Comments on: Why does the retail box matter? (openSUSE 11.0 ready for pre-order)

By: Midnight_Voice

Midnight_Voice — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:41:05 +0000

Well, I bought the 11.0 Retail box, and it had no stickers in it, and only one DVD. Even though the manual that comes with it says ‘2 DVDs’, and its predecessor 10.3 came with 2 DVDs. So, have I been undershipped, or have you now crammed everything on the one DVD, or have I been short-changed? As a big part of the attraction of the Retail box was getting 2 DVD-9s of compatible Linux software compared with the 1 DVD-5 I could get from elsewhere, and downloading the rest (or indeed all of it).

By: Embedded

Embedded — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:21:52 +0000

Dead tree manuals are useful….

I have to go to lulu.com to get the 3 books of a total of 1680 pages for Freescale ARM i.MX27 (ARM 926te with MMU) published for my development team.

I tend to have a published book for gcc, ld, binutil and make as well as a lot of other stuff.

It is a beautiful thing to get a creative commons, compiler manual, processor manual published and mailed to one for $10 to $20 so one can put it beside you while you code.

So when does openSuSE do an ARM port like Debian? Yes I cross compile with openSuSE under Eclipse. No the RPM’s for Eclipse and CDT don’t work. You are better off installing Java and Eclipse in your user account.

Cheers John

By: Wolf

Wolf — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:08:06 +0000

I agree. Shallow as it may seem, I always got most excited about the sticker.

By: Tino Schwarze

Tino Schwarze — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:55:25 +0000

I’ll have the company I work for, order a retail box just on principle – to pay back at least a little bit. We’re using SuSE on all our servers and a lot of workstations and it’s worth a lot more than 60 Euros.

BTW: OpenSUSE 11 is the first SuSE release I’m really excited about. I recently tested RC1 and it worked like a charm!

Good work, I’m looking forward to having Compiz on my private laptop and business workstation. (Dunno, when we’ll equip the servers with 11).

It’s awesome what a community of committed people can do!

Tino.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:21:27 +0000

Amen, Zonker. At an expo, I was representing KDE, and the openSUSE team there gave us some 10.3 live CDs. All visitors were very happy to get a CD, even if many of them already had SuSE installed. Seems like they like the officially looking media.

By: manchette

manchette — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:36:10 +0000

Well, we’re now expecting that you tell us more about :

- where goes the money when we buy an openSUSE box. We’d like to know more on this.

- Also tell us why manuals are not as big as they used to be.

It looks like these two things would help a lot

Thanks

By: sd

sd — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:04:07 +0000

I have to agree with David. I also bought the old Suses (from Suse 7.3 to Suse 9.0) for the manuals.
In the case of Suse 7.3 (to give an example) this meant about 1100 pages printed manuals with seven CDs and one DVD.
This documentation in form of printed manuals made the Suse 7.3 box a real “Suse Professional” version.
Why should I buy the OpenSuse 11.0 retail box now?
I am honest, I don’t know.
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing in it that adds any kind of additional value to the free DVD or CD downloads.

By: gekko75

gekko75 — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:59:24 +0000

I miss these stickers, too. The time when I bought SuSE 9.0 I was proud to have a geeko sticker on my laptop.

By: Rohan Dhruva

Rohan Dhruva — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:16:26 +0000

Hi,

Nice write-up. Much as I’d like to buy a box, I won’t – why? Because I stay in India. If Novell India can offer me a box for somewhere around Rs. 200 – 300 I’d be more than happy, but US Dollar conversion is just killing. Here, I know it will take me 7 days to download the DVD on my 256kbps connection, but I still won’t spend as much as Rs. 2500 for a box as compared to Rs. 10/- for a nice blank DVD.

I am not against the concept, I just wish you would take local conditions into consideration. Novell could have something like a “download-burn-package-distribute” factory in India. I know it’s difficult to cater to every country, and that this comment will not make much of a difference, but I just wanted to get my thoughts across

Rohan.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:34:09 +0000

I look at buying the boxed version as contributing to the cost of the development/sustaining effort.
“Free” is nice but a bunch of real people have put in a lot of time to make this product work.
I don’t mind paying “something” (does anybody have any idea how many work hours went into making 11.0 ready for release?) to help cover the cost of this effort.

My thanks to the team/contributors in advance.