[olug] OS thoughts -- SLES vs RH

[T. J. Brumfield]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 9:40 AM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:
> In about 10 years of running various flavors of desktop & server Linux,
> YaST is by far the most convoluted, difficult package management system
> I've had to use.  That's the number one thing I hate about SuSE.  RHEL's
> up2date and yum systems are far easier, IMHO.  And lest you think this
> is a knee jerk reaction to something different, I spent over a year
> each running SLES on some servers and SLED on my primary desktop.

I've seen worse, but largely I agree that YaST was a poor package
manager.  That changed with openSUSE 11.  However those changes aren't
in SLES/D 10 yet.  I believe SLES/D 11 is coming out in December.  Now
YaST is fast, there is no dependency hell, and the interface works
pretty well.  It is easy to look at your entire system, or a specific
repository, to select not only a specific version of a package, but
the vendor providing it.  Also any update that would change the vendor
alerts you.

> I setup a kickstart server to install new machines, so the default
> capabilities of the install disk didn't concern me much.  Multiple
> LUN's weren't a problem with RHEL, IIRC.

Autoyast allows you to do this as well.  Suse also provides LTSP
support which is pretty impressive.

http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP

As for my own opinion on RHEL/CentOS vs SLES/D, I think both are fine.
 Administering the two are fairly different.  If you are more familiar
with one you are likely going to favor what you know.  The big
difference for me is that we are a mixed shop.  We run Unix, Linux,
Solaris and several flavors of Windows at once.  Currently most of our
Linux boxes are completely segregated, and only run Omaha.com.  RHEL
is designed to be a total package, and they want you to go Red Hat for
each component.  Suse is designed to just work in a Microsoft
environment as well as a Red Hat directory server.

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