[ILUG] Looking for Suse disc images?

[Niall Walsh]

Hi all,

it appears we may now all be finally able to get our hands on Suse iso's 
without cost and legally:

http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Download

The bad news is that the 9.3 images carry the following note:

"This version of SUSE Linux contains some proprietary components such as Adobe 
Acrobat Reader, RealNetworks RealPlayer, Sun Java Runtime Environment and 
Macromedia Flash Player."

Which I'd guess means you still can't just hand around the iso images or burnt 
discs, but at least you can give people the url.   I'm assuming this in the 
absence of downloading and reading the licenses for each of these pieces of 
software, which I honestly couldn't be bothered to do :-D   It's possible the 
licenses on the above could allow redistribution though possibly under 
limited circumstances.

The good news is for 10.0 OSS Beta 1:

"Please note that the SUSE Linux OSS editions only contain open source 
software (OSS). Therefore some packages are missing in the distribution, 
among them are Java and depending packages like OpenOffice.org.

Java and OpenOffice.org packages can get installed afterwards by adding the 
following repository to the installation sources in YaST: 
ftp://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS-beta1/inst-source-java/"

So it looks like the only people who could be bothered to create a freely 
redistributable version of Suse were Novell, but at least it seems someone is 
finally trying :-D

I hope Sun are ashamed about the ommission of OOo.   By trying to tie OOo to 
java they have suceeded in having both removed.   I wonder if Suse will work 
to restore a Free OOo or if they are happy with this situation as it may 
provide one more encouragment for people to buy a non-free copy of their OS.

I wonder what OpenSuse does for media playback ... perhaps I may be tempted 
into downloading yet (unless some eager Suse lover would like to fill me in).  
In fact, what does Suse 9.3 do?  Can you play a DVD out of the box? region 
encoded? mp3? wmv? mov?  Is this, or will this, be another reason to buy a 
copy?

Niall