OpenSUSE Meanderings
Written 14 Nov 2008
At work we debated adding OpenSUSE 11 as an officially supported platform[ 1]. In the past, when doing this, I’ve preferred using the targeted platform exclusively for an extended period. For various reasons, this hasn’t been feasible this time. While testing time has been devoted to it, that doesn’t give one the same familiarity as using it for daily tasks.
Since I am a KDE user, I decided to convert my Kubuntu home desktop[ 2] to OpenSUSE 11, using KDE 3.5. This conversion happened about two months ago. While it isn’t quite the same, it has provided a very nice experience which augmented our testing.
From the personal, non-work related, standpoint, I am very satisfied with OpenSUSE 11 as a deskop OS. The developers have produced a very usable KDE environment. I’m looking forward to upgrading to KDE 4.2 in OpenSUSE 11.1. The distro as a whole “feels” (subjective I know) more complete and solid than Kubuntu. At some point I will distill my thoughts into a real article, but this is all for now.
From the work-related standpoint, we will eventually support OpenSUSE, but it will require a bit more work and time than planned. Part of the reassessment stems from the need to refactor both processes and code to work with a non-YUM[3][4] based system. In the long run this will be a good thing however as zypper is far more robust application than YUM.
[1] We actually will unofficially support operating systems. This means if someone opens a support ticket with us, we will assist the user to surmount an issue. This typically does not involve submitting changes to our product. However, even that is a guideline. Some months ago a ticket came in regarding FreeBSD jails. We don’t support such, and the customer knew it, however he was willing and able to work around various deficiencies to run our product and had done so for a few years. A recent change in our product broke his setup. I was able to track down the change and we provided a fix that was merged into the product. In this case the fix benefited the wider audience. return
[2] For sometime I had contemplated migrating from Kubuntu as many things about just were no longer satisfying. return
[3] One test was to install YUM and put our product through its paces. YUM was adequate for installing most packages, but it simply cannot replace zypper for full system package management. There were times when YUM simply could not update the system, requiring us to use zypper. return
[4] This is non-YUM Linux as we do support FreeBSD although our handling of package management therein is rather poor. Standard procedure for experienced users of our Product on that platform is to disable our product’s management of Ports and Packages. return