[GLLUG] Alternative to SUSE Enterprise Linux

[Marcus Rademacher]

Our GUI is in Smalltalk (wild, right?) and our main app is in C/C++. We
don't target distros so much as attempt to support what's commonly used by
our clients already. Our software is used in conjuction with
enginering/scientific simulation tools (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc). Our clients
already have large compute resources to handle the other tools, and we just
need to make sure we're compatible on those platforms. The main reason we
want to include SUSE in house is to be able to replicate our users'
environment as closely as possible during testing and support.

We do "specify" requirements in a sense, but we're not willing to lose a
sale if someone's compute cluster is still running AIX or HP-UX. Luckily,
the old UNIX stuff is going away, and the big simulation software is not
supporting them as much anymore. This allows us to do the same, and focus on
Windows and Linux as the primary platforms.

Regardless, it appears that there's no free alternative to SUSE Enterprise
Linux. I didn't realize it was so cheap (for the Desktop version, anyway).
At $50/year, it's a steal. RHEL was more than twice that, and that's after
fighting the salesman to tell us the price for the lower support option.

Anyway, thanks for the input everyone!

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Richard Houser <rick at divinesymphony.net>wrote:

> What kind of software do you make (ex. C GUI app, JEE application, Python
> daemon, PHP app, etc.)?
>
> IMO, you shouldn't be as concerned at targetting a specific distro as
> opposed to specifying software requirements (with an ex. REL 4.0, SUSE 1.0,
> for marketting).  For example, the latest Linux releases still run binaries
> built for 1.0.  I suspect the only problems you'd have are dynamic link
> libraries.  The LSB attempts to satisfy some of those, and you can bundle
> the rest with the applications.  It's what all the proprietary applications
> I've dealt with do.
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Marcus Rademacher <radema39 at msu.edu>wrote:
>
>> My company makes software products, and we need to test on multiple
>> platforms. Most of our Linux customers use either Red Hat Enterprise Linux
>> or SUSE Enterprise Linux. We have RHEL in house, but we'd like to get SUSE
>> as well. I'm aware of CentOS, and that it is virtually the same OS as RHEL
>> but without Red Hat trademarks. Is there such a distribution for SUSE Ent.
>> Linux? openSUSE isn't what I'm looking for here, but something that's a
>> CentOS-like entity, but for SUSE Enterprise Linux.
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> linux-user mailing list
>> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>>
>>
>
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