Get The Geeko!


After years of using Yellow Dog on an old PPC 8600/300, then Red Hat, then Fedora, RHEL, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, EnGarde and Mandrake on Intel and in VMs, I've learned many a thing and a lot about what I like and don't like about each distro. I have stuck with Fedora/RHEL for the past couple of years simply because they are mostly fine. However I think I may have now installed what may be my favorite so far, Open SuSe or openSuSe. A Linux distro that actually sparks a little excitement in the inner gearhead. There are myriad reasons to like openSuSe, beyond the fact it is a child of Novell, who played a major role, esentially representing the Linux community, in a fight against patent trolls SCO.

 

Don't get me wrong, RHEL and the others are fine distros, but there are a few things about openSuSe which really make it stand out.
  1. Ease of install - everything works pretty much out of the box for a basic install and you can also choose custom options.
  2. The package manager, zypper, is a pleaure to use. I think I like it better than yum or apt-get, although it may be just becuase the name zypper. :-)
  3. The YaST2 Control Center facilitates easy management of
    • Hardware
    • Software
    • System and boot settings
    • Novell AppArmor
    • Firewall and SELinux
    • Hypervisor
  4. SuSEfirewall2
    While using YaST2 for configuring the firewall is a nice option, I generally prefer to directly manage the fw and the SuSEfirewall2 configuration file makes managing iptables realatively easy compared to other distros. I'm not saying creating complex and secure firewall rules is something that should be tackled by everyone, but for those who are up to it, the SuSEfirewall2 conf file is a real help.

    Until now I've always installed an app call Advanced Policy Firewall (APF), created by Ryan MacDonald of R-fx networks, on my linux systems, both for personal and business use. Ryan has done a great job of simplifying the task of running secure iptables and in my opinion his app beats the heck out of anything offered by the Linux distros. Not only that, APF is easy to implement on systems running third party control panels like Ensim or Cpanel.

    However as far as SuSe is concerned, this will be the first Linux distro I use where I choose to continue with the integrated firewall as installed. Sorry Ryan and cheers!

  5. iceWM
    Until now I have also chosen to use Ghome and KDE as my window managers as those two generally work best with the distros I am familiar with. However, since I installed openSuSe on an old Dell Inspiron 5100 with 1 GB ram with the plan to run VMWare 6.5, I thought I should try and free up some memory and iceWM is the perfect solution.

    iceWM is a part of the default install and works very well on openSuSe, I fire up VMWare and run Windows OS with no problem whatsoever. I also appreciate how easy iceWM is to configure and in combination with YaST2, provides quick access to all the management tools one may require in 360 MB of ram.

  6. Sudo
    The sudoers file on openSuSe is installed in a default configuration facilitating execution of sudo commands using the root password only. This way the admin can configure all sudo perms and test them prior to actually unleashing them on the end user. When ready simply comment out two lines and sudo is enabled for those assigned perms via their own password.
  7. Mono Libs
    If you've had the occasion to try to use .NET framework on Linux, especially via Mono, you know what a pain in the butt it can be, pretty disappointing. No surprise then that the Mono packages on openSuSe work the best thus far seeing as the Mono project is sponsored by Novell.
  8. OpenOffice
    Novell has also lead the charge in OpenOffice development, and was the first to provide OpenXML support modules as a part of a distro, though in the beginning it was for SuSe Enterprise. Even so, it is nice to use the OS where useful cutting edge Linux technology is being developed and rolled out in a stable manner.
Don't be mistaken, I am not saying openSuSe is perfect as there are aspects of openSuSe I do not like. For instance, the default install of two spyware scripts in /etc/cron.d . While I appreciate their purposes, registration and anonymous hardware config reporting to help development of the distro, I do not believe anything like this should be enabled without the user's express knowlege. If you don't go hunting for the files, you'll never know about them.

 

More to come when I've had a chance.