OpenSUSE Family – Absolutely Baching

Installing Giocoso on openSUSE Tumbleweed

1.0 Introduction

First, there was SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES), which was expensive but reliable and business-ready. Then there was openSUSE, which was free but equally reliable as it was effectively simply a re-build and a re-packaging of the original SLES. And finally was brought forth openSUSE Tumbleweed, which isn't really built on SLES, but is more of a rolling preview of what SLES might be in the future. Tumbleweed (for that's what I shall call it henceforth) is therefore to SLES what Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux: racy, daring, cutting (or bleeding!) edge. As a 'rolling release', it gets updates to software all the time, as the updates are released, not once or twice a year when the distro developers are ready for another 'big bang' release of a new version. As such, Tumbleweed is up-to-date and modern... but with a slight tendency to be less reliable than its SLES-based cousin, because new updates can break things.

Anyway, I mention all this history and background because of a crucial difference between openSUSE-based-on-SLES and Tumbleweed: Giocoso can run on Tumbleweed, but cannot on openSUSE 'proper'. The reason is because SLES, and hence openSUSE, ship with Version 4 of the Bash shell... and Giocoso Version 2 demands and requires Bash Version 5. Tumbleweed, happily and as you'd expect from a bang-up-to-date rolling release, ships with the latest version of Bash, and thus has no trouble meeting Giocoso's requirements. (That reliance on Bash 5, by the way, isn't an example of Giocoso itself been too bleeding-edge for its own good, because Bash released that version way back in January 2019. It might be time for SLES to catch up a little!) [...]

Installing Giocoso on GeckoLinux

1.0 Introduction

GeckoLinux is not a distro with which I am very familiar. It's based on openSUSE, but with a fresh coat of paint and a lot of usability tweaks and enhancements. It comes in two distinct flavours. One is based on openSUSE Leap, which is the slightly boring version of openSUSE that itself is based on SUSE Enterprise Linux. This is known as the 'Static' version. The other is based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is a 'rolling release' distro -meaning that it keeps its packages much more up-to-date and modern than the static release.

Which brings us to a fairly important point: Giocoso Version 2 doesn't run on openSUSE Leap, so it won't run on the static version of GeckoLinux which is based upon it. The non-rolling-release versions of openSUSE basically use a very old version of the Bash shell, and Giocoso uses some features of Bash Version 5 and therefore has a dependency on that more modern version of Bash. If you want to run Giocoso on Gecko Linux, therefore, you must be running the Rolling version of Gecko Linux. (Note: there is a third flavour of GeckoLinux called 'Next': it too uses Bash version 4, so is also a non-starter for running Giocoso).
[...]

Installing Giocoso on openSUSE Leap

1.0 Introduction

I'll make this short and sweet: Giocoso does not run on openSUSE Leap.

The reason for this is that Giocoso Version 2 requires the Bash shell version 5 and up, and openSUSE -being based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and thus prone to being quite conservative in its choice of software- only includes the Bash shell version 4. That is not modern enough (though version 5 was released back at the start of 2019, so I would have hoped SUSE and thus openSUSE might have gotten themselves a bit more modern by now!). Launching Giocoso on openSUSE Leap (tested on 15.3 and 15.4) thus produces only this error message: [...]