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SuSE 6.4 ISO - Now Available
Well, as the title says - SuSE 6.4 Evaluation version is now available. Before you start using it seriously, take a look at some of the updates that SuSe already released for this version, such as the Netscape update which you need to install over your installation. Credits for this story goes to Linux Weekly News.
Taking a look at the ChangeLog, it looks like this is mostly incremental bug fixes. Anything major new here? What should I be on the look out for, when I try to impress my date with this hot new distro?
Can your IM do this?
I'm not sure all of these previews are necessarily a super deal. I had an incredible amount of font problems with the preview release of RH6.2 and so i've actually opted to hold off on the full release...maybe just upgrading my kernel manually (when i'm not too lazy).
I've noticed that "beta" copies of OSes often have quite a few problems - perhaps because vendors are still deciding what to/not to include in the "actual" distribution when it comes out a month or so later. It is, however, good for the open source community as far as being able to make the full version much better than it would be normally. People get a chance to see it and make changes or tell the vendor what else they'd like to see in the upcoming release. So i suppose all in all it evens out. Good for the experienced user...not so good for the newbie.
FluX
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'm sorry. I normally wouldn't post something so clearly off-topic, but I feel I need to.
Reading Slashdot and coming across something so clearly ridiculous as "which u need" on the front page really devalues the whole experience. I come here to read the news and take part in intelligent discussions, but when these so-called editors come along with stories that look like they were written by a 5th grader, I can't help but feel a little annoyed.
Now that the Slashdot editors are being paid for this, I'd expect a little better quality. CmdrTaco's spelling isn't the greatest, but that's an honest mistake and I know that he's responsible for most of Slashdot, so it's a lot easier to look the other way. But when HeUnique--who has contributed virtually nothing--comes along with a story like this, it's a lot more irritating.
Please, proofread your stories before you post them, editors.
I actually went out and bought SuSE 6.3 (the day before I bought my CD-R drive). Now I wish I hadn't. I tried it out. It looked like a bizarre combination of Red Hat and Slackware.
Now, I used Slackware way back in the day when Softlanding Systems still existed, and it was good. I finally gave up on Slackware sometime in 1996 when I realized that the distro just wasn't getting updated on a regular enough basis for me. Regular enough being "whenever necessary." Especially for security reasons.
Back then I was reading BUGTRAQ fairly regularly and I would see a bug report posted, an exploit posted, and Red Hat Linux's fixed package posted within a matter of hours. So I figured Red Hat is probably pretty cool. It took my box getting h4x0r3d through one of those exploits to really motivate me to switch, though. And once I did, I haven't looked back.
And there are a few things that bother me about Red Hat Linux, but overall I really like it.
Now I try out SuSE, and lo and behold, Patrick Volkerding wrote YaST? I don't get it. If he had spent the time maintaining Slackware, I might still be using it.
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
What should I be on the look out for, when I try to impress my date with this hot new distro? Dosn't this new distrobution come with Geeko, the stuffed Lizard? Girls would go wild over that. Nothing says 'I love you' like a reptile.
For any of the SuSE users out there, this version really kicks ass. I really like the option of installing XFree 4.0 and ReiserFS as defaults (Reiser can be used on any partition but you might run into problems unless you make a separate ext2 partition with /boot and LILO there). Admittedly I haven't used RH in a long time (not since 5.something) but I think SuSE is probably one of the best distros for first time Linux users. The two reasons for this are YaST and SaX. YaST makes it very easy to do all the system administration you need and SaX does a really good job of configuring your X server for you. After upgrading my file server I tried installing 6.4 on an old NEC I have lying about, I wanted to see YaST2 and see if it was as keen as it looked. If it works it reminds me alot of a Windows 9x installation, it does require a bit of memory and processor power though. If you can't use X readily on your system don't bother with YaST2. The bundled software is also a real catchy part, out of the box it would be ten times more effective in a home or office environment than Windows 98 would be. This software is of course in the boxed version, the ISO in the article is just the basic SuSE distro which is everything but the commercial stuff. Pick it up or the iguana will eat you.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I know lots of people have been waiting for this ISO, so thats why I published it. I'm sure that if you contact Sourceforge peole - you'll see several hundreds of downloads for this..
:)
As for the "u" - Sorry, I guess I need to sleep more
Hetz (Heunique)
Well, I'm a slashdot author (like Rob, Hemos and others) and I don't post so much - When I find something interesting and I cannot post it - I email it to Hemos.
/. author who isn't living in US. I live in Israel, and I'm not being employee of Andover.net or VA Linux, and I don't have any stock options either. And for the person who suggested to send me back to AOL - well, here in Israel we don't have AOL (but we got much worse ISP's)
:)
as for my nick HeUnique - this nick goes with me from the early days I used IRC (from 1991 I think), and its just a nick..
Oh, and I think I'm the only
As for the "u" mistake - I'm sorry. I posted it 2 minutes before I went to bed. I'll check myself better next time.
If you want more details - then click my nick - there is an email address there
Hetz (Heunique)
OK OK I will re-check my spelling next time. I promise.
I was VERY tired (torturing Mozilla M15 with various Hebrew web sites) and then I found this on LWN - and I know that many people wanted it - so I posted that.
I already corrected that mistake in the story.
Hetz (Heunique)
What exactly is the difference between the "Evaluation" ISO and the boxed version? Is CD1 the ISO bit for bit? What is on the other 5 CDs?
.iso image thing for a long time. If you go to www.cheapbytes.com and want to get the $1.99 version of SuSE, this is what you get. Basically a completely functional version of Linux.
Is anyone worried where this is going?
Relax. SuSE has been doing the
If you want to get a lot of the extra libraries, games, X-applications etc. you would want to buy the full distribution. But it is only $29.95 from www.chumbo.com and it includes 60 days of support (which is completely unnecessary - mine expired without a single call). As far as I am concerned it is the best deal in Linux land.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I'm finding that odd, as I bought a retail copy of SuSE 6.4 from Best Buy over the weekend.
I started using SuSE nearly two years ago after I started working for a company with limited bandwidth. I used to download everything I needed at work, burn it to a CD and take it home. SuSE solved that problem for me with the 5/6 CD set they distribute.
So anyway, I was at Best Buy on Sunday with a friend who's looking to get into Linux usage at home and as we turned the corner to the OS's isle, it was like a light from heaven was cast down upon the SuSE 6.4 retail box. Needless to say, we quickly snatched up a couple copies, and made a break for the check out line.
Yast can be quite time consuming if you really want to take a look at all the packages you can install, but I must say it beats downloading and compiling all those packages over a 56K dialup. I also think the time is well worth getting a bunch of packages you don't want installed on your system. SuSE combines the best of the "Workstation or Server?" type of setup that RedHat uses, and the "Nuts and Bolts" approach where you go with the bare minimum then download and build from source. You can choose a preconfigured set of packages that suits you and customize from there.
SuSE Rocks...Hopefully I'll be able to install 6.4 on a system with enough resources to run Yast2 on next week.
This kind of thing is what editors are for. It's hard to spot your own mistakes. You slashdot authors really should start editing each others submissions. Helping others with their writing will make you a lot more aware of the quality of your own, too, I think.
Nels
See what I've been reading.
FYI: With Suse 6.4, I could for the first time flawlessly update from a previous Suse installation. So for those of you having experienced similar problems and who are unsure about getting 6.4, you might want to give it a try. Of course my single experience still isn't a guarantee...
Another hint: AFAIK, you must use the old text-based yast for updating, yast2 (the graphical version) is only for a new install. Correct me if I'm wrong here...
Well, I know that I do from time to time, but I'm still human and mistakes happens. I think the time I posted this was night in US (morning here in Israel), so probably none of the author have seen this.
Hetz (Heunique)
A lot of people are asking what the diff between this ISO and the multi-CD set they sell. And I will be redundant and state that the 'Eval' ISO is a full install of linux itself, and some of the extra packages, but no copywrighted software.
This CD is great if you don't feel like coughing up $50 every 3 mos. for the new distro. You can do the base install from the CD, and you get the basics (YaST2, XFree 4.0, E, Gnome, K, etc). You will prolly look at it and go, 'Hey there is no kjukebox package! I wanna play my mp3's!' And this is where the magic of SuSE comes in.
You can do the base install from the EVAL.ISO, then launch yast (from any shell or xterm), and do all your user admin crap, etc. Then go to the adjustment of install and get the REST of the 6.4 full install packages via automated FTP/install within YaST!
This is great because you can do the core install off of the CD and not hog all the bandwidth doing the base install. The point is moot if you have a T3, but for those of us in the DSL stone age (only 384 incoming), this can save a lot of time!
-Steve
My intelligence insults itself.
The evaluation version is just a 1 cd trial for SuSE Linux. It doesn't have a lot of packages I use, but is useful for getting a system up quickly and trying out SaX and Yast.
I wanted to clarify something for the whiners who assume things they don't have a clue about.
The boxed 6-cd set has a lot more, but you don't have to buy it unless you want the commercial software and the excellent book (the books from Red Hat, Caldera, Corel, etc. really suck, though Corel's has a section on mc, which is cool). After you install the CD you can run Yast and set the installation source to ftp. It will automatically pick ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/6.4/suse for a site. It's not there yet, it might be a week or two, but you can browse the 6.3 directory if you want. You can also change it to a mirror site like ftp.rpmfind.net if you want.
There! Now you can select a shitload of software. Anything from the boxed set except commercial software. There are commercial demos and trials, though, and MySQL and xv are placed under the commercial diskset. I believe it would take up ~5.5GB of space if you installed everything from the ftp site.
You can even grab a single boot disk and set the installation source to ftp and use the mostly complete ftp distribution.
I picked up SuSE 6.4 full boxed set Wednesday at MicroCenter in Sunnyvale. I'm kinda surprised that a few days later I can get an ISO image. What?!?
/usr/local/share and /opt were chock full of empty directories that didn't need to be there.
Anyway, here are my impressions. I'm a Slackware guy, so I'm biased. Over all, SuSE 6.4 is an excellent distro.
But it comes with too many packages. It took me two hours to scroll through the list to select the ones I wanted. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have thousands of packages readily available. But it's overwhelming during installation time. My suggestion would be to limit the initial installation to packages just on the first CD. Leave all the rest of later after the installation is over and done with. I was thinking about using the "default" installation, but it would have added packages I didn't need or want anyway, so I would be right back to square one going through all the lists deselecting them.
YaST2 simplified stuff too much. I could select a package, but I couldn't find out what it's dependencies were like you could in YaST1. I selected xmms, my single favorite audio application, only to discover afterwards that it included the gnome applet, which depended on the gnome-panel, which depended on a whole bunch of other gnome packages. In short, I had about 75% of Gnome installed without my awareness. I'm sure there's Gnome fans who got KDE installed without their knowledge as well.
I ended up with about 50 users by default! Huh? If Apparently, these are the user accounts needed for certain packages, such as empress. But I didn't install any of those packages. This is a potential security problem having all those users. Additionally, a lot of applications had their directory structures already set up even though they weren't installed.
Okay, the pluses. SuSE seems more stable. YaST is not a apt to go and change all your manual settings on a whim. The goofy SuSE icons for KDE have been replaced with more aesthetic versions. YaST2 is a great installer for newbies, but I would recommend YaST1 for intermediates or experts. And SuSE has the best Linux manual in the business, period.
But I'll still stick with Slackware. Small, compact, just the essentials. BSD-style inits. But I still like to play around with other distros, and SuSE is one of the best I've seen.
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