[olug] Suse 9.3 Pro download

[Brian Roberson]

good post - see inline comments...

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 11:27:05PM -0400, Dave Hull wrote:
> 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.

true - but are you saying you do not have a testing environment to test new kernels?

how many times have you ran into this? ( unable to boot after kern update on suse ) 
I have yet to experience this... not saying it could *not* happen; but after 7 years of
suse on a wide variety of hardware... it has never came up... I attribute this to the 
stellar QA SuSE does on their kernel packages.


> 
> 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.
> 

yast firewall - cant get easier than that...



> 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.
> 

yast sw_single 
or
yast sw_single "packagename"

> 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
> 
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