[olug] Suse 9.3 Pro download

[Dave Hull]

During this thread, someone asked:

> How would you guys rate Suse 9.3 to Fedora Core 4, or other distros?

While I haven't used 9.3, I'll throw a few cents at you.

I've used many distros over the years and have been paid to support RHEL and
SLES 9. My preference is for RHEL (and FC).

On RH and FC, when you update the kernel, the previous version and it's 
compiled
modules are left in place and booting to them is a simple matter of selecting
the kernel version you want from the grub menu.

Under SLES, when you update the kernel, the old one and it's modules 
are removed
from the system. If the new kernel doesn't work, oops. You can't simply reboot
and pick the old kernel from the menu. You've got to get a CD with the old
kernel version on it and boot from CD then uninstall the new kernel and
reinstall the old one.

Secondly, the default rule set for RHEL/FC IPTables is simple. You can look at
it and make sense of it in fairly short order. Hence, maintaining it is easy.

Under SLES, the default rule set for IPTables is approximately a hundred lines
of overkill and as a result, it's difficult to maintain.

Thirdly, RHEL and FC3 (and up), both use up2date to keep systems 
patched and to
install new software and it will resolve dependencies for you automatically.
You can configure it to save old packages so you can "roll back" to a previous
version if needed. Up2date can be used from the command line which is nice on
servers with no XWindows, and you can run it from cron to keep systems updated
automatically.

SLES uses online_update from the command line, but you can't install new
packages with it. You can only update currently installed packages. To install
new software you have to use Yast which is an XWindows or Curses gui
application.

There are times when it's nice to run up2date <package> to install something
that you don't currently have on the system.

One thing I don't like about RH/FC is the lack of native support for NTFS and
mp3. I understand they are taking the high ground and all, but having to
recompile modules to support those "standards" gets old.

I'll give Suse this, their email support is top notch. They are very 
helpful and
quick to respond, but I never had to use Red Hat's support via email so 
I can't
vouch for it.

Good luck.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com