The Linux Beacon--openSUSE 11.0 Out the Door and On the Street

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Volume 6, Number 25 -- June 24, 2008

openSUSE 11.0 Out the Door and On the Street

Published: June 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to get a sneak peek at some of the features that will eventually be delivered as part of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 variants for servers and PCs, you can now get it from the openSUSE project, the development effort that creates the code that eventually makes its way into the commercialized SLES and SLED releases. That's because openSUSE 11.0 is now available.

Last week, in an effort to try to steal a little thunder from Red Hat at its customer and partner summit in Boston, the openSUSE project timed the release of openSUSE 11 to coincide with the first day of Red Hat Summit. (Red Hat also makes a habit of making announcements during Novell's BrainShare conference for users and customers. This is ever the way in the IT space.)

The openSUSE project is calling openSUSE 11 a "major update" over previous 10.X releases, and says that there are more than 200 new features and updates to hundreds of applications that are offered as part of the openSUSE stack. It all starts with the Linux kernel, of course, and openSUSE 11.0 is based on the 2.6.25 kernel and is coded with the GCC 4.3 compiler set and the glibc 2.8 libraries. Novell supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, 64-bit Power (IBM System i and System p servers as well as Apple Mac's predating the introduction of X64 chips in the line prior to 2006), 64-bit Itanium, and mainframe processors (which are 31-bit and 64-bit machines, depending on the generation), but openSUSE 11.0 is only available on X86 and X64 processors and System p and Apple PowerPC machines.

The openSUSE 11.0 distro includes the Gnome 2.22 or KDE 4.0 interfaces (and Novell's Gnome project is obviously the default graphical user interface). This is the first openSUSE release that supports the KDE alternative, however, so don't think Novell doesn't appreciate that plenty of users like KDE. (SUSE 8 and earlier releases, which predate Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in November 2003, had equal support for KDE and Gnome.) KDE 3.5 is still available as the option if you don't want to upgrade yet. If you feel like going super-modern, the Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 3D extensions to these interfaces are also available.

The distribution also includes the Firefox 3.0 beta 5, and will be updated with the final 3.0 code once it is available through an online update; the Banshee 1.0 media player is also in the mix, and has been rewritten, according to Novell, to boost its performance and to add video playback. The OpenOffice 2.4 office automation package is in there, too, with Novell's extended Excel and VBA macro support. The project has also redesigned the installer program for openSUSE (and soon, SUSE Linux) to make it easier to install this Linux and manage applications. The YaST tool was, as it turns out, ported to the Qt4 language, which KDE and a number of other programs are coded in, and that means YaST is a lot snazzier. It has also been completely redone under the hood to make it a lot quicker at doing the installation.

Interestingly, openSUSE includes Wine 1.0 Release Candidate 3, the nearly completed first release of the Windows runtime environment that has been in development for--no kidding--15 years. Wine allows programs written for Windows to run on Linux, BSD Unix, and Solaris for X86/X64 operating systems, and currently there are nearly 1,500 Windows applications that can run on the environment. It is not, strictly speaking, an emulator, but a Windows runtime that makes an application think it is running on a Windows machine when it is on a Unix-alike box. This is akin to Sun Microsystems' Project Janus Red Hat containers in Solaris. The software doesn't emulate Linux inside Solaris, but translate APIs and calls on the fly so Linux calls are converted to Solaris calls and hit the right resources. Wine is, in fact, short for Wine Is Not Emulator.

openSUSE 11.0 is available in single DVD images, one for KDE and one for Gnome; LiveCDs are also available. Novell is happy to sell you a boxed set with a manual and 90 days of installation support for $59.95.

The latest openSUSE release is, of course, the code base from which the future SLES 11, SLED 11, and SLERT 11 server, desktop, and real-time server variants of SUSE Linux will be derived. Novell previewed some of the features in SUSE Linux 11 back at the end of March, which I told you all about here. In short, SUSE Linux 11 will have better networking and virtualization support and an appliance variant, too.

Novell Puts Out JEOS Beta, Starts Appliance Effort

Novell Previews Features in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

Novell Taps Zonker to Manage openSUSE Project

openSUSE Build Service Pumps Out Red Hat, CentOS Packages

Novell Delivers openSUSE 10.3 Linux Development Release

OpenSUSE Turns Two, Novell Celebrates with 10.3 Beta

The openSUSE Project Ships 10.2 Release

Novell's openSUSE Effort Gains Steam

Novell Launches Public Build System, Previews SUSE 10.1

Novell to Set SUSE Linux 10.0 Loose in October

Novell Opens Up Development for SUSE Linux

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Top 500 Super Ranking Now Counts Watts as Well as Flops

Red Hat Launches oVirt Embedded KVM Hypervisor Project

openSUSE 11.0 Out the Door and On the Street

As I See It: Flights of Fancy

HP Donates the Guts of Tru64 Unix's File System to Linux

But Wait, There's More:

Rackable Systems Pushes the Server Density Envelope with New Gear . . . Sun Adds Low-End Constellation Switch, New Quad-Socket Blade . . . Sysload Delivers Fine-Grain Monitoring for Virtual Servers . . . Agilysys Hires JPMorgan for Possible Sale . . . IBM Says SOA Deployments Will Rise in 2008, But What About SMBs? . . .