I just migrated all my systems (3) at home from Red Hat 9 to SuSE 9.0. It wasn’t a religious thing. I mostly wanted consistency (although you can definitely mix distros) as well as the fact that I’ve been impressed and pleased with SuSE on my desktops at home and work. It wasn’t that bad, actually. My friend Ben gave me advice on things I hadn’t ever set up before when I needed help. But mostly I did it all myself. A couple notes on this:

• SuSE only wanted 8 characters in the root password- still looking into why that is
• NFS shares were a breeze to set up in YAST, the SuSE configuration tool.
• Apache lives in /srv/www/
• no Ximian for SuSE 9.0 because XD2 is based on an older version of GNOME than SuSE 9 (but I’ve been told by Ximian that in the future, the Ximian Desktop will be SuSE’s default GNOME implementation)
• To start and stop services at the terminal it’s /etc/init.d/service-name command
• SuSE’s imap implementation is compiled with SSL authentication support and no way not to do SSL or other hacks without a recompile. It took a while, but I found instructions on generating my own security certificate and now I do SSL for all imap connections.

Very cool stuff. I’m hoping to find a few more independent rpm places. The best one for SuSE I’ve found so far is usr-local-bin. Thanks to him for those excellent packages.