Published: July 7, 2010 - Pageviews: 25042

Novell's SLED11 SP1

What's New in Service Pack 1

Now, let us move to SLED11. Initially, the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 was a bit of a disappointment. The initial release was plagued with Sound Issues since it was released right at the time PulseAudio was being added by default to most of the major Linux Distributions. At that time, many of the audio applications were not 100% stable with Pulseaudio and the Alsa to PulseAudio "connection" for SLED11 did not work too well.

Along with the sound issues, the initial SLED11 used GNOME 2.24/GTK 2.14, which was pretty aggressive with it's library dependencies and as a result, many of the GTK applications had to be tweaked/updated in order to compile against the newer GTK. Also, the KDE version with SLED11 was 4.1.3, which was still not as stable or polished as the later KDE 4 releases.

Thankfully for the SLED11 SP1 release, Novell switched from their normal Service Pack releases which usually focus only on minor updates to the software and decided to include major software updates. For instance, SLED11 SP1 includes GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.5. This allows developers to more easily work with SLED11 SP1 since many of the underlying libraries were also updated as well. This also took care of all the minor issues of SLED11, such as the sound gaffe.

This normally would be a gamble for Novell to be so aggressive with a Service Pack Release on one of their Enterprise products, but in this case, all of the Admins that we talked to were thankful for this release and allowed some of them to go ahead and move off of the SLED10 base to the newer SLED11 SP1 base.

For a quick look at some of software versions view the chart below, which also lists the last 2 openSUSE releases.

Software Versions for Novell's latest Releases
	openSUSE 11.1	SLED11	SLED11 SP1	openSUSE 11.2
GNOME	2.24.1	2.24.1	2.28.2	2.28.2
GTK+	2.14.4	2.14.4	2.18.9	2.18.1
KDE	4.1.3	4.1.3	4.3.5	4.3.5
QT	4.4.3	4.4.3	4.6.2	4.5.3
Linux Kernel	2.6.27.7	2.6.27.39	2.6.32.12	2.6.31
GCC	4.3	4.3.3	4.3.4/4.5.0	4.4
Samba	3.2.5	3.2.7	3.4.3/3.99.90	3.4.2
OpenOffice.org	3.0.0	3.2.0*	3.2.0.9	3.1.1
Firefox	3.0.4	3.5.9*	3.5.9	3.5.8
F-spot	0.5.0.3	0.5.0.3	0.6.1.5	0.6.1.5
Gimp	2.6.2	2.6.2	2.6.2	2.6.7
Inkscape	0.46	0.46	0.46	0.46
GNUCash	2.2.7	2.2.7	2.2.7	2.2.9
Banshee	1.4.1	1.4.1	1.5.1	1.5.1
Amarok	1.4.10	1.4.10	2.1.1	2.1.1
Pidgin	2.5.1	2.6.3*	2.6.6	2.6.6

* denotes version from updates

As you can see, the initial SLED11 release is based off of openSUSE 11.1, while the SLED11 SP1 release is not based on openSUSE 11.2, but does have some aspects similar to openSUSE 11.2.

Installation & Configuration

Novell provides an easy way to install newer Service Packs through the Yast Online Update module. When a Service Pack is available, you can either continue to get updates for the current release, or apply a “move to SP” patch, which will automatically switch your update repositories to the newer Service Pack and start the SP update. Alternatively, you can simply boot off of the newer installation media and do the update / install using the installation routine.

Images of the Installation Routine for SLED11 Service Pack 1

The installation Routine is very thorough and you can adjust most system settings before the system boots. You can also do advanced tasks, such as have the installer use an automatic configuration file to allow administrators to perform automated and mass installations of SLED11 SP1.

Proprietary Drivers

Both nVidia and ATI provide software repositories for their video card drivers, which are automatically added to the system after you "register" the system with Novell. Unfortunately, during our testing, the nVidia drivers were installed in the incorrect location, and caused the X Server to not start until we rectified the situation. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. We did not test the ATI drivers.

To fix the nVidia problem, we simply copied the "updates" directory from the 2.6.32.11-0.3-pae directory to the 2.6.32.12-0.7-pae directory, then ran "depmod -a".

Yast Control Center

One of the big advantages to using SUSE Linux Enterprise over other Linux Distributions is their Yast Control Center. Yast provides a nice interface to configure most of the aspects of the Suse Linux Enterprise System, while other distros require you to manually adjust the configuration files, SLE allows you to easily perform advanced tasks through various Yast modules. For the SLED11 release, many modules were added to the comprehensive list of modules, such as Kerberos Server, Squid Server and Sudo configurations, along with a re-designed security and hardening module.

Two of the Front Ends to Yast, QT on the left, GTK on the right

Since the SLED10 Service Pack 2 release, Novell provides 2 graphical interfaces to the Yast Control Center, the QT interface and the newer GTK interface. Initially, the GTK interface only provided the GTK front-end, which launched the QT version of the modules. Since the initial SLED11 release, the GTK interface also includes GTK versions of all the modules. With the SLED11 SP1 release, quite a bit of cleanup was done to the GTK interface and it is pretty close to being as usable as the QT interface. Although, if you are remotely configuring your desktop/server, the QT version seems to work much better.

Other Configuration Enhancements

SLED11 also includes quite a few PolicyKit improvements as well as other enhancements related to Novell's other Networking Products, such as ZENworks Linux Management and their Open Enterprise Server.

Next: Working with SLED11 SP1, Additional Software & Final Thoughts