SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a

Linux-based operating system A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

developed by

SUSE SUSE ( , ) is a German-based multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux Ent ...

. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for

server Server may refer to: Computing * Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and s ...

s and

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s, and Desktop (SLED) for

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''worksta ...

s and

desktop computer A desktop computer (often abbreviated desktop) is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply ...

s. Its major versions are released at an interval of 3–4 years, while minor versions (called "Service Packs") are released about every 12 months. SUSE Linux Enterprise products receive more intense testing than the upstream

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, su ...

community product, with the intention that only mature, stable versions of the included components will make it through to the released enterprise product. It is developed from a common code base with other SUSE Linux Enterprise products. IBM's Watson was built on IBM's

POWER7 POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochest ...

systems using SLES. In March 2018, SUSE Product Manager Jay Kruemcke wrote in SUSE blog that SUSE Linux Enterprise developers have ported it to

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SLES was developed based on SUSE Linux by a small team led by Marcus Kraft and Bernhard Kaindl as principal developer who were supported by Joachim "Jos" Schröder. It was first released on October 31, 2000 as a version for IBM S/390 mainframe machines. In December 2000, the first enterprise client ( Telia) was made public. In April 2001, the first SLES for

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

was released. From a business perspective, SLES is not only a technical offering, but also has entangled a commercial offering (services and support). The initial business model was inspired by recurrent charges established in the mainframe world at this time, and innovated by Jürgen Geck and Malcom Yates. Based on customer needs and feedback as well as other evolving Linux based offerings the business model has been reworked by different people in the subsequent years until today. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9) was released in August 2004. Service Pack 4 was released in December 2007. It was supported by hardware vendors including IBM, HP,

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, th ...

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), Server (computin ...

, SGI,

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related ser ...

, and

Fujitsu Siemens Computers Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH was a Japanese and German vendor of information technology. The company was founded in 1999 as a 50/50 joint venture between Fujitsu Limited of Japan and Siemens of Germany. On April 1, 2009, the company became ...

. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) was released in July 2006, and is also supported by the major hardware vendors. Service pack 4 was released in April 2011. SLES 10 shared a common codebase with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10—Novell's desktop distribution for business use—and other SUSE Linux Enterprise products. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES 11) was released on March 24, 2009Novell Ships SUSE Linux Enterprise 11
/ref> and included

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

2.6.27, Oracle Cluster File System Release 2, support for the OpenAIS cluster communication protocol for server and storage clustering, and Mono 2.0. SLES 11 SP1 (released May 2010) rebased the kernel version to 2.6.32. In February 2012, SLES 11 SP2 was released, based on kernel version 3.0.10. SLES 11 SP2 included a Consistent Network Device Naming feature for

servers. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12) beta was made available on February 25, 2014, and the final version was released on October 27, 2014. SLES 12 SP1 was released on December 18, 2015. SP1 added Docker,

Shibboleth A shibboleth (; hbo, , šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwo ...

, Network Teaming, and

JeOS Just enough operating system (JeOS, pronounced "juice" according to SUSE) is a paradigm for customizing operating systems to fit the needs of a particular application such as for a software appliance. The platform only includes the operating syste ...

images. SP2 was released November 11, 2016. SP3 was released September 7, 2017. The SLES 13 and SLES 14 version numbers were skipped due to superstitions associated with those numbers in certain cultures. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 (SLES 15) beta 1 was released on October 18, 2017, and the final version was released on July 16, 2018. SLES 15 SP2, which updates the kernel, PostgreSQL, Samba, Salt and many other parts of the operating system, was released on July 21, 2020.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), introduced as Novell Linux Desktop (NLD), targeted at the business market, it is developed from a common codebase with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and other SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) products. SLED includes the

GNOME Shell GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite cons ...

Evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

and many other popular

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

packages such as Dia,

TigerVNC TigerVNC is an open source Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server and client software, started as a fork of TightVNC in 2009. The client supports Windows, Linux and macOS. The server supports Linux. There is no server for macOS and the Windows ser ...

, and

lftp lftp is a command-line program client for several file transfer protocols. lftp is designed for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was developed by Alexander Lukyanov, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. lftp can t ...

. Like SLES, SLED is based on openSUSE Tumbleweed and shares a common codebase with openSUSE Leap. SLED since version 12 has included a modified version of the GNOME Classic Shell to include a layout with one panel on the bottom of the screen, traditional application menus, and desktop icons for traditional desktop users. It also includes

, Mozilla

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

, and

along with many standard GNOME utilities, such as GNOME Documents and

GNOME Files GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel with many luminaries from the tech world including Andy Hertzfeld (Apple), chief architect for ...

. As well, the

YaST YaST ( Yet another Setup Tool) is a Linux operating system setup and configuration tool. YaST is featured in the openSUSE Linux distribution, as well as in SUSE's derived commercial distributions. It is also part of the defunct United Linux. Y ...

Control Center allows end users to make advanced changes to the system from the command line. HP offers business notebooks with SLED 11 preinstalled, under both its own brand and the Compaq brand.

Micro-Star International Micro-Star International Co., Ltd (MSI; ) is a Taiwanese multinational information technology corporation headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan. It designs, develops and provides computer hardware, related products and services, including l ...

offered

MSI Wind Netbook The MSI Wind Netbook was a family of subnotebooks / netbooks designed by Micro-Star International (MSI). Wind stands for "Wi-Fi Network Device". The first model was announced at CeBIT 2008, and first listed for pre-orders on May 9, 2008. While ...

s with SLED 10 preinstalled.

previously licensed SLED as the basis of the Linux version of

Java Desktop System Java Desktop System, briefly known as OpenSolaris Desktop, is a legacy desktop environment developed first by Sun Microsystems and then by Oracle Corporation after the 2010 Oracle acquisition of Sun. Java Desktop System is available for Solaris ...

History

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop has been developed while SUSE was under the ownership of several different parent companies. SUSE was owned by and conducted business as

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

from SLED's first release as Novell Linux Desktop in 2004 until 2011 when

The Attachmate Group The Attachmate Group, Inc. was a privately held software holding company based in Houston, Texas in the United States. The major companies held by the group were Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE. Attachmate was owned by Wizard Parent L ...

purchased Novell and created SUSE as an autonomous subsidiary.

Micro Focus Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and ...

in turn purchased The Attachmate Group in 2014 and made SUSE an autonomous business unit, before selling it to

EQT Partners EQT AB Group is a global investment organization founded in 1994. Its funds invest in private equity, infrastructure, real estate, growth equity, and venture capital in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. , EQT's assets under management ...

in 2019. EQT Partners is a private equity group that develops new companies before divesting them as independent companies. ;Novell Linux Desktop 9 Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) 9 was originally released November 8, 2004, less than a year after Novell's acquisition of SUSE. There were a number of Service Packs (SP's) released for NLD 9. SP1 was released on February 11, 2005 and contained many updates. After that, SP2 was released on August 9, 2005, containing all the released updates and bugfixes since August 2004. SP3 was released on December 22, 2005. NLD 9 was based on SUSE Linux 9.1 and offered a more conservative offering of desktop applications for businesses. Its desktop included common end user applications like Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org. NLD also included software developed by Novell and its 2003 acquisition

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel ...

, such as the Red Carpet software management tool from Ximian and Novell's system management tool

ZenWorks ZENworks, a suite of software products developed and maintained by Micro Focus International for computer systems management, aims to manage the entire life cycle of servers, of desktop PCs (Windows, Linux or Mac), of laptops, and of handhel ...

. ;SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 With SLED 10,

increased the focus on features for a broader range of corporate users by focusing on meeting the needs for basic office workers, positioning SLED as a competitor to

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

. Basic office workers were defined in this context as users who need basic desktop functionality, including an

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings ...

, a collaboration client, a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

, and

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigg ...

. Novell attempts to meet these needs by concentrating on making these components very compatible with existing enterprise infrastructure, such as Microsoft Office data files, Microsoft

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was used only for centrali ...

, and

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

Novell GroupWise GroupWise is a messaging and collaboration platform from Micro Focus that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The GroupWise platform consists of desktop client software, whi ...

collaboration systems. It also included the

Beagle The beagle is a breed of small scent hound, similar in appearance to the much larger foxhound. The beagle was developed primarily for hunting hare, known as beagling. Possessing a great sense of smell and superior tracking instincts, the ...

desktop search tool, similar to Spotlight in Mac OS X v10.4. The Xgl+

Compiz Compiz () is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. Effects, such as a minimization animation or a cube workspace, are implemented as loa ...

support enables a variety of advanced graphical effects in the user interface, such as "application tiling" (similar to Exposé). Other features include making it easier for Linux beginners to connect digital cameras to the computer and play audio files such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

s using Helix Banshee. The version of GNOME included this release was highly customized, and debuted the ''slab'' application menu on a one panel layout. SLED 10 was originally released June 17, 2006. The last service pack for SLED 10 was Service Pack 4, released April 15, 2011. ;SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SLED 11, based on openSUSE 11.1, was released March 24, 2009. It included an upgrade to GNOME and was the first release to ship

KDE 4 KDE Software Compilation 4 (KDE SC 4) was the only series of the so-called KDE Software Compilation (short: KDE SC), first released in January 2008 and the last release being 4.14.3 released in November 2014. It was the follow-up to K Desktop En ...

, with version 4.1.3. Several improvements were made to improve Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server integration, and the Novell OpenOffice.org version was upgraded to version 3.0. SLED continued to include some proprietary components such as Adobe Flash, as well as open-source implementations of closed sourced plugins and runtimes such as

Moonlight Moonlight consists of mostly sunlight (with little earthlight) reflected from the parts of the Moon's surface where the Sun's light strikes. Illumination The intensity of moonlight varies greatly depending on the lunar phase, but even the ful ...

and Mono. Four service packs were released for SLED 11, with Service Pack 2 notably bringing

BtrFS Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused w ...

commercial support to the enterprise Linux market and including the snapper tool to manage BtrFS snapshots. The most current service pack, SP 4, was released July 17, 2015. ;SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 On October 28, 2014, SUSE (now an independent business unit) released SLED 12 built on openSUSE 13.1. SLED 12 introduced several new technological upgrades, including

systemd systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. Its main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions; Its primary component is a "system and service manager ...

, GNOME 3, GRUB 2,

plymouth Plymouth () is a port city and unitary authority in South West England. It is located on the south coast of Devon, approximately south-west of Exeter and south-west of London. It is bordered by Cornwall to the west and south-west. Plymout ...

, and the in-house built wicked wireless network manager. SLED 12 also included further stability and integration with BtrFS. With the transition to GNOME 3, the GNOME Classic Shell, the vanilla GNOME Shell, and a SLE Classic Shell with a design that more closely mimics the slab layout were included. KDE, the default desktop environment in openSUSE, and support for 32-bit x86 processors were dropped from the enterprise distribution. SLE 12 Service Pack 1 was the first to be the basis for openSUSE's more conservative Leap series, with openSUSE Leap 42.1 sharing its codebase with SLE 12 SP 1. Leap 42.2 and 42.3 were built from the same codebase as SLE 12 SP 2 and SLE SP 3 respectively. SLED 12's underlying base, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, was the first version of SLE to be offered on the Microsoft Store to be run on the

Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

. ;SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SLE skipped over versions 13 and 14, realigning the versions of openSUSE Leap and SLE at version 15. SLE 15 was released June 25, 2018 with the same codebase as openSUSE Leap 15.0. SLED 15 included major upgrades to GNOME 3.26, LibreOffice 6.0, GCC 7 and LTS kernel version 4.12. Version 15 also made the Wayland implementation of GNOME the default. SLES and SLED can now also be installed from the same media. SLED 15 offers the same GNOME Desktop options as SLED 12. SLE 15 SP 1 shares a common codebase with openSUSE Leap 15.1. SLE 15 SP 1 includes improvements to the ability to migrate from openSUSE Leap to SLE, increased 64-bit Arm System on a Chip (SoC) supported processor options, transactional updates, and various other features. SLE 15 SP 3 features a unified repository with same source code and binary packages with openSUSE Leap 15.3.

People

Novell's effort on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 was led by

Nat Friedman Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub, and former Chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute, and an advisor ...

, one of the two founders of

. Nat was aided by a host of former Ximian and

developers, with product manager Guy Lunardi and engineering manager Kelli Frame.

Derivatives

Throug
SUSE Studio Express
users can create custom appliances based on SUSE Linux Distributions including SLED. Options for SLE allow for the creation of derivative distributions as custom Kiwi and docker containers with customized package choices and configuration parameters.

Features

SUSE's work on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop brings several unique features to its implementation of desktop enterprise Linux. ;Desktop Effects Desktop Effects was built upon Xgl and

to enable a variety of advanced graphical effects in the user interface, such as "application tiling" (similar to Exposé) and a spinning cube that interactively switches between desktops. The now included GNOME 3 Shell includes several graphical desktop effects by default. ;Device and Application Support SLED also includes the ability to connect

digital camera A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices ...

s and

iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes wa ...

s to a computer, and have an appropriate application automatically start when this happens. ;YaST Control Center

is the primary configuration tool in the SUSE Linux distributions, including SLED. YaST is an installation and administration program which can handle hard disk partitioning, system setup, RPM package management, online updates, network and

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

configuration, user administration and more in an integrated interface consisting of various modules for each administrative task. ;SUSE Package Hub SUSE Package Hub gives SLE users the option to install packages that are not an official part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution or are more up to date than those included with the latest version of SLE. SUSE Package Hub is unofficial, and the software installed from its repositories does not receive commercial support from SUSE. Currently about 9,000 packages are available from SUSE Package Hub for SLE 12 and 15 with packages available for AArch64, ppc64le, s390x, and x86-64.

End-of-support schedule

Legacy versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES 9 and 10) had a ten year product lifecycle. Newer versions have a thirteen year product lifecycle (SLES 11, 12, and 15). The current support model consists of 10 years of general support from time of First Customer Shipment (FCS), followed by 3 years of Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS).

Version history

Release dates of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versions: * SuSE Linux Enterprise Server ** for S/390, October 31, 2000 ** for Sparc and IA-32, April 2001 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 (For first time, common codebase for all architectures (IA-32, Itanium, iSeries and pSeries, S/390 and zSeries 31-bit, zSeries 64-bit)) ** Initial release, October 13, 2001 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 ** Initial release, October 2002 ** SP1 ** SP2 ** SP2a ** SP3 ** SP4 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 ** Initial release, 2004-08-03 ** SP1, 2005-01-19 ** SP2, 2005-07-07 ** SP3, 2005-12-22 ** SP4, 2007-12-12 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 ** Initial release, 2006-06-17 ** SP1, 2007-06-18 ** SP2, 2008-05-19 ** SP3, 2009-10-12 ** SP4, 2011-04-12 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 ** Initial release, 2009-03-24 ** SP1, 2010-06-02 ** SP2, 2012-02-15 ** SP3, 2013-07-01 ** SP4, 2015-07-16 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 ** Initial release, 2014-10-27 ** SP1, 2016-01-12 ** SP2, 2016-11-11 ** SP3, 2017-09-07 ** SP4, 2018-12-11 ** SP5, 2019-12-09 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 13 ** Skipped * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 14 ** Skipped * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 ** Initial release, 2018-07-16 ** SP1, 2019-06-24 ** SP2, 2020-07-21 ** SP3, 2021-06-23 ** SP4, 2022-06-24

References

External links

* *
SUSE blog

Interview with Novell's Ted Haeger on NLD

News about the next Novell Linux Desktop

- DesktopLinux.com news item about upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 {{DEFAULTSORT:SUSE Linux Enterprise Enterprise Linux distributions ARM Linux distributions Linux distributions Linux distributions used in appliances Power ISA Linux distributions RPM-based Linux distributions SUSE Linux X86-64 Linux distributions

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

History

People

Derivatives

Features

End-of-support schedule

Version history

See also

References

Further reading

External links