Screaming Penguin

The LinuxWorld Expo picked best of show on Friday, the winner was SuSE. My SuSE take: SuSE is a very solid distribution. I also like SuSE very much and have used it quite a bit. However, I just kicked SuSE out and made ToTSP a totally RedHat shop (for now, I am sure that will change soon enough.) I had a few SuSE problems, the installer and automated config tools are lousy. In defense of SuSE, I have not used 6.3 with YaST2, I was using 6.2 with YaST 1. The new installer and config tool is supposed to be much better. I decided against upgrading and re-tooled with RedHat for several key reasons. Support, availablity of applications and certification track. I had a few support issues with SuSE. I even got to address a few of them with SuSE engineers in a live demonstration at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. The issues I had, were indeed issues and are being "fixed soon" (like DHCP per adapater specs, I was actually old "they dont use DHCP in Germany, we are working on it", to which I replied "dont be afraid, DHCP can be your friend.") As for applications, there are many and just about anything that will run on RedHat will fly on SuSE (even supports rpm), but all the documentation and READMEs refer to a particular flava of RedHat, and I wanted to be as conforming as possible (I know, not really the spirit, but I need stuff to work, fast.) The SuSE documentation leaves a lot to be desired, and that includes the online knowledgebase. Most of the "knowledge" is sparse and or in German (yes, still.) I am also pursuing the RedHat RHCE, so I want as much experience with their distro as possible. I was able to do everything I needed to do with SuSE, I just had to do most of it manually (which is usually better anyway.) I had to maintain a weird balance between the automated "SuSECONFIG" and custom scripts. I had scripts to clean up stuff after SuSECONFIG exited because I wanted to use some of the auto features, and others screwed things up.) Ironically I had a problem with Redhat 6.1 and quotas on root RAID. I setup quotas with Linuxconf and it blew up everything. I needed to boot into a virtual system and then mount the disks and fix a few files. Simple right? WRONG. RedHat gets a big flat "sucks" for the rescue disk procedure. The book says , should you need to boot to rescue mode, boot up and then mount the CD and make a rescue disk. Well, how in the heck am I gonna do that, if it booted I would not need the damn disk, arghhh. Then I used another machine and the rescue.img is not even on the disk as documented and promised (a commercial registered version too.) So what to do, boot with the SuSE cd, pick rescue mode and fix it. Worked great, why isnt there a similar feature on the RedHat cdrom (that needs attention if you are listening RedHat, that and the Kickstart stuff, SuSE is way ahead there too.) Overall I still like some of the new RedHat features and the stronger RedHat support and acceptance. I am sticking with RedHat for now. I have used Slackware (years ago it was all I used, before I knew there was a RedHat or SuSE), Debian, Caldera, RedHat and SuSE. And the last 4 of those are all major league professional players. Most of my Linux experience is RedHat and SuSE and while the two are both good and both very capable; I put RedHat in the lead for now and have chosen to re-adopt it mainly for its mainstream usage and subsequent overall acceptance.   ZDNet SuSE Best Distro Story