and the PackMan packages are great, but sometimes it gets a little hairy keeping everything straight. Novell could open up a community-based repo for all the latest, greatest "stuff" that people work on, and make that available as another source in YaST. (Behind the scenes may need to exist a common CVS repository so that the people making the packages can use the same underlying libraries.) Anyway. I may be completely off-base here. I know there are bits and pieces of this already. I realize that the Ximian guys have some red carpet channels out there for mono and mono-based apps. Will these get updated for SuSE 9.3, and will they receive the "gold" versions of things like beagle between official releases of the distro? I certainly don't know. I'm just trying to highlight the only thing that I think other distro's have on SuSE: access to the majority of "stuff" in the FOSS world, and bleeding-edge packages, if desired, all of which are pre-packaged to "play nice" in native way of administering the system. Comments? dk