[brlug-general] SuSE......wow who'da thunk it

[Ronnie Gilkey]

I was really impressed by SuSE this week.  The other day I went to
upgrade the OS on a Linux server.  Normally, this is a painstaking
process.  We wanted to upgrade the server from SuSE 9.2 to >= OpenSuSE
10.2.  Normally it is hard enough just to upgrade one release of an OS,
let alone a handful.  I heard of other users / read posts on the forums
just popping in a CD / DVD and upgrading, so I had to try it.

Getting to the point, I just popped in the first disc of the OpenSuSE
10.2 set in the CDROM drive and it after a couple language / keyboard
questions it asked me if I would like to install or upgrade.  I chose
upgrade.  The system smart enough to resolve all the package
dependencies, add a few more, remove some stale / non-existent packages
in the new version.  An hour and a half later, I rebooted to find an
OpenSuSE 10.2 system with the latest software, and all my user /
configuration data in place.  No skips, bumps, nothing, it just worked
-- and properly at that.  I had to re-compile one non-distributed Apache
module and I was running again.

Even with fully commercial versions of operating systems like Microsoft
or Red Hat you just can't do that and have it work.  What would have
normally taken a full days work was done in an hour and a half, and I
was back to doing other things.

Until now I thought of SuSE like any other bloated mainstream distro. 
While it still is a bit bloated by default, that little bit of
manageability really makes a difference to me.  It turned what would
normally be a day to half-day project into a one hour maintenance task. 

It's also a great step in the direction of making Linux systems easier
to maintain in the long run.  Good job SuSE.

Ronnie

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