Category: Technology

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Technology

Benefits of Stability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP3 (I’m just going to call it SLED) is not a modern Linux distribution. I’m using “modern” in the sense of less-than-one-year-old sense. It seems that most modern Linux distributions are on a six-or-eight-month schedule for releases.

While Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and others push ever onward, SLED sticks with the tried-and-true until the dust settles and everything quiets down just a little bit. You won’t find GNOME 3 here (yet), and you won’t find a deluge of new and exciting offerings in the standard repositories. You will find stable applications and a stable system. That’s what someone like SUSE or Red Hat offers to “enterprises” and it might just be something that regular people are looking for as well.

That stability brings a big benefit: support.

Years and years of it. Security and stability updates keep coming even as other distributions and operating system vendors move on. This means less change, more time spent working on other projects and other needs, and stuff continuing to work even as the technology market continues to move ahead.

This isn’t just for SUSE either, but there are others who do this same thing. It is important to keep that in mind when you are choosing an operating system for almost any application. How long can you keep this server in service and still receive support?

This gets back to something I talk about a lot … cutting down on the choices which need to be made. Apple does this by only offering a few things and you can choose from those few things. SUSE and other “enterprise” vendors do this by making you choose once and then letting you use it for up to 10 years without needing to pull it out and upgrade it again (even if it continues to work and fills the current and sometimes future needs …  for example: DNS servers).

Two different ways to handle it.

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Technology

A Month With Linux: More Thinking

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No, I have not even started yet, but I do have some more thoughts on my planned “A Month With Linux” thing coming up in the future. I’ve been waffling on my end, especially with the imminent release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but I am going to go through with it at some point in the future.

What I AM waiting for is the next release of openSUSE. As such, you will notice on my “sidebar” a countdown image for the next release of openSUSE, 13.1. I’m pretty excited about this release for a number of reasons:

  • openSUSE 13.1 is supposed to be the base platform from which SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 is going to be based. That means a lot of updated software is going to be getting support from SUSE. I’m most interested in seeing how both KDE and GNOME have matured (especially with the recently GNOME 3.10 release).
  • I kind of like to mess around with file systems a little bit (THAR BE DRAGONS), and Btrfs has me a little excited. I really like ZFS and will probably end up using FreeNAS for something at work this year, but Btrfs looks to be where the Linux kernel is headed and I want to play with it some more.
  • The move to Ruby that YaST team just completed makes me a little bit excited about the platform. I like Ruby, so I like that a major component has moved its entire code base to Ruby and I want to watch what happens.
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 is a really solid GNOME 2 distribution and I am interested to see which of the GNOME 3/KDE 4 divide they end up on … so I need to watch what happens with openSUSE 13.1+ to get an idea of what the future might bring.
  • I want to maybe move some of our older, less essential servers to openSUSE and want to get a feel for the tooling for this distro.

So, a lot to work with. That is why I’m holding off on a final decision until after 13.1 is released and I can take a look at it. I have put SLED 11 back on my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 for the time being to play with it some more. The hardest part is the lack of software directly in the repositories, and the lack of an updated version of Firefox as well (if anyone knows if SUSE is going to move to the latest Firefox ESR, please let me know in the comments).

I’m having fun playing in these new (to me) communities and how they operate. Hopefully I’ll soon have an entire month to do so.

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Technology

A Month With Linux

Back in July I took over many of the network and system administration duties for Martin Luther College when my longtime colleague stepped away for a new opportunity as a developer.

Our current systems are a mix of Windows, Linux, and Novell NetWare systems. On the Linux side of things we use Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat across maybe twenty or so physical servers and virtual machines. With a switch from NetWare 6.5 to Open Enterprise Server 11 on the horizon, we will also be adding SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to our fleet of distributions we support as well.

I’ve used Linux on-and-off for coming up on eight years now, but I’ve been heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem for the past few years. Some of my Linux capabilities have atrophied a little bit in that intervening time, and that doesn’t exactly make me feel good.

With the new emphasis on Linux administration for me at work, along with my continual need to make sure I can use all current platforms, I think it is time for a little bit a challenge.

I’m calling it “A Month With Linux”. The idea is to keep my usage of OS X to a minimum (mainly only for work-related needs which can only be fulfilled by an OS X machine) and use a Linux distribution as my main computing platform on my laptops and desktops.

While I haven’t settled on a distribution yet, I’m leaning toward a version of openSUSE. Right now the released version is openSUSE 12.3 with 13.1 currently in active development (as of this writing, Beta 1 has been released) and not due to be released until November (right around the time for Baby #3!), but the inclusion of GNOME 3.10 is a huge “win” for me along with updated versions of Ruby and the Linux kernel.

I’m hoping to also give Btrfs a try as my default file system, but I need to also figure out why I can’t install a stable system with it first (might be entirely my fault). I am also going to try to give Dropbox the boot by trying out some other file-syncing services (first on the list: BitTorrent Sync).

That’s the general outline. I am still going to use my iPhone 5 (obviously), iPad mini, and my wife will still have her MacBook, but Linux is going to be MY only computing platform for a month …

… starting soon. I need to choose a distro first.

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Technology

Missing Podcasts

I listen to podcasts as a primary form of both entertainment and education. Recently, however, I’ve found myself unsubscribing from various long-time subscriptions because the feeling I was having was this:

Oh no, another episode just showed up. I know I should listen to it, but man … it is such a chore.

Does that make any sense?

No.

So I’ve whittled my subscriptions down to three to five shows I still find quite interesting. However, I have noticed that there is a lack of podcasts I am really interested in within a few sectors the technology industry: SUSE/openSUSE, higher ed technology (campus technology), and IT service management.

Because of this, I am putting out the clarion call for your podcast referrals in those three areas. I know where to find many development and Apple-centric podcasts, I don’t need help with that. SUSE/openSUSE, higher ed tech, and IT service management … those are the three I am looking for.

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Business Technology

SUSE Linux Days 2013

I had the pleasure of attending SUSE Linux Days 2013 today at the Marriott at the Minneapolis City Center. I like being able to attend “techie things” in the Twins Cities.

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It was a lot of fun. Sadly, traffic was a little crazy on the way up from the south so I ended up changing my plans and riding the light rail into the heart of Minneapolis and walking the rest of the way. The few blocks were a pleasure, even if I forgot my jacket for that early in the morning.

The day revolved around three topics.

  1. SUSE Linux Enterprise Update
  2. SUSE Manager
  3. SUSE Cloud

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Each topic melded into each other, and the two presenters did an excellent job of covering a good number of topics, answering a good number of questions, and keeping everyone engaged with what was going on.

The impressive things I took away from the morning about SUSE Linux Enterprise included:

  • How many companies actually use SUSE Linux Enterprise. General Motors and Ford were called out specifically for using SLES as the backbone of their IT transformation and standardization projects. That’s pretty cool.
  • How many partnerships SUSE keeps up with. Not just hardware, but software partners as well. I’ve never really kept up with SUSE that much, but they are in more places than I would have thought.
  • SUSE offers up-to 10 years of support. Crazy. The support windows are very regular, very knowable, and very standardized. That’s rather nice when making decisions.
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 is on track for a mid-2014 release. While a roadmap and more information is on the way for SUSECon, one thing called out was the possible use of Btrfs as the default file system. A bold move for sure, but kind of cool to hear about.
  • The High Availability stuff is cool and useful and SUSE has done a lot of the “thinking” for you. Many of the components are freely available as open source, but having someone pull it all together and support it could be really useful.

I’m most excited to see  what is going to be coming with SLE 12 in mid-2014. It is supposed to be based on openSUSE 13.1, which is currently in development, and one thing I will be watching is the inclusion of the new Ruby-fied YaST and an upgrade of the default Ruby installation to 2.0 … please?

I know another interesting development will be whether SLED 12 will move away from the Gnome default of SLED 11 and before and move to KDE. At the moment KDE is the default desktop for openSUSE, but whether the SLE release will move to that is yet to be seen.

SUSE Linux Days 2013 3The rest of the day was dedicated to SUSE Manager, SUSE Studio, and SUSE Cloud … well, it was actually dedicated to how those three products work together in their private cloud platform. What I was able to see was really good and I want to be able to play with the whole thing because I think that the ability to provision hardware as a part of SUSE Cloud, to build standard images with SUSE Studio, and manager it all from SUSE Manager looks like a really strong combination.

Is it too much for a small IT department at a private college in New Ulm? Maybe. It IS fun to dream.

I’m installing openSUSE 12.3 with the default KDE desktop while I write this so that I can try to keep up with what the future might be bringing. I don’t know if we are ever going to be able to standardize on a single platform at Martin Luther College, but I do think that I will see if there is a more prominent place for SUSE within the organization. What I was able to see looked good, but now I need to actually play with it myself to see how good it actually is.

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