[ale] SUSE Linux talk

[Scott Plante]

They are both RPM based and I'd actually say they're pretty similar in general, but some of the things he asked about are different. We mostly use openSUSE on desktops, and CentOS, and a little RHEL for servers, so I can't speak to SLES/SLED but I believe they're pretty similar to openSUSE. 



> Things like what to consider when installing Open-SUSE/SLES/SLED by itself ? 



The install process is different from Red Hat, but fairly straightforward. I haven't had trouble with hardware support, but I've only installed on fairly generic desktops, not laptops or machines with cards requiring weird drivers (other than cards with specific Linux support, like Digium). 


> How about installing it inside of VirtualBox ? 


Never used VirtualBox. 


> How to add custom repos and upgrade software ? 


zypper addrepo http://some-server/some-path/ your-repo-alias 
Or you can run yast and go through the GUI. Sometimes they supply an RPM that installs the repository--Google does that for Chrome, if I recall. A further question would be what are the recommended repos and packages for desktop or server usage, especially to get things like Windows media files to play well. I know "Packman" is supposed to have a lot of that stuff and I've gotten it all to work before, but I don't remember exactly what I did. 


> How to upgrade a particular software to a later version and it is not in the official repo ? 


Well, you can add another repo if there is one for that software. You can download the RPM and type: 
zypper install your-package.rpm 
This will usually try to work out dependencies for you. 


> How to compile from source if this cannot be done ? 


This depends on the particular software. Usually, it's something like download the tar file, untar it, look in the directory for a README with instructions. Most times it will be "./configure; make; make install" as three separate steps. Sometimes there's a "make menuconfig" or specific options for configure to set locations. It's all up to the developers of that package, but most seem to follow that general flow. A lot of times during the configure, it will end with an error saying something is missing. You'll have to search around for the package that provides it, and install it. You can use "zypper search" and Googling helps. 


> How to get the rpm dependencies resolved etc., ? 


See above. 


I don't consider myself an expert but I have done all of the above before. That may not always be the best way, but hopefully it'll get you further along and may spark some better suggestions from others. 


Scott 



----- Original Message -----

From: "JD" <jdp at algoloma.com> 
To: ale at ale.org 
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 11:11:59 AM 
Subject: Re: [ale] SUSE Linux talk 

Aren't they both RPM-based? 

On 09/20/2013 04:49 PM, Adrya Stembridge wrote: 
>>> Aren't SUSE, RHEL and CentOS closely related? 
> 
> CentOS is the community supported version of RHEL. No commonality with SLES 
> other than being Linux. 
> 
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