SLES :/
So … despite my positive impressions at the incredibly slick installer that suse comes with, and how easy it is to get some things working …
some other things, not so much.
For one, the package system is missing some software that I don’t like being without. Like rdesktop (it’s got its own remote desktop client, but you can’t set color depth or anything like that, which is lame). It’s missing pico and nano both. The default install doesn’t include a lot of things that you’d probably quite want …. like ncurses, and the ncurses headers.
I’ve never been a big fan of the chkconfig system … it’s ok, but it’s just not my preference. And I’ve also never been a fan of having useful services started by xinetd. Something about it just rubbed me wrong, I guess from back in my first forays into freebsd.
While there are things that work out of the box pretty nicely, or with only the setup that’d be required to make things work … other things are a bit weird. Like, for instance, you can join a machine to a domain pretty easily, and get it using winbind for valid authentication. But it’s still a mystery to me why these valid authenticated users aren’t allowed to do actual gui logins. Probably something in the pam stack, but … I’d really think for something priding itself on out-of-the-box functionality, poking around in the pam stack is probably a bit beyond what most of their customers want to do.
The non-free update service annoys me, just like it annoyed me about redhat. Sucks to have another machine that I can’t easily update without buying an overpriced license. I’ll activate the free month of updates tomorrow, but … I’m also going to make sure the machine is no longer a suse box by the time the update period is over.
Still, if you’re a fan of kde (or if you took the time and effort to install gnome), it’s a very very servicable desktop. Very easy to do very advanced things in with minimal fuss.
I think after I get this oracle stuff done (the only reason I’ve got suse on there to begin with) I’m going to bounce over to ubuntu, to see what all the fuss is about there. And then maybe tour FreeBSD again, see how things have changed… and Solaris 10 too. I’ve never been root on a solaris box in the scope of time that I’ve sorta known what I was doing (I installed it once, when I was testing a lot of shit, 2 or 3 release versions ago… didn’t know what was going on, scrapped it for netbsd). Maybe tour Fedora, see how the world is there. But first thing’s first, and the first thing is that oracle database.