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SUSE Linux Becomes openSUSE 55

Posted by timothy from the radical-new-direction dept.
A user writes "With the anouncement of the release of SUSE Linux 10.2 Alpha 2 there is also an anouncement that SUSE Linux will be renamend to openSUSE. A very logical step to clear things up. The name went from S.u.S.E over SuSE to SUSE Linux and for many people it was not clear what the name realy was. It also points out the importance Novell gives the the openness of the whole openSUSE project."
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SUSE Linux Becomes openSUSE More

SUSE Linux Becomes openSUSE

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  • I could swear that... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13, 2006 @11:15AM (#15713093)
    I could swear that it's been called that for a little while now. I downloaded it a few weeks ago, and it was reffered to as "openSUSE" on their website then. Old news?

  • This doesn't affect SLED and SLES (Score:5, Informative)

    by michael path ( 94586 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @11:16AM (#15713103) Homepage Journal
    Summary is a bit misleading....

    With current naming we experienced confusion internally and externally
    between the project openSUSE and the distribution created there. And
    especially with the new naming of our Linux business products (SUSE
    Linux Enterprise 10) the differentiation between our business products
    and community/consumer product is not intuitive. Therefor the upcoming
    community/consumer version will be named openSUSE 10.2. We'll
    implement first name changes with Alpha 3 starting directly after
    Alpha 2 and will have a fully renamed distribution with Beta 1 in Nov.

    The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 are keeping their names.

    This seems to illustrate yet again the issues Novell has had for the last decade with their product marketing - how can they develop brand loyalty when they keep changing the product names?

    Had they left the Novell Linux Desktop name and replaced the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Novell Linux Server or Novell Linux Enterprise Server, wouldn't they have been able to distinguish the community versions against the enterprise versions much easier?

    Novell's seemingly quarterly change in nomenclature and direction is baffling.

    • Had they left the Novell Linux Desktop name and replaced the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Novell Linux Server or Novell Linux Enterprise Server, wouldn't they have been able to distinguish the community versions against the enterprise versions much easier?


      Yes, but then they would have thrown out the brand SUSE had built around their enterprise versions.

      Most people probably never knew what "Novell Linux Desktop" was.
    • We'll implement first name changes with Alpha 3 starting directly after
      Alpha 2 and will have a fully renamed distribution with Beta 1 in Nov.

      Is it just me or is the above wording confusing?

      Alpha 3 => open [i.e., first name]
      Alpha 4 ... time passes ...
      Beta 1 => openSUSE [i.e., full name]

    • how can they develop brand loyalty when they keep changing the product names?
      Yeah, it worked so bad for m/b/Phoenix/Phoenix Browser/Firebird/Firebird browser/Mozilla Firebird/Firefox...

      p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Fi refox#Naming [wikipedia.org]
      • That's a lot different - most people were first introduced to Firefox, not its previous incarnations. Moreover, most people didn't have to invest money or remarkable effort to find out what Firefox was all about - being a free download for Windows and all.

        If a product is important enough, it can obviously survive a change in name. I have a hard time believing that the latest Novell line of Linux solutions are going to prove as important or interesting as Firefox has unless it becomes THE flagship OS for

    • Exactly. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Jack Johnson ( 836341 )
      As usual, Novell lacks focus and can't figure out how to name or version their products properly.

      Forgive me if I'm wrong about some of these. I work with these products every day and I don't even know exactly how to differentiate everything. In the last few years we've had...

      -NNLS (Novel Nterprise Linux Services), a package of Novell Services like eDirectory for use on Linux.

      -OES (Open Enterprise Server Linux and Open Enterprise Server NetWare) They are both called OES by Novell. The NetWare version is basi
      • OES is technically both. When you buy OES, you get both Netware and SLES. I believe OES SP2 is actually comprised of Netware 6.5 SP4 and SLES 9 SP3.

        When DirXML's scope increased, it became "Novell NSure Identity Manager", which, in version 3 is now "Novell Identity Manager". Novell's iChain's next revision is being released as "Novell Access Manager 3". To be fair, in each instance the products evolved greatly. However, the radical changes suggest a lack of vision.
      • To those who aren't familiar with these products, I bet this sounds absolutely RIDICULOUS!! Because it is...

  • That clears everything up. (Score:3, Funny)

    by rowama ( 907743 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @11:20AM (#15713130)
    I now feel better about my decision to consider possibly maybe eventually switching to openSuSE.

  • What are the ramifications? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @11:44AM (#15713291) Homepage Journal
    Does this mean that the following will no longer be bundled and have to be downloaded separately?

      - Real Player
      - Planmaker
      - Textmaker
      - Java (and dependent packages)
      - Opera]
      - ATI drivers
      - NVidia drivers

    Yeah, I know, CD #6 contains some of the extras, but it sure is nice to get them all on one DVD like the retail SuSE has offered. It's more convenient than OpenSuSE has been.

    I've been buying the retail version of SuSE for a few years now, and really like it, even with the problems the distribution has had from time to time. I hope that this move doesn't change anything for the worse.
    • - ATI drivers
      - NVidia drivers
      IIRC from when I got SuSE 9, it did not include the nVidia drivers, and therefore I doubt it would include ATI drivers, so these haven't changed because it's open.
      • You may be right, I know I've downloaded the drivers via YOU on both versions, but don't deal with it much since most of our systems have ATI cards still, and with ATI I stick with the open source drivers because the open source drivers actually work. On the Nvidia systems we do have I do use the proprietary drivers, but I don't remember whether they were included on the SuSE 10 disc or if I had to download those via YOU.
        • In SUSE 10, the drivers are installed via YOU (the 'fetchnvidia' script), in theory. However, it didn't work for me (I think that nVidia's download servers were sucking when I tried), but the manual install is pretty painless as long as you're able to read instructions, and remember which one's which between the generic nvidia and official nvidia when telling sax to switch drivers.
  • I missed the whole SuSE --> SUSE switch.

    It's probably just as well -- mixed case tends to confuse people. Look at all the people who still write about "FireFox" (with the second F capitalized) instead of "Firefox."

    Anyway, the good thing about this name change for the free version is that it'll match the domain name of the website!

    • Re:CapitalizAtion (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dhfx ( 988710 )
      The lower-case 'u' came about because in German it's the abbreviation for 'und' - the equivalent of an ampersand. So when you see SuSE you can think S&SE.

    • Re:CapitalizAtion (Score:4, Funny)

      by jtobin ( 988724 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @02:16PM (#15714155) Homepage
      Yeah, capitalization is important. It's the difference between "I helped Uncle Jack off his horse" and "I helped uncle jack off his horse".

  • I hadn't realised... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HaloZero ( 610207 ) <protodekaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @01:22PM (#15713839) Homepage
    ...that it was called S.u.S.E. at one point. Did it stand for something?

  • OpenSUSE
    opensUSE

    insertFOOT
  • GNU/openSUSE?
  • I bought the retail Suse 10.0 last year.
    When 10.1 came out I tried that and it is total shit.
    Nothing works right, ALL the multimedia features are crippled and the package management system sucks ass.

    After two weeks I dumped Xgl & Compiz because it's broken crap that can't go an hour without crashing and locking up. After a month I gave up on 10.1 totally. I reformatted the drive and did a fresh, clean install of 10.0 retail and by that evening I was up and running with everything working properly as i
    • "Suse 10.0 is a little slow and clunky on my Athlon 64 3500+ w/1gb ram but it's tolerable."
      What? SUSE 10.0 (SuSE, suzy, whatever) always ran sweetly on any nearly new system I installed it on. Maybe you should upgrade to Vista?
      • Maybe you should upgrade to Vista?

        There is no such thing as an "upgrade" to Vista.

        I wouldn't use Vista on a bet. Sadly though, I have to support people that do use it so I have a Vista machine that I fire up only for tech support purposes. It's used for no other reason or occasion.

      • As a longtime SuSE user (5.1, 5.2,,7.1, and then 9.2) I was impressed with the ease of installation on generic systems and stability of their distribution under the 5.x versions, but things went downhill from there.

        I wouldn't say it ran smoothly on any new system that I ever tried it on--the last two versions I bought wouldn't work on new systems because...well, the choice of driver modules for installation kernels was severely limited. The sad part is, I could theoretically compile a kernel with the need
    • No, you're dead on. They decided to do some crazy things with the installation and package management starting with 10.1.

      10.0 was nice as it was released. However, there's a lot of things that were needed in 10.1 to make it unusable. It made no sense for it to be a minor revision, as it was a major overhaul.
    • Been running compiz and Xgl on Ubuntu Dapper Drake for some months now (since way back in beta status) and the Quinnstorm and Reggaemanu compiz, Xgl, and Mesa debs are not only very very good, but very very stable as well. I cannot recommend this combination highly enough - it works really well. Dash me an email if you want the specifics.
  • Aside from geek points, is it worth taking a look if you're currently running a happy stable Fedora setup? Been reading a lot of hype that's all but there's nothing specific that I want to do that SUSE can and Fedora can't, at least from what I can tell. Anyone who knows both well, would appreciate your input.
    • ...if you're happy with what you've got, why switch? If SUSE has something you want, and Fedora can't offer the same, why not switch?
    • I was a happy SuSE fanboy for some years, starting with 6.something, and it just got better with every release...until it went all open. The quality and level of testing seems to have dropped dramatically: it was only stable in a default configuration, and sometimes not even then. I ran 8.2 for years with all sorts of stuff messed around and hacked the way I wanted it, and it all held together. I ran 10.1 for about a week and my last act with SuSE was to download and burn the Ubuntu iso.
      • This was exactly my experience. I was quite happy up to 9.3.

        I believe Novell and Red Hat let hobbyists work out bugs on a relatively free (as in freedom) distros. The "enterprise" versions bundle in non-free things, draconian licence terms, support and hopefully do more bug squashing.

        I just don't find the stability I need in the opensuse or fedora distros. (someone will no doubt declare otherwise) For me, it's back to Debian where testing is the equivalent of running opensuse/fedora and stable is product
    • What are you doing with Fedora? Will you get a better experience out of another distribution?

      You can look at others to get a feel for why things are they way they are. Novell uses a slightly different configuration and package management mechnism than Redhat and Debian. You might understand why Yum is in your Fedora there if you deal with YaST for a while. The main attraction to Fedora just might be the default GTK theme - the way the screen looks..

      Nobody is counting 'geek points', so you are free to do

  • Open, SUSAME (Score:3, Funny)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:58PM (#15716183) Journal
    Is this name supposed to be a reference to Ali Baba and the forty theives?
  • There could possibly be some misunderstanding when people hear you talking about downloading "open suzie".
  • Has anybody else noticed that SUSE's Update mirrors are screwed up at the moment, and that almost every mirror on the Internet has an equally broken mirror?

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