[mdlug] Suse 10.1 --> OpenSuse 10.2

[Dr. Robert J. Meier]

David,

> Is OpenSuse just a name change ?

At this time, they differ only by the "Microsoft tax", but IMHO
content divergence will become significant in less than a year.

When SuSE was a German company targetting small businesses, it published
two lines of distro, SuSE and SuSE Pro.  SuSE was unencumbered, and came
on CDs and DVDs with hardcopy manuals, convenient for the administration
of several differently configured computers, as found at most small
businesses.  SuSE Pro included SuSE and several proprietary packages,
bundled at a discount.  (I found the Opera and Communicator seat
enough to justify the additional cost.)

<OVERSIMPLIFIED>When Novell bought SuSE, they tried to eliminate the
online support database, eliminate the unencumbered line,
use downloadable source from a throttled server to
satisfy GPL requirements, and get free tech support by giving OpenSuSE
to the community.<OVERSIMPLIFIED>

This backfired and they reconnected (but do not support) the online database,
eliminated the encumbered line, are threatened by GPL warranty issues,
and the community has been wary.

With the recent announcement that Novell will pay the "Microsoft tax",
many OpenSuSE supporters have moved to ubuntu, gentoo, and mepis.
   
> Are there [any] issues upgrading from Suse 10.1 to OpenSuse 10.2?

None that I am aware of.

-- 
Dr. B

"To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's
fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern,
politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found
themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system
(viz. society) with no documentation or instruction of any kind, and so
whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce
certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanic rigor, because they were at
a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm.
Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system
administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least
had some documentation, som FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing
some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack.  They were, in
other words, capable of displaying adaptability."
      -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, p.585