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History

SUSE Linux originated in 1992 as a German language localization of Slackware Linux. SUSE founders Hubert Mantel, Burchard Steinbild, Roland Dryoff, and Thomas Fehr formed the company S.u.S.E. GmbH, which in German is short for Software und System Entwicklung Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. In English, the name simply means Software and System Development, Ltd.

In 1996, S.u.S.E. evolved from a Slackware derivative into developing its own original distribution. For its base system, S.u.S.E. chose adopt the Jurix Linux distribution, at the time developed by Florian La Roche. Jurix ceased to be separate project and was folded completely into S.u.S.E., which then began writing its own installation and administrative tools.

By 2003, S.u.S.E. had grown into a top-tier Linux distributor with home, business desktop, and server products, and officially changed its company name to SUSE Linux. SUSE Linux was acquired by operating system maker Novell in January of 2004.

Novell continues to develop SUSE Linux to this day. In 2005, it announced openSUSE, a completely open source Linux distribution that the public could download, test, and contribute to. Novell supplies most of the engineering time that goes into openSUSE, as it forms the basis for Novell's enterprise Linux products.

The first release of the new publicly-developed OpenSUSE was version 10.0, in October of 2005. Since then, new point releases have come out approximately twice every year.

Installer and packaging system

One of SUSE's prominent claims to fame is YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), a powerful installation, configuration, and administration program. YaST gives users an easy-to-use graphical setup process, handling hardware details like disk partitioning and monitor configuration, and software details like application installation and user account management.

Originally a proprietary application unique to SUSE, YaST was released as open source following the Novell acquisition, and has made its way into other Linux distributions.

SUSE uses the RPM package management system, and provides dependency checking and online updates for installed packages through YaST. SUSE has recently added Zen, a new package manager that is simpler to use and is geared more towards desktop applications, and less towards full system management than YaST.

SUSE also features the AppArmor security system, with which a system administrator can can restrict the capabilities of each program on a system, thus preventing bad behavior and accidental flaws from harming the system.

Although SUSE has historically favored the KDE desktop environment, its corporate parent Novell also employs a sizable group of developers working on the GNOME desktop. Consequently, support for both environments is excellent in SUSE Linux. Users can install either (or both) through YaST.

Derivative distros

Technically speaking, SLED and Novell's enterprise server distributions are derivatives of the collaboratively-developed OpenSUSE. Because they are bundled with support contracts, these commercial offerings are generally slower to adopt bleeding-edge technology like new kernels and filesystems.

OpenSUSE has spawned some non-commercial offshoots as well. The SUSE Performance Enhanced Release (SUPER) is a SUSE derivative that focuses on modifying the base SUSE distro for enhanced speed, experimental optimizations, and missing features.

At the other end of the spectrum is MiniSUSE, a minimalist distro designed for use on systems with small amounts of disk space and limited memory resources.

JackLab is a SUSE-based distro built for multimedia work, in particular use as a digital audio workstation. JackLab uses a real-time Linux kernel and the JACK low-latency audio server to provide its audio-friendly specialty services.

How to get it

To try OpenSUSE, visit the OpenSUSE Web site and either download a set of CD or DVD images (for OpenSUSE 10.2, you will need six CDs or one DVD), or try an over-the-network install. OpenSUSE provides installation images for i386, AMD64, PowerPC, and Intel Itanium processors.

You can purchase Novell's commercial SUSE Linux products directly from Novell. Visit the Linux section of Novell's Web site and select SLED, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, or one of the other products, and follow the links on the page. If you are not ready to buy yet, you can also download an evaluation version of SLED or the server products in order to test-drive it for 60 days.

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