SLED 10.2 NVidia Driver 6/3/2009 - broken again

[mikewillis]

Thanks for the reply. And yes, I'm venting. However, I'm venting because Novell support does read these forums. Using the Nvidia installer is not a suitable solution in an environment with mobile users.

Unless you have patient users who you can rely upon to follow instructions. So, no :) I guess I'm lucky that all my user's are desk bound. When they tell their machine to shutdown they can just walk off and it doesn't matter if it sits there for five minutes installing updates and rebuilding the Nvidia driver before it actually turns off.

Every time the kernel updates, graphics break. My users are not advance, nor do they have the privileges to install the driver via the nvidia installer. Kernel updates, IMHO, are considered critical, and I don't feel like skipping critical updates on machines that are out in the wild. We purchase licensing for a product and expect timely updates for the license fees that we pay.

The breakage you described would certainly p i s s (censorship is futile) me off. I'm now wondering if such breakage was why I decided to use the installer from Nvidia instead.

Hell, the kernels in 10.2 are so far out of date it's not even funny.

I think Novell would prefer 'well tested' rather than 'out of date' :)
But seriously, when this local root exploit came out, Slashdot | Linux Kernel 2.6 Local Root Exploit, I was very pleased to be running an older unaffected kernel. Though that may have just been luck rather than anything else.

Give me a break. If I were not mandated to use a "supported" OS, I'd have moved to a community OS by now ... one where the community actually gets involved and keeps things up to date, which clearly Novell has no motivation to do.

I know where you're coming from, but if you want something newer than SLED 10 SP2, there's SLED 11. (Assuming you are willing to stop using KDE or put up with 4.1.3 for three years.) Part of the point of SLED is that it stays much the same for years on end. It's called stability. A lot people in an Enterprise environment consider stability to be very valuable. This is why SLED exists. If I were to use openSUSE then my one major update window a year plus the openSUSE release schedule and supported lifespan would mean I'd be forced in to doing a major update every 12 months. I know my users don't want that and it doesn't appeal to me. Sure the kernel version in SLED 10 is old, but Novell put out security updates for it and also roll in newer drivers during service pack releases and they also make drivers available separately, like for the e1000e network driver you need for an Intel Q45 chipset. It's age has never caused my any problems, though of course YMMV.


A downside with distros like SLED is that Linux moves quite quickly. A lot of people like that about it and for them a distro like SLED, where you're expected to keep much the same library versions and stuff for three years or even longer seems a bit, well, boring. More seriously, because things more along so quickly, you can start running in to issues where software demands newer libraries than you have. Being stuck with Firefox 2 (assuming you're not willing to build a newer GTK and it's dependencies) really makes SLED 10 look dated.

You say you've considered a switch to RHEL, but do you know for sure that RHEL doesn't suffer from the same issues you dislike, or others as bad, that SLED does? For example according to DistroWatch.com: Red Hat Enterprise Linux the current version of RHEL has KDE 3.5.4. 3.5.5 was released October 2006. It has GNOME 2.16 and 2.18 was released in April 2007. Sure they're newer than what is in SLED 10, but that's only because RHEL 5 came out around a year later. Like how the current Ubuntu has GNOME 2.26 because it came out later than the current openSUSE which has 2.24. There's no mention on that page of the kernel version in RHEL, but given the versions of everything else included, I doubt it's all the much newer than SLED 10's. RHEL 5 can lord it over SLED with it's inclusion of Firefox 3 made possible by it having GTK 2.10 rather than 2.8 as SLED does, but then SLED 10 has OpenOffice 3.1 and RHEL still has 2.3.0.

As for "supported", I've only sought support for SLED from Novell a few times and to be honest when I haven't been particularly impressed. There's an issue I've had open with Novell for about a month or so now. Since raising it I solved it myself using some info I found on a forum that was written for a different distro but also applied to SLED. I'm now leaving the issue open with Novell to see if they can give me the solution. So far they've sent me two 'solutions'. The first didn't work and would have been useless if it did, the second one was something I'd already tried and found to not work. Novell don't make SLED 11 in the same way that Microsoft make Windows or Apple make OS X. (And the same is true for RHEL.) I think that's reflected in the manner in which they are, or more specifically sometimes seemingly are not, able to provide solutions to problems their customers encounter.

Anyway, I'd better stop rambling now and go and do some work.