Hi! I've been wanting to replace windows at home with SUSE for some time now. I've been running SUSE since 9.0 on some computer. Current 10.2 is probably the best so far (although the software management / update systems still do not work as well as they did for example in 9.3. - well, at least for me they do not work).
So far it seems that with SUSE you can do email, web browsing (with some problems) and basic things like that. Thanks to Guru and Packman, even media works somehow. And of course, developer things are there, but this is not your normal home things (rather your work). Basic office is there (although, the OO in 10.2 can not open word docs as well as the OO in 10.0 did...). But it's still far behind WindowsXP and OS X. And as Vista is coming, it'll be further again. And what Vista brings on is DRM. Of course, in short time, OS X will have the same protected hardware paths for HD Video. Linux will not. Yes, I hate the DRM things! And I love Linux for not having them. But this is one more reason why SUSE will not make it to the general desktop at home. So what to do? I'm personally now occupied by designing two "home offices" with high-end desktop graphics workstation (running WinXP) and trying to figure out different options for the storage. The storage could be in the workstation, but everybody has 2 or more computers nowadays. So you need to access the stuff from multiple places, laptops and such. Add in media centers and things like that. So dedicated server that holds everything is needed. Yes, people need this kind of stuff! And not for pr0n as generally mentioned in connection with these home servers. Just an example: I have couple of hundred gigs of photos. Our DV box contains about 30-40 tapes, each worth 13 gigs of storage. I need one of those servers also. SUSE Linux is the perfect choice for it - well unfortunately only from the technical point of view. It as everything that you need for a backup server or just a server: samba, software RAID, raid monitoring tools, smartmontools, LVM, web-services etc. But what it does NOT have is the UI for it all. Just some examples: - Setting up RAID with YaST is easy, but there is no GUI for setting up the monitoring for it. Putting everything in the RAID that doesn't wake you up if one disk goes bad is just false sense of security. You are going to lose everything. Why not make a YaST GUI for setting up RAID monitoring? And smartmontools. - Samba and Linux passwd synchronization... How do you setup Samba in SUSE? Well, you open up YaST and start up Samba server. How do you give you children access there? Well from YaST you create new users. And then comes the catch - they can not access any smb-shares. And no, you can not fix it from the YaST - even though you could do everything else from there. You have to go down to command line. And then teach everybody that you have these 2 different passwords to use. This is the area that people will need in the future. Unfortunately, MS has also seen this (proof that this is what people need): http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070107-8566.html So, unless creating GUI for all this is something you guys are willing to do, maybe somebody could setup a wiki page for this. Setting up smartmontools and RAID-monitoring and all that is not easy. I do not count on Novell to do this - I've once completed a questionnaire from Novell, where they asked multiple questions about whether I would buy SUSE if it does not contain server software. Sigh. -- HG. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
