Good discussion, so I just thought I would add my 2 cents... Ubuntu, SuSe, and Red Hat have different models. SLES and SLED are targeted toward the enterprise and include support options. They are also more stable releases. The paid-for OpenSuSE includes only installation assistance. Canonical is a commercial company that supports the Open Source Ubuntu family and provides support for a fee. I would suspect that if there were a reasonable demand, Novell could provide fee-based support services since the mechanism is there with SLED and SLES. Canonical provides 9-5 support desktop for 1 year at $ 293.76 and server support for $ 881.25. The difference is that SuSE and Red Hat both provide enterprise versions where Ubuntu provides a desktop and server version free of charge where you buy the support as an extra. The advantage of the SuSE model is that releases of OpenSuSE can be more cutting edge where releases of SLES and SLED are stable built on the experience learned from OpenSuSE. Just a different way of doing the same thing. -- -- Jerry Feldman <gaf@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846