Actually, the SuSE distro may have been a fortuitist gift for him.  On July 8, 2004 Novell had become the first networking infrastructure vendor to reach an agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration to participate in the SmartBUY program for government-wide software purchasing.  As of today, for many reasons including security, Novell's networking infrastructure software (SuSE is part of this) is still the only off-the-shelf software of this category in the SmartBUY program.  The sole provider of open source software in the SmartBUY program, Novell offers three Linux bundles - a desktop solution, a "starter pack" server solution for smaller departmental deployments, and a more managed/full featured server solution for large environments.  Vista has been around for over a decade and runs on various OS platforms.  However, over the past year the government (initially the Veterans Administration) has been slowly replacing its Windows, and small islands of *n(i,u)x installations with SuSE.

The only reason I happen to have any familiarity with this is because about a year ago the Federal Court system in this area asked me to migrate them off of RedHat and Windows over to SuSE.  I was surprised but when I dug into what was going on, I understood.  With WINE and Mono providing the Windows and .NET support on SuSE, the government is moving at an ever increasing rate in adopting the SuSE distro.

Bob

Andy Stewart wrote: 
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Jared Greenwald wrote:
  
I'm surprised that no one has suggested ubuntu (ubuntulinux.org).  I
had that installed on my Compaq Evo N600c for a while before reverting
back to Gentoo.  (I'm normally a Gentoo user everywhere, but Ubuntu is
just so easy, quick and painless I had to give it a shot.)  I'd have
to say its about the easiest distro to install.  There is even a
version that comes with KDE pre-setup called Kubuntu (kubuntu.org).

You can even try the livecd to see if it can detect all the hardware
on your laptop.  The standard (non-livecd) installer uses the same
logic to do the install, so if the livecd works the real install
should as well.  The thing that will take time is the actual download
of the livecd and installer cd.

-Jared
    

HI gang,

I'm not certain if Mel truly has a preference for SuSE or if he
mentioned that because of the CDs I gave to him (I suspect the latter).
 Clearly there are a lot of good choices and Ubuntu is one of them.  His
interest in the VistA open source medical software may be driving this
decision.

Later,

Andy

- --
Andy Stewart, Founder
Worcester Linux Users' Group
Worcester, MA, USA
http://www.wlug.org

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