Linux – How similar is Ubuntu to SUSE Enterprise

linuxslesUbuntu

I have a question for SysAdmins who know many flavors of Linux. I need to be familiar with SUSE Enterprise for a job, but I currently have no access to the enterprise edition. I also would prefer to learn Ubuntu. So how similar is ubuntu to SUSE Enterprise in terms of the commands, etc.

Best Answer

As it happens I'm currently going the other direction, coming from a SLES-based office to an Ubuntu one.

The difference is quite significant and they do not share much in the way of distro-level commands. The commands that differ:

Service start/stop/management
Runlevel editing
Package management
Config-file management (though the "just directly modify files" methods work on both)
sudo/su config differs
Network configuration

In short, nearly everything is different. I'm still learning how to do things the Ubuntu way and it has been several months. The linguistic analogy is the difference between German and English.

If you need access now, I suggest downloading the latest OpenSUSE release as that's what SLES is based on. The newer OpenSUSE releases do differ from the SLES version in some interesting ways, but how you interact with the overall system doesn't change a lot. Again with the linguistic analogy, this is US English vs UK English; it's a different dialect but still intelligible.

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Linux Bash – How to Sort du -h Output by Size

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

Linux in Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V Environment

Microsoft, like any company, responds to pressure from customers. Unfortunately, for a while there they were in a big fight with Red Hat during which they weren't even responding to customer demands for Red Hat support but that has been resolved. Microsoft claims that SUSE and Red Hat are the primary distros that people are asking for and indeed the two of them make up a huge chunk of the distros in large companies (the ones that most easily get Microsoft's attention). Given how long it took and how painful it was to get Microsoft to support these two, I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for another distro.

Technically, the issue is performance. You can build a VM on Hyper-V and run any distro you want and it will work if you use the legacy NIC and normal IDE storage controller. The problem you'll find is that the performance of the VM with the legacy NIC and the IDE controller without better drivers is poor. With the release of Hyper-V R2 (and Windows 2008 R2), Microsoft released the Linux Integration Components Version 2. Once installed, you can use the synthetic NIC which is much better and you'll find that the IDE controller performs on par with a Windows VM. Microsoft's testing and documentation for the integration components was done only with SUSE and Red Hat but many people have been able to get them succesfully installed in other linux distros and they are working fine. You just can't call Microsoft for help if something breaks or acts strange. The Integration Components were also released under GPL so other distros might themselves choose to integrate them to make things even easier.

The Integration Components are here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c299d675-bb9f-41cf-b5eb-74d0595ccc5c&displaylang=en

Here's a howto for Ubuntu: http://blog.allanglesit.com/Blog/tabid/66/EntryId/22/Hyper-V-Guests-Linux-Integration-Components-Ubuntu-and-Debian.aspx

Best Answer

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