Synthetic Cartoonz wrote:

On Wednesday 03 August 2005 01:40, Fred A. Miller wrote:

...

"Novell will be launching a community-based Linux distribution, OpenSuSE, at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco, according to sources close to the company.

Following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc. with its successful Fedora Project Linux distribution, Novell Inc. will be opening up its Linux development efforts with OpenSuSE, sources said.

A site, opensuse.org, has already been set up for the project by Novell under the name of Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne. The site, however, is not open for business yet."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843097,00.asp

I hope this doesn't spell the end for a consumer SuSE distro in a box. The SuSE printed docs are excellent and worth every penny of the retail price tag.

The reason I went with SuSE instead of Red Hat was due to Red Hat abandoning the consumer boxed distro. (And being about twice the price of SuSE at that time didn't earn them points either.)

Please let the lizard continue living in the box.

I agree with you on the retail issue. Just having boxes on the shelves in Computer stores makes Linux more visable. Which is less intimidating to new users. Also it make Linux available to people with only phone line connections. Imagine being faced with a phone line download of 5 CD's Here at Hal-pc's Houston LUG due to Red Hats dropping a store distro has promoted SuSE 9.3 Now at Hal hardly anyone is using Red Hat or Fedora. They have dropped Mandrake and based on a box purchase SuSE wins. Free downloads have moves to Debian based CDs. -- 73 de Donn Washburn Hpage: " http://www.hal-pc.org/~n5xwb " Ham Callsign N5XWB Email: " n5xwb@hal-pc.org " 307 Savoy St. HAMs: " n5xwb@arrl.net " Sugar Land, TX 77478 BMW MOA #: 4146 - Ambassador LL# 1.281.242.3256 " http://counter.li.org " #279316

Marden P. Marshall wrote:

On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 08:10 -0500, Donn Washburn wrote:

...

Synthetic Cartoonz wrote:

...

On Wednesday 03 August 2005 01:40, Fred A. Miller wrote:

...

"Novell will be launching a community-based Linux distribution, OpenSuSE, at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco, according to sources close to the company.

Following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc. with its successful Fedora Project Linux distribution, Novell Inc. will be opening up its Linux development efforts with OpenSuSE, sources said.

A site, opensuse.org, has already been set up for the project by Novell under the name of Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne. The site, however, is not open for business yet."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843097,00.asp

I hope this doesn't spell the end for a consumer SuSE distro in a box. The SuSE printed docs are excellent and worth every penny of the retail price tag.

The reason I went with SuSE instead of Red Hat was due to Red Hat abandoning the consumer boxed distro. (And being about twice the price of SuSE at that time didn't earn them points either.)

Please let the lizard continue living in the box.

I agree with you on the retail issue. Just having boxes on the shelves in Computer stores makes Linux more visable. Which is less intimidating to new users. Also it make Linux available to people with only phone line connections. Imagine being faced with a phone line download of 5 CD's

Here at Hal-pc's Houston LUG due to Red Hats dropping a store distro has promoted SuSE 9.3 Now at Hal hardly anyone is using Red Hat or Fedora. They have dropped Mandrake and based on a box purchase SuSE wins. Free downloads have moves to Debian based CDs.

If you read the article, it states that SuSE will continue to sell boxed distributions.

That's good news if the boxed versions are not sawn off versions under the name of SuSE Pro. The move tells me they don't make much money from private sales, it's the corporate buyers with maintenance contracts that bring in the money, so that may be the focus. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks

suse_gasjr4wd@mac.com wrote:

On 8/3/05 12:05 PM, "Sid Boyce" wrote:

...

That's good news if the boxed versions are not sawn off versions under the name of SuSE Pro. The move tells me they don't make much money from private sales, it's the corporate buyers with maintenance contracts that bring in the money, so that may be the focus. Regards Sid.

OK, I guess I just don't understand what this means. Can someone explain what this means to Mr. Joe User? (And please speak real slow and not in geek speak.)

Is it they will let anyone work on the distribution? The pro version will be the same, so what's the dif?

I have been following the thread, but just don't get it. I just don't understand. :(

What this means they want to concentrate their effort and manpower on the more lucrative Enterprise Edition. The community version will be aimed at Linux enthusiasts, not at the casual user at home who wants a Windows that has the name Linux. In short they have given up the idea of selling Linux as a replacement for users of Windows. The consequences of this is that they will probably not spend as much effort as now to ensure a distribution with as few problems as possible. They will use more recent versions of software with the expectation that bugs will be discovered and hopefully even fixed by the community. If a software version has been thoroughly tested, cursed and fixed until it runs stable and reliable it will then be included in the Enterprise Edition. You can compare it to the "stable" and "development" versions of software. That is the community part. I only hope they will reduce the price of the box accordingly if they aren't even willing to call it "Professional" any more. Also timely ftp versions would be appreciated. I'll wait and see if they will reduce the support time to one year as Redhat has done for the community version. Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com

----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred A. Miller"

On Wednesday 03 August 2005 2:06 pm, Sandy Drobic wrote:

[snip]

...

What this means they want to concentrate their effort and manpower on the more lucrative Enterprise Edition. The community version will be aimed at Linux enthusiasts, not at the casual user at home who wants a Windows that has the name Linux. In short they have given up the idea of selling Linux as a replacement for users of Windows.

Hold on......NOT so fast. SUSE is VERY MUCH intent on displacing MickySoft on the desktop!!! You'll see some evidence in the next release confirming that, if what I've read and hear is correct. They're simply going to open things up to the community, quickly and efficiently so that solid stable development will happen sooner.......and better.

[snip] And when they do it, God we pray, please don't let happen to SuSE the same thing that happened to Mandrake....... It only took six release cycles for them to almost recover. -- David C. Rankin, J.D., P.E. RANKIN LAW FIRM, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 (936) 715-9333 (936) 715-9339 fax www.rankinlawfirm.com --

On Wednesday 03 August 2005 21:06, Sandy Drobic wrote:

What this means they want to concentrate their effort and manpower on the more lucrative Enterprise Edition.

Sure, one way or the other we've all seen this happen already. Overall quality & testing done for 9.2 and 9.3 took similar steps backwards than RH did with 8 and 9. Focus was already moved elsewhere.

The community version will be aimed at Linux enthusiasts, not at the casual user at home who wants a Windows that has the name Linux. In short they have given up the idea of selling Linux as a replacement for users of Windows.

Yep, and due to overall quality drop it's now impossible to recommend SUSE (pro) to people that just want to get the job done. It's a development release as such, bad things can and do happen with it. On the positive side, let's hope that we can work things out via the ( yet undefined ) community effort. SUSE folks, your call. -- // Janne

Sandy Drobic writes:

What this means they want to concentrate their effort and manpower on the more lucrative Enterprise Edition. The community version will be aimed at Linux enthusiasts, not at the casual user at home who wants a Windows that has the name Linux. In short they have given up the idea of selling Linux as a replacement for users of Windows.

This is not true. We will continue to sell SUSE Linux and target the home users. We just want to do it better ;-)

The consequences of this is that they will probably not spend as much effort as now to ensure a distribution with as few problems as possible. They will use more recent versions of software with the expectation that bugs will be discovered and hopefully even fixed by the community. If a software version has been thoroughly tested, cursed and fixed until it runs stable and reliable it will then be included in the Enterprise Edition. You can compare it to the "stable" and "development" versions of software.

No, since we will release a SUSE Linux product, we will take care to make a version that is as stable as it is now.

That is the community part. I only hope they will reduce the price of the box accordingly if they aren't even willing to call it "Professional" any more. Also timely ftp versions would be appreciated. I'll wait and see if they will reduce the support time to one year as Redhat has done for the community version.

There's no change, we stay with two years of security updates, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

On Thursday 04 August 2005 4:03 am, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

What this means they want to concentrate their effort and manpower on the more lucrative Enterprise Edition. The community version will be aimed at Linux enthusiasts, not at the casual user at home who wants a Windows that has the name Linux. In short they have given up the idea of selling Linux as a replacement for users of Windows.

This is not true.  We will continue to sell SUSE Linux and target the home users.  We just want to do it better ;-)

Thanks.......they wouldn't believe me. ;) Fred -- Planet Earth - a subsidiary of Microsoft. We have no bugs in our software, Never! We do have undocumented added features, that you will find amusing, at no added cost to you, at this time.

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005 02:05 am, Sid Boyce wrote:

...

...

...

Please let the lizard continue living in the box.

...

If you read the article, it states that SuSE will continue to sell boxed distributions.

That's good news if the boxed versions are not sawn off versions under the name of SuSE Pro. The move tells me they don't make much money from private sales, it's the corporate buyers with maintenance contracts that bring in the money, so that may be the focus.

At a meeting with some Novell and Suse people, they told the story of Novell's reaction to seeing the print run for the first Novell-Suse Pro release. They thought there was a typo and the numbers were 100 times too high. They just couldn't believe sales at that volume. So don't discount the numbers of boxed lizards that sell. BTW, The Novell people also admitted that taking on Suse has re-invigorated Novell. Pretty obvious really. -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166 Go Novell, keep hitting SCO with writs.