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SuSE

22 January 2008 5 views One Comment

(pronounced /ˈsuːsə/[1], German: IPA: [ˈzuːzə]) is a major retail distribution, produced in Germany and owned by , Inc. is also a founding member of the Consortium.

As of version 10.2 Alpha 3, the distribution is officially named openSUSE.

History

The distribution was originally a German translation of Slackware . The Slackware distribution (maintained by Patrick Volkerding) was initially based largely on SLS. In mid-1992, Softlanding (SLS) was founded by Peter MacDonald, and was the first comprehensive distribution to contain elements such as and TCP/IP.

S.u.S.E was founded in late 1992 as a consulting group, which among other things regularly released packages that included SLS and Slackware, and printed / manuals. S.u.S.E is an acronym for the German phrase “- und -Entwicklung” (” and development”), however in English speaking communities a rumour still circulates that the name is a tribute to the German Konrad Zuse, whose name in English has similar pronunciation. They released the first CD version of SLS/Slackware in 1994, under the name S.u.S.E 1.0. It later integrated with the Jurix distribution by Florian La Roche, to release the first really unique S.u.S.E 4.2 in 1996. Over time, incorporated many aspects of (e.g., using RPMs and /etc/sysconfig). In a move to more effectively reach its , introduced the in 2001, and consecutively changed the name to in September 2003 as a part of its overall new branding strategy, as announced by ’s marketing VP Uwe Schmid.

On November 4, 2003, announced it would acquire . The was finalized in January 2004. J. (’s corporate strategist for the Pacific region) stated that would not “in the medium term” alter the way in which continues to be developed. At ’s annual BrainShare gathering in 2004, all ran for the first time. At this gathering it was also announced that the proprietary administration program YaST2 would be released into the public under the GPL license.

On August 4, 2005, spokesman and director of public relations Bruce Lowry announced that the development of the Professional will become more open and within the community project openSUSE try to reach a wider of users and developers. The , by definition of open , already had their coding “open,” but now the development process will be more “open” than before, allowing developers and users to test the product and help develop it. Previously all development work was done in-house by , and version 10.0 was the first version that had public beta testing. As part of the change, YaST Update access will be complimentary for users, and along the lines of most open distributions, there will both be a free download available on the web and a boxed edition. This change in philosophy led to the release of the 10.0 release on October 6, 2005 in “OSS” (completely open ), “eval” (has both open and proprietary applications and is actually a fully featured version) and retail boxed-set editions.

The current mascot of is commonly referred to as a gecko called Geeko, but is actually a chameleon.

Features

Several environments such as and and managers like Maker and Blackbox are included, with the YaST2 installer allowing the user to choose a preselection of , , or no at all. ships with such as K3b (CD/DVD burning), Amarok (audio playback), and Kaffeine (movie playback). It contains .org, and for reading and/or creating other common document formats such as PDF. Due to patent problems, the distribution lacks codecs for proprietary formats like avi, but these can be installed with packages available on the . MP3s are handled in the fully capable graphical media studio Amarok with the Helix engine (part of RealNetworks’ RealPlayer), when RealPlayer is installed. This is due to an agreement between and RealNetworks to ship RealPlayer with as a to MP3 patent problems.[citation needed]

Starting with the 10.1 release, includes a secondary installation program known as Zen-Updater, which can be used as a secondary means of installing and replaces -updater providing notification of updates on the .

has support for resizing NTFS during installation which allows it to co-exist with existing 2000 or XP installations. has the ability to detect and drivers for many common winmodems shipped with OEM and systems (such modems are designed to use -specific to operate).

Administration Settings (YaST)

includes an installation and administration program called YaST2 which handles hard disk partitioning, setup, package management, updates, and firewall configuration, user administration and more in an integrated interface. YaST also integrates with SaX2 to help users handle their graphics card and monitor, touch displays, and even additional monitors with Xinerama. In more recent times, many more YaST modules have been added including support.

Xgl and Compiz

In January 2, 2006, developer David Reveman announced Xgl, an architecture designed to take advantage of modern via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. Compiz, one of the first compositing managers for the that is able to take advantage of this OpenGL-acceleration, was also released.

Innovations ()

has been a leading contributor to for many years, and now sponsors more developers to work directly on than any other distribution. Hence, ’s contributions in this area have been very wide-ranging, and affecting many parts of such as kdelibs and kdebase, kdepim, and kdenetwork. Other notable projects include:

* KNetworkManager - a front-end to NetworkManager.
* Kickoff - a new K menu for .

Innovations ()

The Ximian group became part of , and in turn made and continued several contributions to with applications such as F-Spot, Evolution and Banshee. The now uses the slab instead of the classic double-panelled menu bars.

Build Service

The openSUSE Build Service provides developers with a tool to , release and publish their for many distributions, including Mandriva, , and Debian. It typically simplifies the packaging process, so developers can more easily package a single program for many distributions, and many openSUSE releases, making more packages available to users regardless of what distribution version they use. It is published under the GPL.

Versions

The latest release, openSUSE 10.3 is available as a retail package and as a no-cost open package. In terms of , there are major differences between the two packages (see Reference below), including the fact that the retail edition contains a number of proprietary components, such as Adobe . In addition, the retail package, available for 59.95 USD, includes a printed manual and limited . openSUSE is available to download freely from their . The retail and eval versions contain one DVD and six CDs, while openSUSE now uses only one CD. It is the second release to be called openSUSE, versions before openSUSE 10.2 were called .

Other varieties include editions and groupware geared towards corporate networks and enterprises, along with a stripped-down which runs some designed for out of the box by virtue of .

(SLES) and (SLED) are ’s branded version of at corporate environments. product line (SLES and SLED) include some proprietary as well as . For instance, 9 (SLES 9) has fewer packages (around 1,000 packages) than the Professional (consumer) distribution which has around 3,500 packages. Most of the packages that have been removed are applications which are more suited to consumers than to a environment. SLES has a guaranteed life cycle of 7 years and only the SLES products are certified by independent and vendors.

Distribution

In the past first released the Personal and Professional versions in boxed sets which included extensive printed documentation, then waited a few months before it released versions on its FTP . Under and with the advent of openSUSE this has been reversed: 10.0 was available for download well before the retail release of 10.0. In addition, has discontinued the Personal version, renamed the Professional version to simply “ ”, and repriced “ ” to about the same as the obsolete Personal version. Now has also renamed to openSUSE with version 10.2 of the distro.

Starting with version 9.2, an unsupported 1 DVD ISO image of Professional was made available for download as well as a bootable LiveDVD evaluation. The FTP continues to operate and has the advantage of “streamlined” installs: Only downloading packages the user feels they need. The ISO has the advantages of an easy package, the ability to operate even if the user’s card does not work ‘out of the box’, and less experience needed (i.e., an inexperienced user may not know whether or not to a certain package, and the ISO offers several preselected sets of packages). The retail box DVD supports x86, and x86_64 installs, but the included CD-ROMs do not include x86_64 support. OpenSUSE 10.3 is available for download as a DVD iso-image. This image is also available in a 32-bit or 64-bit version. It can be freely accessed at the . It can be downloaded either by or HTTP. Of course it is also available as a download to CD-ROM. It too is available for a 32 or 64-bit .

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One Comment »

  • webmaster (author) said:

    I use SuSE for a few year… but now moving to Ubuntu

    # 14 February 2008 at 10:07 am

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