Holmes Media

First off, let me just say, I’ve never been a huge suse fan.  Matter of fact, while I have used Fedora and Ubuntu extensively, I can’t really claim to be a huge “fan” of any one distro.
In 2003 I started using RedHat; which at the time was really the best “server” ready version of Linux.  It was more geared towards what I was using it for as well.  When they sold out and Fedora project was created, and I quickly started using it since FC1.  Later in Dec 2005 I upgraded a server of mine to FC2 (or FC3, I don’t remember now), and really became acquainted with Fedora.  Fedora was pretty fast, reliable and for the most part very easy to administer.  I have used Fedora for all Linux needs up until 2008.

After the fall of Linspire, the then CEO made his pitch for Ubuntu.  Up until then I had written Ubuntu off.  I wasn’t really interested in it, and quite frankly I really liked YUM, and some of the Fedora-centric concepts.  After doing some research, I decided to try it out as a desktop OS.  I was really getting sick of XP and I sure wasn’t going to give Vista a try.

I found Ubuntu to be very easy to install, administer and work with.  Aptitude (APT) was very easy to learn and use and had a great command line structure.  The Ubuntu mirrors were extremely fast, and so far reliable; which is more then I can say for the Fedora mirrors which made a constant habit of crashing, or becoming so slow they were worthless.

So happy ending no?  NO!  So I’ve been using Ubuntu since, like it, but there are some issues with packages being unstable.  I have had it crash on me twice after kernel updates, and I have also had system updates take out my video twice.  I have found that installing non-repository drivers is almost worthless if you plan on using the auto updates that come from Ubuntu’s mirrors.  So I set out to do some research and really find out who’s using what.

I am a C# programmer at work so I looked to see who was managing the Mono project, turns out Novell/OpenSuse are lying in bed with the Mono project.  SO fast forward to today.  Installed OpenSuse 11.2 on a server at work.  This server is going to house Solr (running on Jetty) which will be used for product searches.  After installing and setting my eyes on the wonder that is KDE, I was impressed.  Unfortunately my initial reaction wasn’t here to stay.  Quickly I found some oddities in the OS.  DHCP didn’t pick up right after install, I had to configure it, and the firewall has been nothing but trouble.  On Ubuntu I have been using “FireStarter” which is a great all around Firewall.. Easy to understand and administer and fits the needs.  For this server really we only need a couple services coming in and out.

After fiddling with the Firewall and every other security setting known to man, I figured out that, I cannot connect over SSH.  Not even from the computer it self.  Did a bit of research and found that, by default in 11.2 SSHD is NOT enabled.  Now I understand the whole “lets keep it secure” argument, but disabling SSH.. REALLY?  As you can imagine after playing with this thing for almost 3 hours now, I am become quite irritated.

OpenSuse is a rock solid OS, and it has a lot of things going for it, and it’s great for the Enterprise, but unless they can start allowing developers to install out-of-the-box and not kill them selves getting it to work, their going to continue shooting them selves in the foot.