SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) discussion thread.

A thread about the end of support for openSUSE-11.1has me curious about SLED. We still have 2 PCs in our family (a laptop and my mother’s old PC) running openSUSE-11.1 and clearly in the case of those PCs, if it were not for support stopping for openSUSE-11.1 I might have considered using those PCs longer.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) purportedly has longer term support. I previous rejected SLED because of what I perceived as a lack of 3rd party support, but it appears with the openSUSE (SuSE ?) build service this has been addressed, as was pointed out in the above end of support for openSUSE-11.1 thread.

So how does one buy SLED ? From a shop such as the Novell SLED site here: Linux Desktop: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop by Novell . What is the typical pricing? An initial purchase of €49 or €100 ? (I get this from checking the price in Euro its only €100 SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop - European pricing )

How does one maintain continued updates ? Is €100 required every year?

Who on our openSUSE forum uses SLED ? (I know there is a separate SLED forum, but I’m curious as to the views of those who visit our openSUSE forum).

Comments anyone?

Hi
It’s a matter of shopping around to find a reseller, I used CDW and
have a three year electronic license for updates at US$105 for the three
years. The only issue I had was not using my Novell account email
address when purchasing, so had to raise a support request to get it
sorted.

Service packs seem to run between 18-24months, I think then it’s about
6 months after that for updating. Updating on SLED11 is painless
process with zypper and works fine (sort of a zypper dup) on my tests;
<http://www.novell.com/support/php/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=7005410&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_TID_1_1&dialogID=174143570&stateId=0%200%20174145205&gt;

Now that packman have started packaging on their instance of OBS
initially for multimedia, then all the rest will follow :wink:

SLE is also available on SuSE Studio, so you could always create a live
cd to try out on your systems?

It also has KDE3 and KDE4 (I’ve only tried KDE4).

You can download the SDK which gives access to all the devel packages
and things like apache, mysql etc along with updates. If you have
multiple machines (as in my case) you can add the SMT component to
distribute updates locally.

Along with OBS I can build most of my favorite applications, all in all
to me SLE is just a mellow version of openSUSE :wink:

But I do now dual boot this desktop with openSUSE 11.3 and my netbook
as well. But the netbook probably spends more time running openSUSE.


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.32.23-0.3-default
up 1 day 9:44, 3 users, load average: 0.02, 0.08, 0.04
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 260.19.12

I’m currently trying to get a handle on the SLED life cycle … I read in a wiki on SuSE:

… products target corporate environments, with a higher life cycle (5 years, extendable to 7), a longer development cycle (24 to 36 months, a guarantee of stability at the potential expense of development speed, longer technical support and certification by independent hardware and software vendors. SUSE Linux Enterprise products are only available for sale (updates fees).

and also read in a wiki on SLED:

New major versions are released at an interval of 24–36 months, while minor versions (called service packs) are released every 9–12 months.
which is consistent with what you noted, but the figure I am curious about is the final life cycle (5 years expendable to 7) …

I’m wondering if as one approaches 5 years (and likely even a year or two before) the availability of 3rd party packages from packagers such as Packman (and other build service packagers) is they will provide less and less packages. I am worried of a risk that the packages simply won’t compile any more due to dated SLED libraries, … or are the SLED updates significantly encompassing in size to prevent this from happening?

Hi
The additional 2 years is self support on the novell forums.

SLE 9 is still on OBS, not sure when that came out… The only thing on OBS it’s the default install packages, so no updates as such, eg kernel so whilst you can build a module for the default install eg 2.6.32.x and your kernel is updated the module won’t be unless you rebuild from the kernel source. That being said, it does drop the module into weak-updates so it will keep working.

If it’s mainly packman items, guess we need to ask them :slight_smile: (I’ve asked yaloki on IRC)

It all depends on what your using the system for, really suggest if someone is interested to download and try out, you get a 60 day key for updates, then the system will keep going…just no updates.

The main reason SLED would interest me would be for my mother’s PC, where she lives 9,000km away, and I maintain it remotely and I have physical access only once/year or sometimes only every 2nd year. Needless to say, the 18 month life cycle of openSUSE is not really compatible with a visit every 24 months. I’m purchasing a new PC (HP P6510F) for my mother this year and plan to setup openSUSE-11.3 on it in 2 weeks. I believe the motherboard in that PC needs a relatively new kernel for the ethernet (either 2.6.33 or 2.6.34 I think) so I don’t believe it is suitable to install SLED-11 (or if it is, then after the kernel install an immediate kernel update will be needed).

So in the mean time (for the next year or two) I could bring my self up to speed an any quirks in SLED (by installing it on one of my PCs) and thus be more technical aware when it comes to installing it on my mother’s PC.

There may also be office related aspects where SLED familiarity could be useful, but I’m constantly worried (and need to tread a fine line) about conflicts of interest there, so I try hard to stear clear of direct involvement with SLED in the office.

Hi
On that model it may only be the broadcom wireless that may require the wl driver, ethernet should be fine with the r8169 driver, else it’s easy enough to build it from;
Realtek

Hi
And the driver is already on the OBS…

Index of /repositories/drivers:/nic/SLE_11_SP1

I note there is an interesting review of SLED Service Pack 1 here: Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 Service Pack 1 (SLED11SP1) It’s About Time - Kernel News

oldcpu wrote:

> I’m wondering if as one approaches 5 years (and likely even a year or
> two before) the availability of 3rd party packages from packagers such
> as Packman (and other build service packagers) is they will provide less
> and less packages. I am worried of a risk that the packages simply
> won’t compile any more due to dated SLED libraries, … or are the SLED
> updates significantly encompassing in size to prevent this from
> happening?

It’s a justfiable “fear”. But there’s no panacea solution. Obviously, it’s
better to start with the “new” thing as soon as possible.

Service Packs are the best attempt at the “answer”. But they don’t always
do what you want. Service Packs are not an attempt to do an “end around”
the versioning process. So, ideally, SP1 will not attempt to trade Perl 5
for Perl 6 (ok, I’m using an absurd example intentionally). However, SP1,
MIGHT provide an additional, optional upgrade set of software/libraries…
but it’s a difficult thing to do. SLES 11 SP1 did a MAJOR kernel upgrade…
that’s UNUSUAL… even if wise in that particular case.

Red Hat also tries to deal with this problem. However, they removed the
terminology “Update” and switched to using minor numbers to denote their
style of “Service Packs”. This was done in RHEL 4.5 and cause great
confusion (and Red Hat profited off of that confusion). Essentially, many
legacy/comptability things got dropped with RHEL 5… and creating a “new”
release called 4.5 made it look like Red Hat was listening and was going
back to the RHEL 4 line, when all they really did was change from calling it
RHEL 4 Update 5, to calling it RHEL 4.5… but many customers viewed it as
a NEW release and actually purchased new subscriptions (when their existing
RHEL 4 subscription ALREADY covered the upgrade). Tricky.

IMHO, the desktop can prove to be the worst case scenario. We do NOT run
SLED for that reason, but prefer openSUSE instead… ditto for the other
choices out there (Fedora, Ubuntu (not LTS)). Even with the rapid release
cycles of openSUSE though… the problem STILL HAPPENS!! (just can never get
it granular enough to satisfy the world’s “everything… NOW” demands). So,
IMHO, unless your desktop is VERY static (like a large company for
instance), you’re better off with the something with a short lifespan.

In general (for SLE):

  1. Patches mostly fix security issues.
  2. Some SLE patches ARE done to fix broken things (yippee! Support!.. won’t
    get that with openSUSE… well… not directly)
  3. Service Packs are used to RAISE the compatibility base so that more “new”
    stuff works. In general, version numbers of packages do not change too
    greatly even with SPs if it can be helped.
  4. New VERSIONS are how functionality/package version upgrades are handled
    (e.g. SLED 10 going to SLED 11).

I installed SLED-11 SP1 on my 32-bit Athlon-2800 (Asus A7N8X motherboard) with 2GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 8400GS PCI (not PCI-e) graphic card.

Some observations, and this is by no means intended to be a complete nor partial review …

**Slick installation:
**
The installation graphics in SLED are even more ‘slick’ than what I have noticed with openSUSE … possibly the resolution is higher ? … possible the colour selection of the patterns is superior … possibly I just have not done an openSUSE install for a few months and I forgot how nice it looks …

Media Check:
The installation has some neat menus right at the start, for the user to check the quality of the burned CD. openSUSE does not have these menus.

Gnome is Default Desktop
One is not given a KDE nor Gnome selection. Instead Gnome is installed by default. Later, when one is given the chance to review their planned Software Install, one can change to KDE from Gnome by selecting the KDE base pattern and de-selecting the Gnome. I went with the default Gnome setup. There is no xfce nor lxde selection.

Development pattern in software install
In the software update selection, to add the various compilation packages it is not called “Base Development pattern” but rather I think it was just “Developement Pattern” … It also picked up kernel-source and kernel-syms automatically by that selection which I think is a nice touch, … I always have to do that manually in openSUSE.

Repository observations
The repository setup tried to add the ATI repository (even though I have nVidia graphics) and kept failing there. It did add the nVidia repository. I assume many users would like that. I confess once I had completed the install I deselected the nVidia repository. I note having the nVidia repository did NOT automatically help with the SLED graphics (more on that later).

The repository setup kept failing with one repository, which I assume is the main SLED update repository … possible because I have not yet put in the commercial activation code … I’ll add that in a later install effort … For now I wanted to stick with the evaluation version and get a feeling of that.

Partitioning:
The partitioning failed to guess the partitioning setup I wanted in my PC (which has 2 hard drives and multiple partitions). That was no surprise (every distribution has the same hiccup and no crystal ball into my partitioning wants) and it was a simple, albeit slow, process to redirect where I wanted the / and /home installed.

Grub boot manager menus:
The grub proposal did NOT include my openSUSE-11.3 install that I wanted to keep. So I had to go and manually edit the grub selection from the installer menu. I suspect only a solid average user (which is what I consider myself) or an advanced user (someone out of my league) would feel comfortable in doing that sort of edit. I simply added sda5 to being a grub selection, telling grub to look for /boot/grub/menu.lst on sda5 as the openSUSE-11.3 boot selection. I later tested that and it worked. Note not having openSUSE by default in SLEDs grub boot proposal is NOT an issue. I suspect most SLED users will not have openSUSE as a selection and those who do will likely be skilled enough to apply a solution similar to what I applied.

MP3
The software selection automatically included gst-fluendo-mp3. I don’t know if that typically happens with openSUSE or if that is only a SLED feature.

fbdev driver and sax2
The release notes warned if graphics don’t work, one should use “sax2 -r -m 0=fbdev” , indicating sax2 is still on SLED and indicating a conservative but solid approach. The fbdev driver works with almost all graphic hardware. I noted there was an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and the fbdev driver was specified in that file.

The installation was very slow (much slower than what I experience on openSUSE) but it was successful, and I was able to boot into a gnome desktop. A check of the /var/log/Xorg.0.log indicated the desktop was using the fbdev graphic driver (and not “nv” nor “nouveau”). I later rebooted and installed the latest nVidia proprietary driver (and then ran nvidia-xconfig to recreate the xorg.conf file).

Sound.
Sound in Gnome ‘just worked’. I note this out of total suprise as my experience with Gnome on openSUSE is sound never worked, or when it did I had to fiddle a lot. I hate fiddling. So this was a pleasant surprise. A BIG surprise.

Packman
I added the SLED SP1 packman repository manually. There is no menu selection in YaST Software Repositories for this (unlike openSUSE which has such a community selection) and I think Novell have adopted the best approach here.

I note the SLED SP1 packman repository is very thinly populated. Mplayer and libxine1 installed. vlc was missing a dependency and would not install. I suspect I can rebuild the missing vlc dependency and I may do that this evening.

Conclusion
Installation was slow but painless. But I had no time to play as it was very late in the evening when I finished.

I have to rush off to work now. Maybe more observations later.

I want to test installing the proprietary Virtual Box on SLED 11. I note from the Virtual Box site that they have an rpm for SLES 11 but not SLED 11. Am I correct in assuming I can use the SLES 11 rpm on SLED 11 ? I’ll likely try anyway (the worst that can happen is it will fail and if it does I can just remove it … ).

Hi
Yes, same code base, should be fine.


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.3 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.34.7-0.5-default
up 17:49, 3 users, load average: 0.06, 0.07, 0.01
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 260.19.12

The repository that was failing is working now. Looks to me like one of the SLED repositories was down during my install ?

[quote=“malcolmlewis,post:12,topic:57567”]

Hi
Yes, same code base, should be fine.
[/QUOTE]Ok, I installed Virtual Box for SLES-11 and the GUI starts up. I have to try to install any OS inside Virtual Box. Maybe later tonight or this weekend.

Missing was libfluidsynth1. I note that was reportd on Packman in fluidsynth1. But then I discovered it was missing the dependency libportaudio which I presume comes from portaudio. That was NOT on Packman.

So I added (briefly) repository

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/libs/SLE_11/

and installed portaudio.

Once I did that, then vlc would install. I tested it and it plays audio well on SLED 11 SP1.

I hope to give ‘nx’ a try soon also.

One package that appears to be missing is x11vnc. I am too new to this to quickly find where it is located as a packaged rpm for SLED 11.

Hmmm … now that this repos is back up, turns out I have a 1.8 GByte update to apply ! :slight_smile:

I’ll get this 1.8 GByte update sorted before I try to chase this up.

Hi
There is a version here…
software.opensuse.org: Search Results

The gnome desktop already has it built in… you can just go to the menu (slab) Control Center and enable it as in remote desktop…

Thanks. That will save my rebuilding it. I tried “rpmbuild --rebuild x11vnc.some.src.rpm” but that then needed libjpeg-devel and openssl-devel as dependencies. I was (am) in the process of building openssl-devel when I saw your post. I think I’ll skip rebuilding and try that rpm instead.

If I get desparate I’ll try that. I’m particularly interested in piping vnc thru ssh , which is my normal method for accessing a vnc desktop remotely.

Hi
Most of the development packages are on the SDK, no need to rebuild…
SUSE Linux Enterprise SDK

Hmmm … I’m running into a permissions problem with gnome and x11vnc. I saw the same thing when using gnome with openSUSE-11.1. I may just restart … ie nuke gnome and replace it with KDE. At least I have a better idea as to what I am doing there.

I’ve never done this from a KDE desktop as the local PC (and gnome as the remote). I suspect it does not support piping through ssh.

I’ll ponder this overnight, but I am thinking of starting over and installing KDE instead. I wasted hours last weekend trying unsucessfully to sort this gnome permissions implementation blocking my ability to pipe vnc thru ssh. I can re-install in a fraction of that wasted time.

Hi
NX or teamviewer is my solution these days :wink: