A post in my ongoing saga to find a replacement operating system for CentOS8. These posts are primarily notes I am making for myself on why I consider an OS an acceptable replacement or something I personally cannot use to replace my CentOS8 servers. That are certainly not detailed posts or even fully evaluated recomendations for anyone else… I am not fully evaluating each OS but only focusing on what I need and whether the OS provides it.
OpenSUSE ‘leap’ Seems to have a support (LTS) cycle of around 18 months between point releases.
‘Leap’ is the more stable release, there is also the ‘Tumbleweed’ option which is updated more frequently with ‘stable’ packages and is more for testing the latest features not in the more stable ‘Leap’ release; potentially a more stable version than CentOS but in the same place in the new position in the development stream CentOS ‘stream’ has been placed in.
I decided to look at the ‘Leap’ release 15.2 has now been released. The ISOs for all platform types are available at http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.2/.
Do not for evaluation purposes reply “yes” to the do you want to enable network repositories now prompt at install time. If you do it will try to download over 4Gb of data (it seems like it will use the network repositories in preference to what is on the install media). Reply “no” and it will install from the install media.
Also I could find nowhere to define a static network setup duting installation, so it installed using dhcp addressing which I do not want. Also after installation iin the “Yast Network Settings” you will see that by default sets the hostname based upon what if gets from the dhcp server, and there is nowhere to set a static address. Also under “settings/network” tehre is no way of setting a static ip-address. There is documentation on how to do so from a GUI interface using “Yast Network” configuration at https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-opensuse-reference/cha-network.html (tip: search the page for “set a static”) however it does not work as any attempt to open the overview tab just throws up an error saying it is managed by NetworkManager. After much googling in the Yast Network configuration change the network from networkManager to Wicked and then you can set a static ip-address and set the hostname (took a lot of googling to find that, god knows how on a server (no gui) you would do it from the command line) and you must still use the hostname/dns tab to set a static hostname and define custom dns settings; despite it saying changes are applied there is no change in ipaddress and a ‘systemctl retstart NetworkManager’ and ‘systemctl retstart network’ have no effect and a reboot is needed to pick up the change.
There are probably too many incompatabilities between this and other *nix’s for it to be an immediately viable alternative (specifically package management). Examples
- to find what package containes ifconfig the command is “cnf ifconfig”… that command does however tell you the exact command to use to install the package which is nice
- to install the package the command to use is “zypper install net-tools-deprecated”
While I am used to dnf/yum/rpm, and can manage to fight my way through apt/dpkg, do I really want to learn a completely new packaging system just to replace a CentOS8 server; not at the moment.
The openSUSE community do provide cloud images (including for openstack) which is one of my requirements for a replacement OS. These can be found at https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Cloud:/Images:/Leap_15.2/images/ although I have not tested one.
Docker is available for openSUSE. Installation instructions for Yast2 gui and command line options (and a workaround for a bug where it ignores brtfs quotas) is at https://en.opensuse.org/Docker.
Mariadb is available, a walkthrough on how to install it is at https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-mariadb-on-opensuse/ and involves adding a seperate epository.
Puppet-agent is not available for openSUSE Leap 15.2, documented at https://software.opensuse.org/package/puppet with the comment “There is no official package available for openSUSE Leap 15.2”. So to replace many servers would be a lot of manual work.
So while openSUSE looks interesting as a replacement for centOS8, it is not really an option if you are looking for a quick and easy replacement as there are new packaging commands to learn, and the major detail that puppet-agent is not supported (yet) makes replacing more than a single server impractical for me.
If you are not replacing an existing rhel based server farm but looking to implement a new solution from scratch then this OS could be considered as an option for you. Although one thing to consider is that leap point releases seem to become available at around 18 month intervals so LTS can be considered as 18 months (the commercial offering has LTS of 10 years betwen major releases, but of course as a CentOS replacement we are only looking at free options).
