[WLUG] Free SLES Distro?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 09:55:47AM -0500, Clif Flynt wrote:
>   The main thing I'm disliking about the new Centos & SL is the GUI,
> and how pervasive, non-intuitive and unavoidable it's becoming.
> [...]
>   Someday, I will embrace Gnome and KDE, but the developers seem to 
> think they are writing emacs and everything should be a WM/DE
> application that can only be run when you sit in front of the computer.

Sadly, anything modern is going to be using the recent KDE and Gnome
unless they're like Canonical and they're building their own desktop
environment.  

On my RHEL7 and CentOS7 systems I use MATE from EPEL.  It's a fork of
the old gnome2 code, with continued development, and it will probably
perform quite like what you're used to.  I'm also not a huge fan of
Gnome3 and I'm not sure what we're going to do when we start deploying
RHEL7 workstations here.  I don't really blame Red Hat here -- they're
just packaging what is supported by upstream.

>   But, it's not fully integrated (yet) in SL/7. Sendmail is still
> controlled with init.d.  This might be that RH is moving away from 
> sendmail.  I'll concede that sendmail is a bear to configure, but last
> time I looked at postfix it couldn't do the envelope rewriting I need.

I'd double-check that -- the CentOS7 sendmail package doesn't include
a SysV init file, only systemd service units.

# rpm -ql sendmail | egrep 'systemd|rc.d'
/usr/lib/systemd/system/sendmail.service
/usr/lib/systemd/system/sm-client.service

The only way you get the SysV init script is if you install the
extra sendmail-sysvinit package. 

>   My joy with OpenSuSE has been that everything under the sun is
> available from the repositories and I don't always have to compile my
> tools from scratch.

I'm pretty happy with CentOS + EPEL.  Much of what I want is already
built. 

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>