[ale] Suse Enterprise & RPM repositories

[Greg Freemyer]

Welcome to the group.

Here's some overall SUSE info:

1) There is a great opensuse mailinglist.  Higher volume than even
this one.  And the skill sets on it are surprisingly high.  The only
issue is some real hard cases hang out there and flame wars are pretty
common, so you have to ignore the craziness at times.

I've forgotten where to sign up, but the archive is herer:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/

For SUSE specific questions you may have better luck there than here.

2) There is a "factory" that is continuously creating rpms of the
lastest code.  Great stuff if the dependencies don't get you.  Every 8
months the factory rpms are released as the next distro and factory
continues to move ahead.  2 years ago I pulled rpms from the factory
anytime I wanted something new.

3) Now they have the OBS (Opensuse Build Service).  It is much nicer
than the factory because they often compile rpms for several different
releases and distros.  (Including RH, etc.)
http://software.opensuse.org/search

The OBS is not comprehensive yet, but a significant part of the
factory rpms are now built via the OBS.  Again the advantage is they
tend to be available for various distros and older suse releases in
the OBS.

4) In the official repositories SUSE does not tend to update versions
of packages, instead they backport fixes.

See more interspersed:

2008/7/25 Thomas, Dave <dthomas at tandbergtv.com>:
> Hi all!
>
<snip>
>
> Case in point: Dual-head X setup using an onboard Intel video.  I found a
> forum post saying newer intel drivers would fix my problem.  I see I
> currently have RandR 1.1 and 1.2 has worked for Intel cards of mine in the
> past.
>
> It seems Xorg 6.9 is the latest on the update site.  Googling around, I see
> an FTP site ftp.suse.com and found /pub/suse/update/10.2 contains a newer
> Xorg I'd like to try.  Telling yast to use it as a catalog doesn't get me
> far since all the updates I try cause conflicts.
>
I'm surprised you have dependency issues from there.  I think that is
the source of "online updates" which should get installed as part of
your security updates.

As root, run "you" from the CLI and make sure you are getting your
security updates.

FYI: 10.2 goes out of support in Dec.  Why are you using it?  You need
to move on before the end of the year.  (11.0 has been out for a month
now.)


>
> We are moving some production systems from openSUSE to Suse Enterprise
> Server, so I'm reluctant to encourage openSUSE for desktops.  Would you
> suggest using that as a catalog for updates?
>
>
>
> I realize that SLED is a "stable" distribution so they'd rather backport
> things like kernel updates to reduce the risk of breaking compatibility.
> Does that make updating Xorg unrealistic?
>

Even in opensuse they backport kernel fixes etc.   The advantage of
SLED is that they limit the number of choices people have.  That way
you can have more control of what people are running on their
desktops.

>
> RHEL and CentOS provide other update sites for users who need more recent
> packages than are considered "stable" -- does this exist on SLED?
>
I think SLED will accept any of the rpms compiled for the
corresponding opensuse.  (10.2?)

>
> Thanks, looking forward to the next meeting J

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
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