[UFO Chicago] RHEL:CentOS = SLES:?

[jay at m5.chicago.il.us]

Fellow Nerds,

Red Hat sponsors Fedora, a free operating system together with all the
supporting software that goes with it, written collaboratively by
people all over the world, many of whom work for Red Hat, but most of
whom do not.  Red Hat does this because they then take selected parts
of Fedora, subject them to rigorous testing to make sure that they are
well-behaved, and then assemble those parts into Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, and that is how they make money, by selling support for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (and also by selling training and certification
exams, but most of their money comes from support).  Red Hat does the
same thing with JBoss, Oracle does the same thing with MySQL, it is a
common business model.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, a similar thing takes place, OpenSuSE is a
free operating system together with all the supporting software that
goes with it, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, a product for which
people buy support, is assembled from selected parts of OpenSuSE.

Many people like myself, and probably many of you also, even though we
do not purchase support contracts, nevertheless have Red Hat
Enterprise Linux running on our computers, rather than, e.g., Fedora.
The reason why I do it, which is probably the reason why you do it
too, if you are doing it, is that we have clients who have Red Hat
Enterprise Linux on their computers, and we need to be familiar with
the platforms for which our clients may need our consulting services.
For the same reason we may be running the supported version of MySQL
rather than the community version, and so forth.

Now, although I have installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 on my
computer, I do not have access to the Red Hat software repositories,
because for that you need to register your system with Red Hat, and (I
assume) pay for a support contract.  But that is not a problem,
because CentOS, and Scientific Linux, and Springdale, are all
identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux except for the branding (and
except for extra software repositories which in fact make those rogue
distributions preferable to Red Hat, if you're not going to pay for
support, which I am not).  Thus, I have equipped my RHEL 7.1 system
with the CentOS repositories, and all is well.

However, I have also installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Server Verson 12
on my computer, so that if I need to know SLES for a client across the
Atlantic, I can simply reboot my computer into SLES.  Directories like
/home/jay and /var/mail and /opt/assp and /var/www/htdocs are kept on
ZFS, and are therefore visible no matter what OS I boot my computer
into, and in that way I don't have to continue running an OS just
because I started working on something in that OS, I can reboot into
another OS and continue working where I left off (alas, OpenBSD does
not support ZFS, and neither do non-Unix systems like Haiku or SkyOS,
but I do have 4 dialects of Linux, as well as Solaris 10, Solaris 11,
and FreeBSD 11 all installed on my computer, and all share ZFS
directories with one another, so it is a simple matter to reboot out
of one of those operating systems into another without losing any
continuity, and the only reason I have not installed NetBSD is that I
am waiting for NetBSD 7 to come out, which is supposed to be happening
any day now, or so they have been saying for the past year).

The problem with my SLES system is that, just as my RHEL system lacks
functioning RHEL yum repositories, my SLES system lacks functioning
SLES zypper repositories.  In the case of RHEL this was not a problem,
because there are CentOS, and Scientific Linux, and Springdale.  I am
assuming that there are rogue distributions that parallel SLES just as
there are rogue distributions that parallel RHEL, but I do not know
what they are.  Thus I turn to you, my comrades and fellow nerds, to
ask the question: where can I find the zypper repositories that will
make my SLES system fully functional, in the way that the CentOS yum
repositories made my RHEL system fully functional?  Note that I am not
looking for OpenSuSE zypper repositories, because OpenSuSE is
analogous to Fedora, not to Red Hat; I am looking for repositories
that I can use with my SLES 12 system.  As always, thank you in
advance for any and all replies.


                        Jay F. Shachter
                        6424 N Whipple St
                        Chicago IL  60645-4111
                                (1-773)7613784   landline
                                (1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
                                jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"