Friday Jul 14

SLED 10 and ‘the slab’

It has been a long while now since I last ran SUSE Linux and given it was the first dis­tri­b­u­tion I ever used I like to keep an eye on it, espe­cially as when I moved to Ubuntu the Open­SUSE project began. The works of the tal­ented folks over at Novell and the Open­SUSE project are def­i­nitely worth check­ing out if you have the time.

Mad Penguin wrote a great review on SUSE Linux Enter­prise 10. If you’re looking for using Linux but you’re too afraid to install your own mul­ti­me­dia codecs, Java and Flash support or don’t trust the com­mu­nity support and still willing to put a few dollars forth to get what you want I highly rec­om­mend SLED 10.

It is even the first com­mer­cial dis­tri­b­u­tion to include XGL. Other fea­tures in the package include mul­ti­me­dia apps with support for pro­pri­etary mul­ti­me­dia codecs, Macro­me­dia Flash, Sun Java, VoIP client, VPN, Blue­tooth and wire­less net­work­ing support, Beagle inte­grated desktop search and of course the must-​need office and design tools.

I also quite like what they’ve done to the GNOME menus: very pol­ished - very pro­fes­sional. The Ubuntu Artwork team is cur­rently con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing the menu, know as ‘the slab’ for GNOME or at least making it avail­able for us to down­load and use. There is a useful Ubuntu Forums topic on ‘the slab’ here.

The source for it is avail­able from GNOME CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co slab

And because I wouldn’t down­load and compile any­thing without seeing a screen­shot or two first you can find out what the hype is through the Mad Penguin link above or check­ing it out here.

Edit: And don’t those Tango icons look sweet! :D

This entry was written on July 14, 2006 at 5:20 pm, . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 comments

  1. 1. Hal
    Jul 14, 21:51

    I heard the Slab breaks GNOME HIG, but I could be wrong?

  2. 2. Pascal
    Jul 14, 22:28

    You mean the Human Inter­face Guide­lines?

  3. 3. Marc
    Jul 15, 00:18

    What were your reasons for switch­ing from SuSE to Ubuntu? How would you compare the two?

  4. 4. Pascal
    Jul 15, 02:40

    I was running SUSE Linux 10.0 ontop of which I was using KDE 3.5.1 (both the latest at the time). This was a pur­chased product from Novell, some­thing my dad has been doing for fairly long time (pre 7.x). So this was the com­mer­cial product that Novell was offer­ing.

    This was January this year, and by about now, I have been using Linux for around 2 years. KDE was the only desktop envi­ron­ment I had ever really used, and I never at that point found GNOME entic­ing.

    I moved to Ubuntu and GNOME 2.12 because I was involved in the Ubuntu artwork team and because I was pimping it to my friends and anyone I met when the topic arose, as Canon­i­cal was kindly ship­ping many CDs around the world for free.

    I guess after a while when people came to me asking me Ubuntu and GNOME spe­cific ques­tions that I could not answer having not ever really used Ubuntu beyond I livecd session that influ­enced the deci­sion to move.

    Also I wanted to try out GNOME because I was inter­ested in getting involved in GNOME artwork and finally after I got back from Linux.​conf.au ‘06 I munted my Qt libraries within about 40 minutes of coming home. I had built KDE 3.5.1 not from the SuSE discs as they only offered an earlier version. YaST Online Update did not seem to check prop­erly what was installed so when I updated Qt from online resources it brought about broken depen­den­cies and I had not the heart nor mind at that point to bother and try to fix them.

    So I secured my data and made the switch to a Debian system and GNOME. I really like the deci­sion because now I really appre­ci­ate both the efforts of the won­der­ful folks working behind KDE and GNOME, and if there is some­thing such as an icon or a splash I could do for either I would be happy to help out.

    As for how they compare… well, err I guess the best advice I could really offer is use both for a while. I really do like both and having moved from really using one dis­tri­b­u­tion for a while and now using another exten­sively has pro­vided an appre­ci­a­tion I guess for all dis­tri­b­u­tions and FLOSS projects.

    There are a few great things from both that I want to mention and those are the longe­tiv­ity that SUSE has behind it - SUSE has been around for quite some time and now that it’s in the hands of the tal­ented people behind Open­SUSE as well as the folks over at Novell, some of which worked on Ximian before­hand I think they are def­i­nitely going to remain great friendly com­pe­ti­tion but also provide an excel­lent product for espe­cially one par­tic­u­lar market group.

    I also really liked YaST in SUSE. It’s an extremely exten­sive setup and config tools and was bloody bril­liant for a newbie to Linux and gen­er­ally allowed me to learn and con­fig­ure many things under Linux which would have turned me off through a command line (which now I am quite happy to use).

    As for Ubuntu… mhh. Lots of great stuff there too. I really love the vibrant and friendly com­mu­nity around Ubuntu. I guess because Ubuntu has com­mer­cial backing but yet remains in the hands of the com­mu­nity, pre­dom­i­nately for the com­mu­nity the air around it is more open and accept­ing to every­one par­tic­u­larly an inex­pe­ri­enced kid with some paint on his hands. ;)
    Finally, although dis­tri­b­u­tion inde­pen­dant, I do enjoy working with The GIMP and Inkscape in GTK envi­ron­ments. :)

  5. 5. Hal
    Jul 16, 20:14

    Finally, although dis­tri­b­u­tion inde­pen­dant, I do enjoy working with The GIMP and Inkscape in GTK envi­ron­ments. :)

    And not to mention OS-​independant ;)

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