the reply is bellow the quote On Monday 08 July 2002 17:04, Fergus Wilde wrote:
I'm a bit surprised how hot people are getting under the collar about this one. SuSE simply tried to put together two fairly rational ways to buy tailored versions of their distro. (three if you include the money-saving pro update version which I heartily recommend, though I realise people in some locales have had difficulty finding this).
Personal was intended to provide a cheaper way to get desktop users going, pro to provide about as many packages as someone setting up workstations or servers could expect to find anywhere.
But let's straighten this out - stop me if I get this wrong, but AFAIK the personal edition isn't crippled or broken in any way. If you decide Apache is vital for you as a home user to 'test your webpages' (though viewing them in your browser from a local filesystem that replicates your intended file structure on the server should be more than sufficient for this), then you can freely download all the relevant rpms and set it up.
If you decide you need anything else on the distro, you can pick it up from any one of dozens of mirrors. We're just talking about different collections of packages here, that could be used to make up hundreds of thousands of different Linux installations, not some kind of computing Berlin wall. If you wanted to make your personal edition the exact match of your buddy's pro installation, it will just involve you in a bit of downloading and tinkering. Or you could just ante up the few dollars difference first time round. We're not exactly talking about big money here, are we? SuSE still represents quite unbelievable value, really folks, look at what this outfit is doing for you and then compare it with what others are willing to sell you.
I agree 100% with what Fergus said. There's no way SuSE can statisfied every need with personal version. There might always be someone who feel that SuSE need to put at least 1 more package... And SuSE did good to seperate the pro as more to server solution and personal as more desktop solution. Although Apache might be usefull for user want to test their web pages, but it's more to the network. And for average joe installing apache and having broadband is not a good idea, it could lead to security issue if he didn't know he has some web server running. I do believe if you need apache, or other network component, then you should be the pro user.