[opensuse] Re: [opensuse-factory] openSUSE vs Ubuntu for Enterprise Scientific Computing Environment
On 04/06/11 14:51, Di Pe wrote:
This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say.
It's actually quite off-topic for this mailinglist, which is focused on the development of the next version of openSUSE. Probably any further comments should be on the main mailinglist at opensuse@opensuse.org (cc'ed)
We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3.
In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages)
In general, openSUSE packages can be used on SLES. If not directly compatible they can at least be rebuilt on the OBS.
KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better)
package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here)
I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse)
The package management is a whole lot better now, I promise ... to me zypper is pretty awesome these days
We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing.
We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE.
after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct
Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------
* YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration.
* As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service)
* Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS (~$50k - $100k for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu)
* 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability
* Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu)
* openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers)
Not only this: In many cases, the upstream *is* openSUSE ... Greg K-H (stable kernel maintainer) is on this list for example.
Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------
* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.
Have you seen the OBS (build.opensuse.org / search via software.opensuse.org)? If you have packages you want missing from openSUSE, you can very easily package and deploy them yourself, or just ask for help from the hundreds of buildservice packagers. Even if they're not in the official distro, it's exceedingly easy to add packages to openSUSE via the Build Service.
* Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’)
Hardware certification, can't help with much. But I'd be very surprised if Ubuntu really has better wifi support, it's the same Gnome/KDE in openSUSE as well ... in fact the SUSE guys are the ones who wrote a lot of that stuff.
* Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year)
openSUSE Evergreen is an attempt to do an LTS version of openSUSE http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen
* 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date.
If you need up-to-date versions of software, it will be on the Build Service, regardless of release timing. Or if your brave you can try out the rolling-release version, Tumbleweed.
* Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation
Perhaps. But I would say openSUSE has a higher concentration of actual developers with much more in depth knowledge ...
* better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc)
Not true at all - have you seen SUSE Studio? You can customise your own distro images and deploy them (EC2, various VM's, actual installable iso's, etc) ... it's exceedingly cool, and unique to openSUSE as far as I know.
* better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef.
As far as I know puppet works on openSUSE as well, but I have no experience with it to confirm for sure.
Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc)
Thanks much for your input. dipe
Regards, Tejas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Since I am very interested in HPC I would like to hear from you if you
had any experience with openMPI in openSUSE 11.4 64 bits because it
didn't work for me, only in 32 bits (the same application code)
Cheers
Paulo Motta
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Tejas Guruswamy
On 04/06/11 14:51, Di Pe wrote:
This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say.
It's actually quite off-topic for this mailinglist, which is focused on the development of the next version of openSUSE. Probably any further comments should be on the main mailinglist at opensuse@opensuse.org (cc'ed)
We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3.
In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages)
In general, openSUSE packages can be used on SLES. If not directly compatible they can at least be rebuilt on the OBS.
KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better)
package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here)
I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse)
The package management is a whole lot better now, I promise ... to me zypper is pretty awesome these days
We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing.
We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE.
after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct
Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------
* YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration.
* As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service)
* Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS (~$50k - $100k for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu)
* 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability
* Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu)
* openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers)
Not only this: In many cases, the upstream *is* openSUSE ... Greg K-H (stable kernel maintainer) is on this list for example.
Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------
* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.
Have you seen the OBS (build.opensuse.org / search via software.opensuse.org)? If you have packages you want missing from openSUSE, you can very easily package and deploy them yourself, or just ask for help from the hundreds of buildservice packagers. Even if they're not in the official distro, it's exceedingly easy to add packages to openSUSE via the Build Service.
* Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’)
Hardware certification, can't help with much. But I'd be very surprised if Ubuntu really has better wifi support, it's the same Gnome/KDE in openSUSE as well ... in fact the SUSE guys are the ones who wrote a lot of that stuff.
* Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year)
openSUSE Evergreen is an attempt to do an LTS version of openSUSE http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen
* 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date.
If you need up-to-date versions of software, it will be on the Build Service, regardless of release timing. Or if your brave you can try out the rolling-release version, Tumbleweed.
* Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation
Perhaps. But I would say openSUSE has a higher concentration of actual developers with much more in depth knowledge ...
* better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc)
Not true at all - have you seen SUSE Studio? You can customise your own distro images and deploy them (EC2, various VM's, actual installable iso's, etc) ... it's exceedingly cool, and unique to openSUSE as far as I know.
* better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef.
As far as I know puppet works on openSUSE as well, but I have no experience with it to confirm for sure.
Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc)
Thanks much for your input. dipe
Regards, Tejas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-- Paulo Motta -- "Qualquer tecnologia suficientemente avançada é indistinguível da mágica" - Arthur C. Clarke -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, I'm biologist working on plant molecular phylogeny, so that working mostly with DNA sequences. I use only practically openSUSE, some of my colleagues Debian and/or Ubuntu. So just few words from my point of view... Dne 4.6.2011 18:42, Tejas Guruswamy napsal(a):
On 04/06/11 14:51, Di Pe wrote:
This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say.
It's actually quite off-topic for this mailinglist, which is focused on the development of the next version of openSUSE. Probably any further comments should be on the main mailinglist at opensuse@opensuse.org (cc'ed)
We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3.
In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages)
SLE is not IMHO so much different... SLE 11 is based on openSUSE 11.1.
In general, openSUSE packages can be used on SLES. If not directly compatible they can at least be rebuilt on the OBS.
KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better)
It is IMHO problem of NetworkManager. If You have more or less Linux-only environment, choose type of wi-fi, which works well under Linux.
package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here)
At least between distribution versions, it is not better anywhere.
I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse)
I have also lots of experience with Debian based systems and Zypper is nowadays much better than Aptitude. My opinion, no flame.
The package management is a whole lot better now, I promise ... to me zypper is pretty awesome these days
We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing.
We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE.
after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct
Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------
openSUSE Build Service is IMHO the best available tool of this type. You can build there packages for various distros.
* YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration.
* As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service)
Which software do You package? Is it publicly available?
* Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS (~$50k - $100k for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu)
* 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability
* Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu)
I was using Kubuntu. KDE in openSUSE is really much better.
* openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers)
Not only this: In many cases, the upstream *is* openSUSE ... Greg K-H (stable kernel maintainer) is on this list for example.
Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------
* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.
Debian has different package policy: they usually split software into more packages than openSUSE (see for example Latex packages), so counting of real software is much harder... And of course there is openSUSE Build Service...
Have you seen the OBS (build.opensuse.org / search via software.opensuse.org)? If you have packages you want missing from openSUSE, you can very easily package and deploy them yourself, or just ask for help from the hundreds of buildservice packagers. Even if they're not in the official distro, it's exceedingly easy to add packages to openSUSE via the Build Service.
Very often, scientific stuff in Ubuntu is very outdated and not very well packed (at least from my non-complex experience). Most of software I use are "general" tools like R, easy binary applications working anywhere or software written in Java. There, I'm on more or less same position with any bigger Linux distribution.
* Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’)
I was never interested in HW certification, bud in components, e.g. Intel chipset, type of graphic card (choose some well supported on Linux) etc.
Hardware certification, can't help with much. But I'd be very surprised if Ubuntu really has better wifi support, it's the same Gnome/KDE in openSUSE as well ... in fact the SUSE guys are the ones who wrote a lot of that stuff.
* Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year)
May be OK for server, but on the desktop, aren't You facing problems with outdated packages?
openSUSE Evergreen is an attempt to do an LTS version of openSUSE http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen
* 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date.
Heh, one paragraph higher You appreciate long term support (causing not actual software), so what is important for You? New software or stability?
If you need up-to-date versions of software, it will be on the Build Service, regardless of release timing. Or if your brave you can try out the rolling-release version, Tumbleweed.
openSUSE has a lot of special repositories for particular software. You can, for example, have new Firefox or KDE without affecting rest of the system,
* Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation
See http://doc.opensuse.org/ and http://www.novell.com/documentation/ It is very good.
Perhaps. But I would say openSUSE has a higher concentration of actual developers with much more in depth knowledge ...
* better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc)
Not true at all - have you seen SUSE Studio? You can customise your own distro images and deploy them (EC2, various VM's, actual installable iso's, etc) ... it's exceedingly cool, and unique to openSUSE as far as I know.
* better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef.
As far as I know puppet works on openSUSE as well, but I have no experience with it to confirm for sure.
Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc)
Thanks much for your input. dipe
Regards, Tejas
Good luck! Vojtěch - -- Vojtěch Zeisek Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux http://www.opensuse.org/ http://trapa.cz/cs -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk3r180ACgkQAUwyD/hjyZqY5wCfWPBdL6vRs4Le76tcb1A1xYsN rrAAn3PVk0j4qQ1Zc4kMSq1RPVt4ErL/ =1HlW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Tejas Guruswamy wrote:
On 04/06/11 14:51, Di Pe wrote:
We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3.
I was used for over a decade to setup and use NFS-mounted home directories (and NFS mounts between machines in America and Europe and other nonsense). More recently I've found it more convenient to use local home directories with symlinks to NFS-mounted subdirectories (e.g. Documents). With the increase in system components using dot-directories, I find that is more convenient for login on multiple hosts and for convenient OS upgrades as well as being more resilient against network problems. JMHO.
We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE.
I don't know much about it, but you might want to also consider Scientific Linux http://www.scientificlinux.org/
Advantage openSUSE ---------------------------------
* Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS (~$50k - $100k for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu)
I'm not sure how you calculate your migration costs?
Advantage Ubuntu --------------------------
* About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications.
Have you seen the OBS (build.opensuse.org / search via software.opensuse.org)? If you have packages you want missing from openSUSE, you can very easily package and deploy them yourself, or just ask for help from the hundreds of buildservice packagers. Even if they're not in the official distro, it's exceedingly easy to add packages to openSUSE via the Build Service.
I agree with this advantage of Ubuntu. I'm not an administrator and I find it very confusing and irritating to have to search multiple repositories of variable reputation for well-known packages. It creates a lot of hassle to avoid loading dubious packages. Consider wikis, for example; there is *no* wiki software in the standard opensuse repositories. FWIW, I use both. opensuse on my desktop with an ubuntu box available on the network. Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Monday, June 06, 2011 05:01:58 AM Dave Howorth wrote:
there is no wiki software in the standard opensuse repositories.
Dave, installing MediaWiki is easier then to learn how to package it :) Removing cleanly is just deleting directories it resides in and removing database entries. Besides, someone that can't understand installation instructions is better off to hire someone for many reasons, and rpm will not change that for a bit. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Rajko M. wrote:
On Monday, June 06, 2011 05:01:58 AM Dave Howorth wrote:
there is no wiki software in the standard opensuse repositories.
installing MediaWiki is easier then to learn how to package it :)
Well mediawiki is an overcomplicated wiki system :( It may have a place for large systems, but personally I prefer others.
Removing cleanly is just deleting directories it resides in and removing database entries.
The difficulty is not removing but upgrading. And security patches.
Besides, someone that can't understand installation instructions is better off to hire someone for many reasons, and rpm will not change that for a bit.
That'll be why there are several wikis in the ubuntu standard repositories then. Or are you saying deb is superior to rpm? ;-P -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Since I am very interested in HPC I would like to hear from you if you
had any experience with openMPI in openSUSE 11.4 64 bits because it
didn't work for me, only in 32 bits (the same application code)
Cheers
Paulo Motta
On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 5:59 AM, Dave Howorth
Rajko M. wrote:
On Monday, June 06, 2011 05:01:58 AM Dave Howorth wrote:
there is no wiki software in the standard opensuse repositories.
installing MediaWiki is easier then to learn how to package it :)
Well mediawiki is an overcomplicated wiki system :( It may have a place for large systems, but personally I prefer others.
Removing cleanly is just deleting directories it resides in and removing database entries.
The difficulty is not removing but upgrading. And security patches.
Besides, someone that can't understand installation instructions is better off to hire someone for many reasons, and rpm will not change that for a bit.
That'll be why there are several wikis in the ubuntu standard repositories then. Or are you saying deb is superior to rpm? ;-P -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-- Paulo Motta -- "Qualquer tecnologia suficientemente avançada é indistinguível da mágica" - Arthur C. Clarke -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (5)
-
Dave Howorth -
Paulo Motta -
Rajko M. -
Tejas Guruswamy -
Vojtěch Zeisek