SuSE 10.0

[florian]

Our testcycle for the installation on the supported platforms actually started back in the fall and included hundreds of testcases including various upgrade scenarios; we absolutely believe in the importance of an easy and trouble-free install, for both new and upgrade users, and invest a lot of time and cycles in the subject.

Mirroring Nick's comments earlier on, I believe we've done a decent job on Scalix 10 and the install process. Most improvements included are based on feedback like yours, our internal support statistics and feedback from our own customer-facing technical people, including myself. We've even made sure to test-out the Scalix 10 installation process with a number of selected pre-release customers, so I'm happy to report that we have several thousand users on Scalix 10 up and running in production today and the feedback has been very positive.

Bottom line is that we're quite proud of the work we've done for this new release and looking forward for all your feedback in the days and weeks to come.

Cheers,
Florian.

[vorlon2261]

Guys,

Just curious, any particular reason for excluding SuSE 10 and only
supporting the OSS version? As far as I'm aware, the only difference is
the OSS version doesn't have a few non-free packages which Scalix
doesn't rely on (to my knowledge, anyway... I could be wrong)

Whilst I can fudge the installer to work on SuSE 10, I'd rather not have
to, especially when its a seemingly identical config to something that
is supported...

[florian]

I think this comes down to what we support and what support means for us.

Officially and by the book, we do support Fedora Core 4 and SuSE Linux OSS 10.0 for evaluation only. This means that for corporate and enterprise customers, we do recommend the use of a certified and fully-supported OS such as RHEL3, RHEL4 or SLES9.

This comes down to how we test; for the enterprise environments, we do thousands of testcases for each version, a full testcycle for our software takes weeks to complete. It's all about delivering reliable quality that our customers and users depend upon with one of their most mission critical applications.

Main concern on our side about the free versions of Linux, btw., is the more agressive release changes the free Linux releases are under; probably one of the reasons most companies chose enterprise Linuxes for their more critical applications.

Anyway, we do some serious testing on the free versions as well - especially w/rgds to the installation and hope what we deliver meets your quality expectations. However, at some point we're under resource constraints and need to limit the number of platforms somewhat.

For Scalix 10, the test matrix has already doubled anyway - due to the fact that we now support installation on x86_64 versions of our all distributions.

SuSE is a special case; we needed to limit our testing to one version - due to the enoumous success of Scalix Community Edition (which is mostly used on free platforms) and also because we see OpenSuSE as a kind of parallel to the Fedora project, the actual choice is easy.

So... yes I understand that SuSE Linux 10.0 *should* be the same as OpenSuSE - but then - we don't know; and we don't want to put the same level of certification on it as on something we've thoroughly tested. This is kinda similar to our position to CentOS - it remains unsupported, because we don't test and certify it, even though a number of readers on this forum have mentioned that it runs with no problem at all; in fact, some of our own support and field people run CentOS on their home machines.

Hope this helps,
Florian.