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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.

sameold
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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.

sysadmin1138
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Why not download OpenSUSE and give that a try? It's the free community "development" edition of SUSE Enterprise, similar to how Fedora and RedHat work together.

HampusLi
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Ian Murdock posted a Linux Family tree on his blog a while back. http://ianmurdock.com/linuxfamilytree/ This should give some idea on the history of the major distributions. Generally the closer the relationship the more similar distributions will be.

orien
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@sameold,

SuSE has free training for SuSE Enterprise 10:

http://www.novell.com/training/freelearning/course/view.php?id=122

For SuSE Enterprise 11, you can go here:

http://ocw.novell.com/suse-linux-enterprise-server-administrators/suse-linux-enterprise-11-fundamentals

As I pointed out to @sysadmin1138, you can download the SuSE 11 for Eval purposes, with 30 days of updates. This is probably your best option.

Rilindo
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    • Ubuntu - apt-get
    • SUSE - YAST (which I consider more weak, than apt-*, but it's IMNSHO)
    • Ubuntu - no root in desktop builds (all root actions sudo'ed)
    • SUSE - normal root
    • Ubuntu - deb-packaging
    • SUSE - RPM
    • Ubuntu - grub2
    • SUSE - grub
    • Ubuntu - upstart
    • SUSE - sysvinit

Anybody can expand list, can't recall more on the fly

Lazy Badger
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