I investigated Linux a long time ago but ran out of learning and conversion time. I had to postpone the idea of moving away from Microsoft. Now I have some time and a fairly new computer to run it on without the hassle of dual booting.
I have the boxed version of Suse Linux 9.1 Professional installed and running.
Should I go ahead and buy the latest version?
Is there an “Upgrade” version available?
Have there been enough beneficial changes made to justify it?
I know this is a Suse forum and buying new versions is how the bills get paid. Just remember, I have bills too.
Just to clarify, the SuSE Linux Professional 9.1 is not related to the Novell SLE series. 9.1 predates the Novell acquisition of SuSE (with that odd capitalisation).
IIRC,in those days there was a Pro version with the full printed manuals and an Upgrade version for starving students without most of the printed manuals but the same disks.
These days OpenSUSE is open, meaning if you are a starving student, you can get a full version by downloading, or buying from a duplicator, or copying from a friend. However if you can afford it, and certainly if you are a business, it would be a good gesture to support the developers by buying a box set, which includes printed manuals, and pressed DVDs so no hassles with burning your own DVDs, etc.
9.1 to 11.0 are light-years apart. You might as well install 11.0 from scratch, and then copy over any personal files you want.
Thank you and everyone else for the advice. I will take it.
I don’t mind buying the boxed version as a gesture of support. However, in talking to the rep at Novell, he mentioned “subscriptions”. Is this a one time thing or is it an recurring fee to keep it running properly?
Also, I once was able to rebuild older computers and give them away to friends, family and people who wanted one but were unable to afford it. (I could afford to do that until Microsoft got nasty about multiple installations with Windows XP). I have five computers that will run Linux that are just sitting in my office.
The rep suggested I buy the boxed version for myself and give away the OpenSource version. Any comments? What are the differences?
Sorry don’t know about subscriptions myself. Maybe it’s extended customer support, more talk time on the phone? Never needed it. Software updates are freely available over the net without registration or subscription for 2 years from release. After that it goes out of support.
The box set just contains more packages thrown in, e.g. some non-open source software that is only available from non-OSS repos, but nothing you couldn’t get from the repositories. It’s perfectly ok to install your copy on as many machines as you like. You can then switch those machines to using the Internet repositories for further updates. Or give them a copy of the open DVD if you think they need a coaster. (The one in the box set is a DVD9, more costly to copy.)
The subscription model is for businesses; it is a recurring per annum fee per seat and pays for a support contract. The commercial product will have tightly controlled releases, patching, service packs, with varying support options including 24x7. It is this control, professional-caliber support, and support availability that you are paying for. This is what many if not most businesses require, and is commensurate to what is provided for proprietary products by enterprise-class vendors. And, SLED is the software stack, not openSUSE.
With the openSUSE retail box-set you get a consumer alternative to the SLED offering and the business subscription model. The primary value-add over free openSUSE is support delivered by Novell for a defined period. Think of it as a short-form of the lowest tier of business support. IIRC this retail support is renewable, but ordinarily that doesn’t make sense.
By contrast, openSUSE is developed and supported by a community of volunteers, with assistance from Novell. The control is not as tight (or prescribed) and support is primarily via mechanisms like this forum. You can get a lot of good help here (and on occasion not so good), but it’s not Novell’s professional support nor of course remotely what is delivered with business-class support services with the SLE family of products.
The rep’s suggestion is a good one for many new users, for a small price professional support long enough to get up and familiarized with the OS. But most of us just slog along using these and other forums, and our friend google.
Actually I think you’ll find that Novell pays the salaries of most of the developers on OpenSUSE. You wouldn’t be able to get OpenSUSE releases with quality control and on time without that. Contributed packages could be by volunteers.
You anticipated my next question. I think openSUSE is what I need. I am a personal user, not a business.
I will buy the box (to support the effort and because I don’t believe in something for nothing) and download too (I don’t have a DVD on the computer I want to instll it on).
Is there any incompatibility between the box and the download? Will this cause problems later on as I eventually install OpenSUSE on the other computers on my 4 computer LAN?
The box set and the download version use the same repositories so no problems there. In fact one of the steps to the upcoming 11.1 release is GM, meaning gold master, which is sent off to the DVD plant. (Though I doubt if there is any physical DVD involved these days, it’s probably a carefully checksummed image that’s electronically transferred.)
If you don’t have a DVD drive on the machine you can install from the Live-CD and fetch the rest from the repositories.
Hang on a couple of weeks and 11.1 will be out. You can install using the ISO image you can download and then later buy the box set to get the manuals and support the effort.
If you have a new computer, it is worth installing (or keeping) Windows on it. You will need Windows for several reasons. Dual boot is not a hassle. Installing Windows is.
I have two computers running Windows Vista and one running Windows 2000 Professional. They are my main work computers now and are on a hard-wired LAN in my house. I hope to retrieve anything I need from them when I get the Linux box running and on the LAN. Is there something that would make that plan unworkable?
No, that’s fine, you should be able to send and receive files from Windows machines.
However you should give yourself some time to accustom yourself to Linux equivalents for the Windows apps you have been using, so don’t format those Windows machines yet. For some apps there may be no Linux equivalent available so you would have to use your Windows machine(s) for that work.
There are also other methods for coping, like running Windows in a virtual machine, using WINE, and so forth. It depends. Lots of choices.
Amen, lots of choices. That and Linux flexibility is its great strength, but at the same time it can become a bit challenging to sort through and find what you really want to end up with.
Since you have W2K . . . except for apps which require Vista, you would find that W2K runs very nicely in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is generally considered easiest, VMware most powerful, other choices require more technical expertise) because of its much smaller footprint. (And - whisper, whisper - W2K can be installed on more than one machine/vm.) All of our machines are multi-boot, but since putting W2K in vm’s I don’t think we’ve booted W$ off the disk even once in the past couple years. And the networking in the vm’s works out of the box, too so that is transparent.
