On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 05:22 pm, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Greg Freemyer writes:

...

I'm still trying to find mt_st and per http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/mt_st.html it is located on the DVD.

Is located on the DVD9 we have in the retail package. A DVD9 is quite large and those few people that can burn it, cannot read it on all devices - so not much sense in distributing one.

...

I only have the downloaded DVD (the OSS version?).

No, with commerical packages, the same packages that are on the retail CDs. But a 4 GB DVD and not a 8.5 GB DVD.

You can download all packages from our ftp server,

I'm totally confused by the plethora of SuSE 10 distributions. OSS, GM, CDs, evalDVD, boughtDVD, FTP Argh! It's almost as confusing as the whole of Linux. I couldn't get a DVD download, so downloaded 5 CDs. Actually I was trying to bittorrent in a DVD but got 5 CDs. So I made them into a DVD and built a SuSE10 install server. Found to my horror it didn't have dovecot nor atftp. Checked, No, YaST can't find it, ls can't find it, it's not there. Went back to SuSE 9.3 Heard on the list that more packages are available on ftp, so went to my favourite mirror, and rsynced in the whole install server. Including all 3 hardware architectures i386, x86_64, and PPC it's 25 Gig! This is more than is on even the 8.5 Gig bought DVD. Has anyone published package lists and diffs for the different versions? Now I'm off to put up an install server or 2, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166 PS: I wish they had a deluxe boxed edition, with all packages, all architectures, and all manuals. AND a postal edition, all packages, 1 architecture $US25 including airmail to anywhere on earth. Extra architectures $US10 each.

Wednesday 26 Oct 2005 14:01 samaye Michael James alekhiit:

OSS, GM, CDs, evalDVD, boughtDVD, FTP Argh! It's almost as confusing as the whole of Linux.

You use the figure of speech called exaggeration quite masterfully. OSS is that version which contains **only** Open Source Software (OSS) which means no Acrobat Reader, Macromedia Flash, etc. GM just refers to the final release (after the first release candidate). It's not a separate kind of distribution. OSS and OSS + nonOSS are two versions of GM. EvalDVD has been unanimously accepted as misleading (so we hope Novell will change this nomenclature next time around). boughtDVD contains more apps than the downloadDVD (which is the better name for the evalDVD) and FTP is just a method of downloading stuff.

Including all 3 hardware architectures i386, x86_64, and PPC it's 25 Gig!

"All 3"??? What happened to sparc, sparc-64, alpha etc?

This is more than is on even the 8.5 Gig bought DVD.

That's not surprising. I would think that the double-layer DVD is the full package complement for only one architecture. So are you clear now? Shriramana.

Greg Freemyer writes:

I now have mt_st for 10.0, but trying to find it is a royal pain. Please take the below as generic concerns, not mt_st specific.

I still don't have any idea where on the FTP server to find mt_st and yes I have looked.

You should be able to add it as a YaST installation repository and can then use the YaST software installer for searching.

Unfortunately my local mirror does not have up to date recursive file listings of your main ftp server. (I don't know if that is a generic mirror issue, or specific to gatech below?)

Specifically, see the 2004 datestamps on the 4 "ls" files at ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/suse/

I also tried to download a couple of the "ls" files directly from ftp.suse.com, but that is very difficult currently. Even the 3mb .gz file failed to download due to dropped connections.

It would have helped me if the package description webpage could have given the ftp path: http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/mt_st.html

It would also be nice if Novell could provide a single table that shows every package in the left column and then has every distribution technique in additional columns. Then a simple check or - in every cell.

It seems there are a number of distribution methods. I'm guessing at least 10 counting the main distributions and the supplemental distributions.

It is getting very confusing giving that each method distributes a different set of packages.

We're rethinking this and try to make it easier, thanks for the feedback, 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

Wednesday 26 Oct 2005 20:06 samaye Randall R Schulz alekhiit:

For what it's worth, it is there on the commercial DVD in both 32- and 64-bit forms:

Randall, remove my doubt, please - does the single commercial DVD contain the entire extended package selection (including packages not available in the downloadable versions) in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions? But that's only for the Intel-based architecture, right? Or are powerpc versions of packages also available on the commercial DVD? Shriramana.

Wednesday 26 Oct 2005 21:07 samaye Randall R Schulz alekhiit:

Yes, it contains the 32- and 64-bit Intel architecture package sets in their entirety including those otherwise available only via on-line repositories. No PPC binaries at all.

Thanks for that - but does this mean that PPC people can't buy the boxed set? Isn't SUSE missing out on revenue by not providing a boxed set for PPC customers?

From: Philipp Thomas Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 03:08:01 +0200 To: Subject: Re: [SLE] Confused by downloadable DVD

Shriramana Sharma [Thu, 27 Oct 2005 06:25:10 +0530]:

...

but does this mean that PPC people can't buy the boxed set?

Yes, unless they buy the SLES which is a bit more expensive.

...

Isn't SUSE missing out on revenue by not providing a boxed set for PPC customers?

Maybe, but my guess is that the group of PPC users that want to buy Linux is rather small and so there wouldn't be much profit, given that production costs per box are significantly higher for small quantities.

Yep...the desktop market for PPC is tiny, in large part due to the (INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING!) lack of support for Airport Extreme cards under Linux. Because Broadcom/Apple are being annoying about this, about 90% of the Macs out there can't run Linux _and_ connect to the net. The IBM PPC series are mostly server class, and run the SLES version for PPC, which is available as media. - Ian (nearly crying as I write this on my beautiful macintosh, on which I can't run Linux...)

Shriramana Sharma [Wed, 26 Oct 2005 20:58:08 +0530]:

Or are powerpc versions of packages also available on the commercial DVD?

SUSE Linux 10.0 for PPC is only available as download, not as a commercial version. Philipp