OpenSUSE Meanderings

Posted: November 14th, 2008 | Author: telcor | Filed under: Information Technology (IT), KDE, Linux, Software, Work | Tags: , , |

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

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