I currently have Suse Novell Desktop Enterprise 10.1 on my laptop and I want to upgrade. If I upgraded with OpenSuse 11.1, will it upgrade my laptop or, because I have the commercial version installed, will it overwrite everything when it installs and make me lose all of my data? Is there a difference between Suse Enterprise Desktop 11.1 and OpenSuse 11.1 other than the service contract? Will OpenSuse give me the automatic updates that I get now with the commercial version? Thanks in advance to all who reply.
SLES/SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop/Server) and openSUSE are two different distributions. You cannot directly upgrade from one to the other; if you want to install openSUSE 11.1 over your SLED 10 installation, you will have to do a clean installation.
openSUSE is an open, community version offered free for anybody to download and use. SLED is an enterprise Linux distribution that is based off of openSUSE and supported by Novell. Among other things, SLED releases are supported for 5 years with bugfix and security updates, while openSUSE is only supported for 2. There are more frequent releases of openSUSE, so openSUSE is more a little more up-to-date and a little less stable than the enterprise product. SLED is supported directly by Novell, while the openSUSE community is responsible for providing support for openSUSE.
AFAIK, if you want to update to the newest version of SLED, you need to update your support contract with Novell. You are welcome to try openSUSE, but Novell does not offer any direct support; support for problems is handled instead by us (the community).
Hi
SLED/SLES has always been a free download just like openSuSE you
just don’t get access to updates after 60 days if you only have an
evaluation code, it will still keep working though…
@OP, there is a community forum just like openSuSE at http://forums.novell.com, suggest you ask over there
you