Re: Migrations to other linux distro
On Sat, 7 Nov 2020, Yasha Karant wrote: I have configured the machine with MATE from Ubuntu, and installed all of the utilities I had used on SL plus some that seemingly were not available for SL 7. Naturally, yum, yumex, etc., are replaced by various apt utilities, but the functionalities, if not the actual CLI commands or GUI steps, are equivalent. The only peculiarities I have found to date are that unlike SL, LTS assumes that everything must be done via sudo. As I prefer both su and an Xwindow GUI root screen, I had to modify some of the LTS configuration files to do this, but it is quite simple (in the current LTS). Both of these functionalities now work. When I moved to LUbuntu I noticed this too, but found that sudo on ubuntu does not require the password if it has been run recently in that shell, which makes sudo on ubuntu much more user friendly than sudo on RH/SL. It has also been stated than unlike SL, LTS allows for upgrade-in-place to the next major LTS production release. The caution for this procedure is to nonetheless backup all non-distro directories and files to an external device so that things can be retrieved if something were to go awry. Given that a new Ubuntu LTS release comes out every two years, I was surprised to find that it dated more quickly than SL and I have found myself moving from LTS to the standard release for my home machine. Upgrade-in-place between standard releases does work. -- Andrew C. Aitchison Kendal, UK and...@aitchison.me.uk
Migrations to other linux distro
With the non-existence of SL8, I (and others) have been investigating alternatives to EL. For the present, I have settled upon Ubuntu LTS, that more or less has the same niche as EL, with the regular non-LTS Ubuntu being similar in niche to Fedora. This posting is not an advertisement for Ubuntu, nor am I affiliated with Canonical (just as I am not affiliated with Red Hat nor IBM). The summary below discusses why I have migrated my machines from SL and what I have observed that may be useful to others who face the lack of SL for EL8 and are not necessarily enthusiastic about the other available without fee binary bootable installable (not just source) EL8 distros. My wife had to get a new touchscreen (writing by hand with a stylus) laptop, and thus I started the migration with her machine as EL7 would not suffice for her hardware and application needs. A month or so past, the screen (internal to the laptop cover) on my machine failed -- a circumstance that motivated to examine alternative Linux distros. Given the major surgery required to replace the lid, I ordered an identical machine now only available in refurbished (with a warranty) from a reputable web-based source. Removing the hard drive from the failed machine (SL7 current), I installed it in the new machine and copied all of the non-distro directories and files to a 2 Tbyte external USB drive. I then installed a new 2 Tbyte hard drive into the "new" machine, removing the MS Win 10 SSD drive supplied with it in the event the machine would need to be returned. (On the laptop in question, this is a simple procedure; I do have an "anti-static" work-surface mat with wristband.) I had installed a bootable ISO installation image of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS on an external USB "thumb drive", and proceeded with the installation. Because I wanted a custom partitioning of the hard drive, there were a few false starts; having done this, I can offer some advice to anyone interested. I have configured the machine with MATE from Ubuntu, and installed all of the utilities I had used on SL plus some that seemingly were not available for SL 7. Naturally, yum, yumex, etc., are replaced by various apt utilities, but the functionalities, if not the actual CLI commands or GUI steps, are equivalent. The only peculiarities I have found to date are that unlike SL, LTS assumes that everything must be done via sudo. As I prefer both su and an Xwindow GUI root screen, I had to modify some of the LTS configuration files to do this, but it is quite simple (in the current LTS). Both of these functionalities now work. The support and help lists are much more cumbersome than this SL users list, with a formal style guide, etc., moderators, etc., although there are no style configuration files that work with LaTeX, MS Office (and thus, for the most part, LibreOffice), etc., unlike most journals and professional refereed conferences to which I submit work. As far as I can tell from workstation (not server) use, Ubuntu LTS works as well as SL, seems to be stable with regular security updates, and has the same utilities, etc., that any modern stable Linux distro does. Moreover, unlike EL, LTS seems to support more hardware variants and keeps more "current" allowing "current" production releases of utilities to function (such as the current production Texstudio). It has also been stated than unlike SL, LTS allows for upgrade-in-place to the next major LTS production release. The caution for this procedure is to nonetheless backup all non-distro directories and files to an external device so that things can be retrieved if something were to go awry. Take care. Stay safe. Yasha Karant
Re: Other linux
Yasha, Did you ask your colleagues why they refuse to upgrade? My experience with suse goes back to the early days of fedora. The reason I looked into going suse - i was fedup with tons of fedora updates that were constantly breaking something. And I could not get updates for rh. With no pressing actual needs to use exactly suse, I quickly became frustrated with it - I had to re-learn tons of things, just to become comfortable enough to do my daily routines and support the system. On Mar 26, 2015 6:14 AM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 8:06 PM, Yasha Karant ykar...@csusb.edu wrote: I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. IIUC you're looking at installing another distro because, judging from some of your previous posts, some of SL's packages are too old and rebuilding the Fedora SRPMs isn't as straightforward as you'd like if not impossible. So why don't you use Fedora? A release is supported for 13 months as opposed to the 18 months of OpenSUSE. Are the extra 5 months reason enough to switch to a different distro? Fedora'll be far more familiar and will show you what SL-next-gen will look like. I don't know SUSE (or OpenSUSE for that matter) but won't you encounter the same problems as with SL since it's an LTS enterprise distro?
Re: Other linux
Thank you very much -- but I have no interest in your price list. When I have installed OpenSUSE 13.2 and, if it is successful and useful, I shall share my observations with any SL list subscribers who may be interested. If we had disposable resources, etc., I would not be facing this particular conundrum. Yasha Karant On 03/24/2015 05:18 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote: Price list: answers: $10 researched answers: $20 correct answers: $100 actionable answers: $200 K.O. On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 05:06:38PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote: I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. Yasha Karant
Other linux
I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. Yasha Karant
Re: Other linux
Price list: answers: $10 researched answers: $20 correct answers: $100 actionable answers: $200 K.O. On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 05:06:38PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote: I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. Yasha Karant -- Konstantin Olchanski Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
Re: Other linux
On 24 March 2015 at 18:06, Yasha Karant ykar...@csusb.edu wrote: I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. Yasha Karant In many cases OpenSUSE is going to be a lot like Fedora or non LTS Ubuntu. It has shorter support times in comparison to SLED but gets updates to various core materials much sooner. It uses RPM technology but was for the longest time was more like slackware in how things were packaged up and laid out on disks. Usage of OpenSUSE in univerisity and research environments occurs mainly in Europe with various places in the US using it (though the US universities tend towards Debian.) YAST can be a wonder but it was getting a rewrite and people who liked it in the past have been grumpy lately. However that is most likely a temporary problem. -- Stephen J Smoogen.
