Is it really necessary to throw away rpm's??

English Open Chat
#1

Hello,

Now that the support period for OpenSuSE has been reduced to 18 months, I have an increasing number of machines that are outside support. I can understand that, but why throw away the rpm’s??

I can understand it, Novell want people to buy enterprise editions. The problem with enterprise editions is that they are targetted at, well, enterprises, and not Linux professionals. To name one of those things: SLED has a fixed GNOME desktop, not really what a Linux professional wants.

I’m a loyal SuSE customer, I have boxes of 5.3, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, 9.1 9.2, 10.1. They were great, and had great 3 years support. Well, not for 10.1, which was ****, when contacting Novell it came down to “Go away, use OpenSuSE, we don’t need your money anymore.” So I used OpenSuSE.

The consequences are this **** situation that users must be pestered away into enterprise distributions, and one of those measures is throwing the RPM’s away. Which is darn frustrating, as it prevents you doing your own support.

Think about it, money is not the issue. I would be more than happy to pay the +/- 100 euros a SuSE Linux Professional did cost for some extended support period.

#2

What sort of support do you generally ask for?
What do you mean by “throw away rpms”?

#3

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SLED has KDE there as an option and, while it is not the default, I have
always installed it and used the KDE apps I like within Gnome, though I
could just as easily (and have before) login with the full KDE
environment. Defaulting to Gnome does not preclude KDE with SLE anymore
than it does for OpenSUSE’s defaults. This is one (of many) reason(s)
that I like SUSE distros… an abundance of choice.

Regarding support, well, I’m not in charge of that. I never ran the
community versions of SUSE before 11.1 and that I only run for limited
things (my wife’s laptop, an OpenVZ server I am tinkering with, and random
duplications for customers). Most that I’ve heard back on this front have
wanted to upgrade by the time eighteen months have passed anyway
considering the rate of change in Linux currently. Just from 11.1 to 11.2
KDE has gone from a fairly-painful 4.1 (I think) to 4.3 which appears to
be significantly better, and the pre-release stuff on 4.4 is also looking
great. I understand the standpoint of wanting support for longer periods
of time (I work in Support after all) and I imagine changes limiting
support are done to help decrease demands on testing resources.

Good luck.

dmantione wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Now that the support period for OpenSuSE has been reduced to 18 months,
> I have an increasing number of machines that are outside support. I can
> understand that, but why throw away the rpm’s??
>
> I can understand it, Novell want people to buy enterprise editions. The
> problem with enterprise editions is that they are targetted at, well,
> enterprises, and not Linux professionals. To name one of those things:
> SLED has a fixed GNOME desktop, not really what a Linux professional
> wants.
>
> I’m a loyal SuSE customer, I have boxes of 5.3, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, 7.1,
> 8.0, 8.2, 9.1 9.2, 10.1. They were great, and had great 3 years support.
> Well, not for 10.1, which was ****, when contacting Novell it came down
> to “Go away, use OpenSuSE, we don’t need your money anymore.” So I used
> OpenSuSE.
>
> The consequences are this **** situation that users must be pestered
> away into enterprise distributions, and one of those measures is
> throwing the RPM’s away. Which is darn frustrating, as it prevents you
> doing your own support.
>
> Think about it, money is not the issue. I would be more than happy to
> pay the +/- 100 euros a SuSE Linux Professional did cost for some
> extended support period.
>
>
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#4

This is mostly done to free up storage space as they don’t have unlimited storage. However, there are mirrors around that keep RPMs of (very) outdated SUSE versions, going back to SuSE 7.3

Index of /Mirrors/ftp.suse.com/update
ftp://ftp.hosteurope.de/mirror/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/discontinued/i386/

That said, compared to other community distro’s, openSUSE with its 18 months support time is much better than them. Look at Fedora/Ubuntu how soon they drop support for older versions and semi-force users to upgrade whenever a new version comes as the previous one will be soon out of support

Now, if you want to have very long support time but don’t want to buy into commercial Novell offerings, then try out CentOS or Ubuntu LTS

#5

Well, what originally inspired me to write this e-mail was that I wanted to install a sound editor on my 10.3 system, for example:

Kwave - A sound editor for KDE

I don’t mind compiling it from source, … only I can’t compile it from source because I am missing some -devel packages and the OpenSuSE 10.3 rpms have been deleted from the mirrors. Even I had burned them to CD’s, I believe my KDE installation comes from the Build Service, which also has all 10.3 material deleted, so it would still have been a problem to get the right -devel packages.

I searched for various other sound editors, for none I had the -devel prerequisites installed. I did end up finding some command line tool that I was able to compile.

#6

syampillai wrote:
> What do you mean by “throw away rpms”?

my guess: online repos removed from servers/mirrors

–
palladium
Ubuntu is an African word meaning “I can’t set up Debian.”

#7

Okay… But does SLED give the same experience as a SuSE Linux Professional? I highly doubt it, it’s simply not targetted at people for which Linux is more than just a hobby. But maybe I should order one just to try…

You put the finger where it hurts :slight_smile: I have been testing with KDE4 on OpenSuSE 11.2 lately and it’s certainly becoming a usable desktop, but still so much behind 3.5 in functionality that’s it is a though decision wether I should upgrade my three 10.3 desktops to 11.1 or 11.2…

Well, things like security updates and so on are one thing. Security updates are certainly important, as you don’t want to recompile all your applications every week, it’s good to have a distributor do that.

However, if necessary I can take a source RPM from a newer SuSE and compile it to do my support myself. I have succesfully done that in the past. However you need -devel packages for that, and without the ability to download those, your computer becomes increasingly hard to use.

#8

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Save yourself the money… download the free evaluation from
download.novell.com. Only updates are temporary… the system works forever.

Good luck.

dmantione wrote:
> ab@novell.com;2102365 Wrote:
>> SLED has KDE there as an option and, while it is not the default, I
>> have always installed it and used the KDE apps I like within Gnome,
>> though I could just as easily (and have before) login with the full KDE
>> environment. Defaulting to Gnome does not preclude KDE with SLE anymore
>> than it does for OpenSUSE’s defaults. This is one (of many) reason(s)
>> that I like SUSE distros… an abundance of choice.
>>
>
> Okay… But does SLED give the same experience as a SuSE Linux
> Professional? I highly doubt it, it’s simply not targetted at people for
> which Linux is more than just a hobby. But maybe I should order one just
> to try…
>
> ab@novell.com;2102365 Wrote:
>> Regarding support, well, I’m not in charge of that. I never ran the
>> community versions of SUSE before 11.1 and that I only run for limited
>> things (my wife’s laptop, an OpenVZ server I am tinkering with, and
>> randomduplications for customers). Most that I’ve heard back on this
>> front have
>> wanted to upgrade by the time eighteen months have passed anyway
>> considering the rate of change in Linux currently. Just from 11.1 to
>> 11.2
>> KDE has gone from a fairly-painful 4.1 (I think) to 4.3 which appears
>> to
>> be significantly better, and the pre-release stuff on 4.4 is also
>> looking
>> great.
>>
>
> You put the finger where it hurts :slight_smile: I have been testing with KDE4 on
> OpenSuSE 11.2 lately and it’s certainly becoming a usable desktop, but
> still so much behind 3.5 in functionality that’s it is a though decision
> wether I should upgrade my three 10.3 desktops to 11.1 or 11.2…
>
> ab@novell.com;2102365 Wrote:
>> I understand the standpoint of wanting support for longer periods
>> of time (I work in Support after all) and I imagine changes limiting
>> support are done to help decrease demands on testing resources.
>>
>> Good luck.
>>
>
> Well, things like security updates and so on are one thing. Security
> updates are certainly important, as you don’t want to recompile all your
> applications every week, it’s good to have a distributor do that.
>
> However, if necessary I can take a source RPM from a newer SuSE and
> compile it to do my support myself. I have succesfully done that in the
> past. However you need -devel packages for that, and without the ability
> to download those, your computer becomes increasingly hard to use.
>
>
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#9

The devel packages are compiled from source as well, so you could recreate them too…You’d end up with the entire system in sources…:wink:

#10

You are still on 10.3. Since you are trying to compile a sound editor, I am assuming that you are not running a server. Any specific reasons for not moving to recent versions?

#11

I manage a SLED box for professionals who prefer Gnome, including myself.

#12

Well, when I was still young and crazy, I tried to be up to date, my installations were regularily updated, I installed every new kernel etc. So, I can totally understand that a lot of users upgrade quickly.

But the more professional you get, the more you get interrested in keeping everything in working state. I’m often working from home, it’s not as critical as a server, but I cannot afford to have a non-working video card, not being able to print or fax, and it is even essential to have the sound card working perfectly as people cannot reach me over Skype in such case. Even a non-working PostgreSQL on my desktop could be a problem, it is my “experiments” database, but I may need to do some experiments.

Upgrading, no matter how good YaST is, always gives you some days of troubleshooting or at least things to check. As an example my 11.2 experiment left me with a non-booting computer because Lilo was no longer support, you quickly spend a few hours with boot-media to fix that. This all makes upgrading something you want to do as least as possible, at least it’s much more attractive to install the latest KDE, Firefox on your current system, rather than upgrade your distribution to the latest version.

P.s. of course I do have servers, what can a Linux user do without his personal mail server! :wink: I actually have two servers, one is still running 9.3 happily, the other has more need of support and runs the more up-to-date 11.1…

#13

The point is not that professionals don’t use Gnome, the point is that a Linux professional wants a toolbox that lets him select what’s needed for the particular system he is installing. And of course allows personal preferences.

Enterprise often means making choices for the end-user in the interrest of supporting him better.

#14

Hmmm… upgrading is never a good option, especially from 10.3
Also, the pgSQL databases wont get upgraded automatically to next major versions. It requires a dump (from the previous version) and restore.

#15

As far as I’m concerned openSUSE 11.2 is the BEST yet; especially using KDE4. No other distro comes close with KDE.

I understand your grievance but if you’re not happy with the way openSUSE does things then why not try something like Gentoo (that sounds more like your cup of tea anyway!). The other thing if you want to stay with openSUSE, the backup and reinstall. This, in my opinion, is the best way to upgrade.

Of course you could be a troll…

#16

Why? You could be one too :wink:

But seriously… I don’t see a need or desire to switch to something else. I’m letting my favourite distribution know that the quicker rpm deletion policy is creating problems for me…

#17

Here’s a solution for you, that covers a lot:

Install 11.2 alongside 10.3; build it up until it works as it should. You could to that in the time you’re saving by not having to compile everything from sources, up to reinventing the wheel.
Upgrading works now, by merely changing repos to a newer version. Done it on a small file server from 11.0 to 11.2 yesterday, took just one hour, reboot, done.
And what, if one day your videocard sends the last farewell? You might find that you cannot get it to work, due to a too old kernel.

Recent Linux distros all seam to be working on this matter. Maybe one of these days the need for a clean install will completely go away.