The SuSE SLES ARM Package.
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSuSE Leap 42.2, and openSuSE Tumbleweed are all now available for the Raspberry Pi 3. I'm giving each of them a whirl.
At the end of November, the Raspberry Pi Blog announced the availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for the Raspberry Pi 3. As Eben Upton said at that time, this was a big deal for two reasons -- it was the first official 64-bit operating system for the Pi 3 (Raspbian and other currently available versions are 32-bit), and it was an official release from a major vendor.
The announcement in theSuSE Blog gives a lot more information about the what/why/how of the SLES port, and makes for an interesting read. From what I gather, SuSE and/or ARM gave out some spiffy packages (shown at right) which contained a Raspberry Pi 3 preloaded with SLES 12 SP2: I would have loved to have been there and been blessed with one...
There are a few strings attached to this release, however, because SLES is a commercial Linux distribution. The Raspberry Pi port is being offered free of charge, along with a one year self-service registration for updates and patches. I'm not sure what will happen at the end of that year; I hope that the registration and patch/update availability will simply be continued for another year, but I didn't see anything in the announcements about that.
The sign-in page.
Image: J.A. Watson
The first step, of course, is to download the distribution image. The SuSE Linux Enterprise Server download will ask you to sign in or create a SuSE Customer Center account in order to receive a year of patches and updates. Look closely at the bottom of the window, and you will see that there is an option to simply download the image without registering, and thus without getting the updates and patches. If you just want to download and boot SLES out of curiosity or for the "gee whiz" effect, you can take the no-registration option. But if you plan to keep it around even long enough to try it out and see if it might be useful, then you probably should register in order to get the patches and updates.
Even if you choose the no-registration option, you will still have to fill out a form to agree to the SuSE privacy policy and export restrictions. Once you have gotten through that, you will be able to download a 950MB xz-compressed image. The page also contains MD5 and SHA256 checksums for the download.
The image can be uncompressed and copied to an SD card (minimum 8GB) with the following command:
xz -cd IMAGE | dd of=/dev/sdx bs=4M
Replace IMAGE with the download file name (currently SLES-12-SP2-ARM-X11-raspberrypi3_aarch64.aarch64-2016.10.04-GM.raw.xz) and /dev/sdx with the device name for your SD card. This command takes something like 5-10 minutes on my desktop system, so be patient and give it time to complete.
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