[KLUG Members] A look at SuSe 10.1beta8

[Adam Tauno Williams]

I've installed SuSe10.1beta 8 in VMWare 5.5;  here is a quick looky-loo
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Important versions:
---------------------
PostgreSQL 8.1.3
MySQL 5.0.18-9
OpenLDAP 2.3.19
GNOME 2.12
Evolution 2.6.0
Beagle 0.2.2.1
CUPS 1.1.23
Mono 1.1.13
PHP 5.1.2
Apache 2.2.0
Samba 3.0.21c
SASL 2.1.21
Bind 9.3.2 (includes LDAP SDB support)
ISC DHCPd 3.0.3  (includes LDAP support)
Firefox 1.5.0.1

* This is the first mainstream distribution to include a reasonably
version of OpenLDAP,  which is the reason I'm testing it.

The GNOME now includes Galago (which makes the concept of presence
pervasive throughout the GNOME desktop) and D-Bus, and Beagle is enabled
by default.  Beagle is significantly faster than before, in part because
the newer Mono version are themselves are faster than previous versions.
Nautilus also sports a left pane by default, as it did in days of yore;
so users can see the filesystem tree without having to know where to
turn that feature on.  The Evolution has all the features expected in
2.6 including memo support and a cleaned up UI.  Monodevelop is now
included.  It is a little disappointing that it is still GNOME 2.12 and
not 2.14,  but 'unofficial' GNOME 2.14 packages should be available.

You can read about Galago, which should provide some very interesting
functionality, here -
http://gnomejournal.org/article/4/galago---presence-for-the-linux-desktop  

You can read about D-Bus here -
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus  There is aleady a patch
floating around to add D-Bus support to CUPS so it will actually be able
to notify users of printer status, problems, etc.... finally.  That is
in CUPS 1.2 as of build 5083 - http://www.cups.org/software.php

The LDAP and monitor backends to OpenLDAP are now built into the main
package and not availabe as seperate packages.  (OpenLDAP 2.2.x BDB
databases must be exported and reimported due to the changes in the
database format between 2.2.x and 2.3.x).  The syncrepl overlay is built
in, just enable it with an "overlay syncrepl" in slapd.conf.   The
OpenLDAP build is pretty feature complete including the accesslog,
dyngroup, refint, valsort, dynlist, pcache, retcode, rwm, lastmod,
ppolicy, translucent, denyop, and unique overlays.

The NetworkManager applet/application doesn't seem to work yet so I
haven't been able to test being a WPA/EAP supplication without futzing
around starting wpa_supplicant.  The app runs but all the widgets are
empty.  The "Share Folders" utility fails to run with a "Unable to
execute su" error,  which smells like a beta-version packaging error.

Samba is compiled with: --enable-cups --with-acl-support
--with-automount --with-msdfs --with-pam --with-pam_smbpass
--with-quotas --with-smbmount --with-syslog --with-tdbsam --with-utmp
--with-vfs --with-winbind --with-shared-modules=idmap_rid,idmap_ad
--with-expsam=xml,mysql,pgsql --with-python

If anyone has any questions about what is included/not-included etc...
in the next version of SuSe I'll be happy to take a look.