Thursday, April 19, 2007

ZLM client removed from openSUSE

On SUSE Linux 10.1 it was required, on openSUSE 10.2 you can deselect it during installation, for openSUSE 10.3 it was planned to be made an optional install but yesterday Andreas Jaeger announced:
openSUSE is focusing on native software management by using YaST
and libzypp, the package management library.

ZENworks Linux Management is Novell's solution for enterprise-class
resource management for desktops and servers. ZENworks components are
fully available and supported for SUSE Linux Enterprise based products
and not longer part of the openSUSE distribution.

Product development for both ZENworks and SUSE Linux Enterprise
concentrates on continued interoperability solutions for remote and
local software management.

Meaning no Zenworks for future openSUSE releases and use of native tools only - zypper, opensuse-updater and YaST. This is definitely good idea - make the existing package manager better and more reliable, instead of adding and integrating another one. The next openSUSE 10.3 Alpha featuring no ZMD at all is planned for May 16.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's about time! It was too buggy, I hope opensuse-updater does a better job.

Anonymous said...

opensues-updater a new component or a re-branded zen-updater?

Also, how will this affect ZMD moving forward?

Anonymous said...

"This is definitely good idea - make the existing package manager better and more reliable, instead of adding and integrating another one." .... ZMD was there before zypper, may be someone should have told SUSE to concentrate on making the ZLM agent better rather than creating a new updater. If zypper has a few problems are they going to give up on that as quickly and create another new updater? If ZLM is the enterprise solution SUSE should buck their ideas up and solve all the issues with that. I for one do NOT need another tool for updating, but now it looks like I am going to have one in the office and a different one at home .... nice

Anonymous said...

Does this mean ZLM will no longer be able to inter-operate with YaST and libzypp installers? It would be much nicer if there was one best of breed solution with ZLM hooks rather than one package manager which doesn't work with ZLM, and one which does work with ZLM but isn't that great as a stand alone solution.

Personally I prefer the YaST tools but having update notification and being able to left click RPMs to install the odd package here and there is needed too (although zmd gets out of sync doing that). What is going to be lost by not simply getting the whole solution to work together without duplication?