[KLUG Members] SUSE

[Adam Williams]

> I'll be purchasing a copy of SUSE. Which flavor of their distro should I
> get? Any recomendations.

99.44% of the time the latest off-the-shelf version is OK.  I know, that
like RH, they offer various Enterprise versions - but unless you have
>=(4Gb,4CPU) boxes these don't really offer much (IMHO).  If you
encounter a huge server there should be allowances for selecting an
up-scale version.

> The company I work for wants a comprehensive list of tools and utilities
> that will be our "Company Standard". Along with which distro will be our
> "Company Standard".
> I've only ever worked with RH. (5-9)

Pretty much same here,  I've only tested other distro's.

> Personaly I think it's a little premature to lock in to a single
> distribution. 

Yes.

> Plus tools and utilities are constantly changing. 

Very much so.

> On top of that he, that being my boss, is asking for this by the 4th.

That sounds normal.

>  He asked me today! I'm the one with the most Linux expirence. Hence 
> the reason he asked me.
> Anyway, any help, thought, or comments would be appreciated.

I'd just list the "SuSE Linux Professional" version,  but I'd want a
proviso to use "SuSE Linux Enterprise Server" on any large servers that
will be hosting transactional services (Relation Databases, Business
Logic Engines, etc.... vs. File Shareing/E-mail/etc...).  The Enterprise
Linux distro's support Async I/O which is really important to
performance in transactional systems.  Note that Async I/O, and some of
the other features of the enterprise versions will be standard in the
mainstream kernel when 2.6.x is released - so the tools of choice will
change.