Subtitles of the Movie

Now that we've talked a little bit about Linux in general, let's get an overview of openSUSE in particular. Now, it's known by many names: SUSE, SUSAY and it's been through many different versions, but the most current version, called openSUSE is basically Novell's open source version of it's popular SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server Platforms. Now, openSUSE has been around for a while in some form or another, uh, but essentially, just like all Linux distros, it's a community-developed OS and community-supported. The SUSE trademark happens to be owned by Novell and Novell, uh, provides a lot of, uh, huge support to openSUSE and essentially what happens is, um, Novell has based it's commercial SLED, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SLES, which is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, are kind of both based upon openSUSE and as more versions of openSUSE come out and are contributed to by the developer community and by users, uh, SLED and SLES both benefit from that because sometimes they adopt the better features of openSUSE or, uh, openSUSE serves as a platform for trying out new ideas and new concepts and new software and once it's proven, it could be adopted into SLED or SLES. Now, SUSE in general is considered to be the world's oldest commercial distribution. It, uh, basically was the first distribution to be commercially packaged and marketed. Now, again, as I said before, it's went through several iterations since its inception. Uh, the company that, uh, produced SUSE was created back in Germany and the first kind of initial release, uh, it wasn't a complete release, it was in 1994, uh, version, uh, 4.2 I think and the first fully-fledged release that, uh, was, started becoming widely adopted was in 1996. Now, it went through several iterations, uh, had its ups and downs, but eventually was bought by Novell and Novell kind of turned it around. It was repackaged, uh, in 2003 and, uh, some of the, the versions that we've seen recently kind of reflect the Novell flavor in there because Novell has integrated a lot of their products, such as eDirectory, uh, into the, uh, SUSE operating system. So they kind of integrated some of the traditional Novell networking products into the system. Now, openSUSE by itself can provide a wide range of functionality. We'll talk a little bit later about some of the features it provides. Uh, but it can be basically used as a desktop or a server-based operating system. It can provide productivity for users and it can provide server services as well for enterprises. It's very easily scaled. It's probably one of the better Linux distributions, in my opinion, because it supports most modern hardware and even some legacy hardware. So you don't have to have the top-of-the-line computer to run it on, but it will support some of the most modern hardware out there. Now, openSUSE Linux is compliant with the Linux standards base, which is a standard, uh, agreed upon in the Linux community for drivers and software and things. OpenSUSE has the ability to use a wide variety of open source and commercial software. There are tons of open source software out there and even some commercial or proprietary software, such as Media Codex drivers, uh, uh, file readers and so forth. So openSUSE supports a wide variety of software out there. Because of it's ease of use and because it supports a wide variety of hardware, uh, in my opinion, all in all that makes it one of the better distros that you can get for beginners and advanced users. Now, I'm not knocking any of the popular distros such as Slackware, um, Red Hats Fedora or DVN or Ubuntu or anything like that. They all have their features, uh, and, and in some cases, they may offer advantages that openSUSE does not. But all in all, uh, it, it's a very all around, very good operating system, openSUSE is.