for a new project we’re deciding on the distro to use, and openSUSE is one of the contenders. Since we expect a need to install 3rd party software, and we see that quite a lot of this software is not packaged for openSUSE, but it is for SLES, I have the following question:
Is it, in general, possible to install SLES packages on openSUSE?
Background: I’m mostly talking about hardware vendors that provide some RPMS for their own software. Often these are only available for RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu. I’m fairly new to openSUSE and although I like what I have seen I worry about future problems with these kinds of packages.
Is it, in general, possible to install SLES packages on openSUSE?
can you install them, sure why not. Will they run, that’s a different question the software might or might not run as LEAP is based on SLE 12.
I’m mostly talking about hardware vendors that provide some RPMS for their own software. Often these are only available for RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu.
if that’s a low level driver the chance of it working is low, I did run vlc for SLE under openSUSE LEAP 42.1 for a week or so because there wore no LEAP packages out and while vlc did run there was a missing dependency that couldn’t be satisfied so…
The real answer is SLE 12 packages might run on LEAP but don’t count on it.
But with the exception of anything kernel-related, if LEAP is based on SLE 12, than a package that was built for SLE 12 would run on LEAP, right? How closely is LEAP following SLE 12 library versions and such? Is there any information on that?
That’s pure speculation, it depends on how the application was compiled, for example the ancient skype for opensuse 12.1 runs great on LEAP, as I said vlc for SLE12 ran good on LEAP (there was a missing library libcdio14 that is included in SLE but depreciated in LEAP), I also used libxine2 for SLE on LEAP with the same missing library, I would speculate that a package for SLE has a greater probability running on LEAP then a package for RHEL running on Fedora.
Even tho LEAP is based on SLE 12, SLE12 is more then a year older LEAP has a lot of newer packages actually LEAP is more closely related to the upcoming SLE 12 SP1 then SLE 12 gold.
If I’m not mistaken SLE 12 uses the 3.12 kernel while LEAP is on 4.1 and that’s a big Leap
edit
one of the things I like about openSUSE is that they try and abide the LSB (so does SLE) the chances of interoperability are real stull they depend on the software vendor and how he compiled and linked his application.
Some of the apps I’m running (particularly virtualization) are on the leading/bleeding edge of implementation.
What I’ve found is that for practically everything either third party 13.2 or SLES 12 packages will work almost all the time but there are a few times when <neither> will work.
And then of course you make a decision… either attempt to build from source or avoid the requirement altogether if you can.
