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Up close with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12
New Chameleon
At the end of September, a very exclusive green USB stick with the SUSE logo reached the ADMIN magazine editorial office. The stick contained an image with the current pre-release version of SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) 12 [1], including the plugins for high availability. The test team had the chance for a first look at what SUSE has been up to, and we discovered they want to keep enterprise customers in a good mood for the next few years.
The universal truth for all long-lasting enterprise distributions applies equally to SUSE: What is broken in the new version of SLES to the extent that it cannot be fixed with an update will regularly come back to haunt the support team – and admins – during the next few years. Nonetheless, SLES 12 does come with some major changes. Among other things, the default filesystem will be Btrfs in the future – you can't say the SLES developers lack courage.
Linux 3.12.26 is no longer the latest kernel, but it is an LTS version and thus the logical choice for SUSE. As expected, all major server programs are available in sufficiently recent versions for enterprise systems.
We took a tour of SLE 12 pre-release USB stick that arrived in our office just in time for this issue to go to press. The good news is, as of October 27, anyone can now gain an impression of the full SLE 12 release, which means some of the bugs uncovered in our journey might already be fixed.
In the Beginning
In the preliminary release notes for SLES 12, SUSE makes it clear that the installer has undergone significant modifications. If you have ever installed SLES 11, you wouldn't need a note to see the change: Compared with the previous versions, the SLES 12 installer is rather drab, keeping to a very dark color scheme (Figures 1 and
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