As far as the software development, most of the software that you see that says "Supports RH version X" is written by companies that are US based and are ignorant to Linux use worldwide. True, RH does hold the loargest market share in the US... but outside of the US, it's a different story. Truth is, most of the software (with few exceptions) will work just fine on either of the platforms... the real difference between the distro's being the kernel and the version of glibc that were used as building blocks. Sure, occasionaly you hit some bug somewhere... but it's not all that common in my experience. The only major things is support for certain hardware, where the Mfr. doesn't open source the drivers (NVidia, Promise, etc.) which causes problems for any distro if you need to build custom kernels for some reason. In general, I've always felt that SuSE had a more user friendly admin suite (Yast vs. Linuxconf) but the underlying file structure, especially with SuSE 8.0 seems to be converging. I would like to see everyone switch to a better package manager (ala Debian) which might actually push Debian to be a better distro overall as well... but some people seem to like RPMs for some reason. There's my 2 cents. - herman On Fri, 10 May 2002, peter banks wrote: ->I have run both and think they are about the same. Except: ->1.) Red Hat a much higher availability of third party documentation than ->SuSE does. ->2.) Redhat does not provide as comprehensive a package for the money Seven ->CD verses five for Redhat. ->3.) SuSE provides better documentation with the package. ->4.) Redhat uses LinuxConf and RPM SuSE use Yast. -> ->Just my thoughts ->pab ->-----Original Message----- ->From: Tim Prince [mailto:tprince@computer.org] ->Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 2:17 PM ->To: mslpop3; 'Uzo Kemdi Anyamele'; suse-linux-e@suse.com ->Subject: Re: [SLE] War among the penguins? -> ->On Friday 10 May 2002 10:41, mslpop3 wrote: ->> .. I'm an IT Manager, and I've only ->> used Windows for the past 10 years - I'm not advocating Windows by this ->> statement! I'm finding ways to replace Windows. .... ->> ->> My question is: In terms of business usefulness, what have you found to be ->> the major difference between SuSE and RH? I don't expect everyone to give ->> me an entire list, but at least 1 major difference would be very valuable. ->> ->> I can tell you this much. I'm not necessarily advocating Red Hat over ->> SuSE, but other companies are developing software that works on Red Hat ->> first because it's more widely marketed than all of the other ->> distributions. Even Dell is offering Red Hat Advanced Server. SuSE is ->> doing something with IBM, but I don't remember exactly. ->> ->> Michael ->> ->RH has a bigger share of the US market for IA than SuSE. Many ->organizations, particularly those doing business internationally, must ->support both, and both recognize the importance of inter-operability. Not ->knowing specifics of your situation, I can't offer much. In my job, I ->deal with both Windows and RH, and find the Windows interoperability ->features ->of RH less satisfactory than SuSE. At least one of the servers I run works ->only with RH6.2, so I would expect that any organization of any size would ->be ->using multiple versions. SuSE has more interest in supporting individual ->users, but both are doing an excellent job of supporting business use, and ->servers appear to account for most of the business demand in the US. RH has ->improved their support for notebooks since I was driven to switch to SuSE ->there. These are purely personal opinions. ->-- ->Tim Prince -> ->-- ->To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com ->For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com ->Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com -> -> -> ->

Yes, I've seen that... but SuSE itself is still RPM based which means you have to deal with all of RPM's idiosyncracy's when applying package changes from the CDs. - Herman On Fri, 10 May 2002, Richard Bos wrote: ->Herman, -> ->didn't you get the latest news. Apt (ported from debian) is available for ->SuSE. Have a look at http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm -> ->On vrijdag 10 mei 2002 21:03, Herman L. Knief wrote: ->> I would like to see everyone switch to a better package manager (ala ->> Debian) which might actually push Debian to be a better distro overall as ->> well... but some people seem to like RPMs for some reason. -> ->

On Fri, 10 May 2002, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

A small hint about the "works with RH" stuff you may see. If it works on RH..then you have a 9-10 chance it's going to work with SuSE. They are binary compatible. The problem you might run into is that RH tends to put things in goofy places ..they muck about with the file structure, but with the LSB becoming quick the standard by which Linux distributions are judged. This won't be a problem much longer.

As far as the major differences between RH and SuSE...well. SuSE is much more LSB compliant then RH and SuSE uses the current standard GCC compiler so you won't run into as many issues. RH uses 2.96-RH while SuSE uses 2.95.3 which most other Linux distributions and other Unices use as well. Others can put up further differences.

It works both ways... SuSE's change this release from /etc/rc.config to /etc/sysconfig/... was to conform to the LSB. My RedHat-using friends are saying 'it's about time!' Yes, the LSB will make it easier for third-party applications to install on any distro. And sometimes the standards committee is declaring the 'RH style' to be the direction to go. Eventually, all distros will have an equal level of 'goofiness' in their FHS implementations. Rick Green

::when will /opt go away......????? Hopefully never. /opt means Optional as in the operating system doesn't need it. /usr means UNIX system resources..it's not usr as in user. I absolutely hate that RH stuffs everything in /usr .. I mean how big does /usr/bin need to be anyway. I guess I'm just old fashion and use Solaris to much. SuSE's layout is one of the reasons I left RH around 4.0 and never looked back. -=Ben --=====-----=====-- mailto:ben@whack.org --=====-- If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. -GC --=====-----=====--

aix uses /opt as of 5.1 too, keeps kde, gnome, netscape and so on in it. I always considered /usr/local somewhere to put stuff that is vital to your own machine, but just your own machine (my adsl stuff lives there for example). if i lose /opt i can carry on using the machine, if i lose /usr/local i will lose my networking. I think mostly the unix filesystems are a mess, hopefully the linux standards base will help :) Ewan

then why is it most manually built programs, i.e. compilled from source, install to /usr/local by default? maybe some of these "/optional" packages need to be there instead? does any other commercial Unix use /opt? (I don't think SCO does?) BTW for those not familiar w/Solaris, you do get /opt as Ben says, but you don't get /usr/local, you have to create that yourself.....

-don (just my .02)