linuxUsing Unix the Right Way
I just read an excellent blog entry by Ted Dziuba pretty much summing up why I love working with Unix/Linux. I'm not actually a developer but use the shell every day for work - being able to whip up a shell script using all the built in Unix tools is a massive time saver (well, when I say *all* the built in Unix tools I really mean the ones that I've actually discovered and semi mastered - there are a ton of small utilities, not to mention Bash builtins...) and means I can come back to it half a year later and generally see what I was doing at the time by reading through the script. <3 Unix :-)
Attachmate Buys Novell
So, Novell has been bought by Attachmate.
Can't actually say I've ever heard of them, but osnews has a brief but good write up about the deal which sees Attachmate Corp walking away with Novell and SuSE. My first taste of SuSE (as it was known back then before it had been acquired by Novell) was around version 7.something and I used it exclusively up until around 9.2ish. I remember it had (imo) hands down the slickest KDE desktop of any Linux in those days and things pretty much worked out of the box (including wireless!) when other distros required a good deal of tweaking. It was the second distro that I actually purchased (rather than downloading) and came in a nice box with install CDs and two hefty manuals (I think back in the 7.3 days I was still on dial-up so would have taken many evenings to download the ISOs - buying a box was much easier).
But time waits for no distro and I soon found I was getting annoyed with RPM/yast compared with apt* - it was simply too slow installing software and updates were painful. Sometime around 2005 I installed Ubuntu and dual booted for a while (I really didn't like Gnome at first!) but after time realised I hadn't booted into SuSE for months so blew away the partition. I've never used it on my personal systems since.
Where I work we still have some SLES 10 machines running but pretty much everything is now on Red Hat so I hardly have to touch SUSE now - a good thing as I find myself getting just as frustrated with the speed of rug (the package manager) as I did with yast back in the day. I'll be interested to see what Attachmate does with its new acquisition but for me at least SUSE lost its relevance many years ago...
* My first taste of "this lynix thing" was actually Corel Linux, a short lived distro that I first used in 2000. It was based on debian so I was thoroughly spoiled by apt and everything else since has never managed to touch that packaging system. This site is running on debian ;-)