[olug] Differences between SuSE and RH

[Obi-Wan]

> This is not a troll, really! :)    I've recently accepted a new position and 
> will be moving from a SLES shop to a Red Hat Enterprise shop.  I haven't used 
> Red Hat since about RH7, so I've got some catching up to do.  Here's a few 
> questions. 

We're mostly RHEL here, with a tiny bit of SLES.  I used OpenSUSE on my
desktop at work for a year, but finally got fed up & switched to Ubuntu.
No looking back!

> 1) If I pull down a recent Fedora and fire it up, will that get me fairly 
> close to the way Enterprise does things?

Kinda sorta.  If you want a free equivalent to play with, use CentOS.
It's compiled directly from the RHEL source tree.  Aside from replacing
"redhat" with "centos" in most of the package names and graphics, it's
pretty much identical.  We use it for all our test boxes.

> 2) What major differences (besides the package manager) can I expect between 
> RH Enterprise and SuSE Enterprise?

The package manager is the biggest thing that I've seen.  I agree with
Andy--YaST is a cruel joke the devil is playing on SuSE admins.  up2date
and yum are much better.  RHEL5 is yum-only.  Early revisions of RHEL4
can only use up2date (which I prefer), while later revisions can use
either.

Both are rpm-based, and many rpm's will install on either OS.

RHEL is more widely supported than SLES for enterprise apps, so you're
unlikely to find any apps that run on SLES but not RHEL.