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First Looks at Suse 8.0 / KDE 3.0
The Register has a first look article on Suse 8.0 and KDE 3.0. Short story: they liked both, pretty much. I think the section on installation -- notably its length -- speaks volumes about the 'which is easier, Linux or MS' debate, too." There's also a review of the new SuSE up at Newsforge with some more details.
Heh -- will SUSE 8 include 6 or 8 CD's?
Although a minor detail, having to shuffle that many CD's just to install the kitchen sink can further complicate an install.
-Turkey
-Turkey
Actually I'm definitely thinking about upgrading a few of my Redhat based systems as well..
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
BWA HA HA HA! Your pathetic troll club can claim what you like, but remember, AC has more First Posts, more Karma, and has added more to this place than you and your spork/syringe cohorts ever will.
- The AC Avenger
You truly sound like an idiot. There's no such thing a Nazism. There was a Nazi party that was facist. And Hitler was spawned in Austria--not Germany.
I know this might be redundant and all -- and i KNOW people here don't go around installing XP for sh*ts and giggles... but in case that you ever did install XP, you would remember that it requires a total of 2.7 clicks of the mouse and absolutely no choices are given.
SuSE, on the other hand...
definitely philosophical extremes here.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
SuSe Linux Professional 8.0 ships on 7 CDs and one DVD which contains all the material that is on the 7 CDs. Don't know about the personal edition.
I have installed using both media on about 8 systems so far and have had no problems yet either on upgrades or on fresh installs.
When installing a lot of packages, using the DVD, mot swapping discs is pretty sweet.
To me, all the popular linux distributions have been easier to install than windows, espesciallly Mandrake, but unfortunately they tend to be harder to configure afterwards, due to the shear volume of options and utilities available. Linux's biggest strength for power users, is also its biggest weakspot for normal folks
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
After I installed 8.0 (personal edition), I couldn't find gcc anywhere, nor could I find it on the CD's. Was I dozing during the installation? Why isn't this installed by default?
I had a problem with the install crashing (2 times last night)
I will try to fix the hd (assuming that is the problem)
... oh, and the partitioner isn't too userfriendly, and is missing a couple of functions I would like to have
-z3r0_d
all in all, a pretty gooed season for Godless greed/fear based LIEforms, with an entire decade of deception planned as a follow-up to the initial fleecing.
This guy should also not wear any cloths ether, most textiles around the world use German made machines.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
look SUSE has Enlightenment in its packages. Gee is that so hard Red Hat :)
I'm a big SuSE fan. Loved 7.3 (and will be going back to it tonight) but I've had a serious problem with 8.0. I won't go into all the details, but I'd like to point out one major problem I've had.
:)
YaST2 has been hailed lately (and I have in the past liked it as well) as one of the easiest installation tools out there. I agree the installation options are very well laid out and easy to understand. My one problem though, has to do with the handling of package errors.
I installed 8.0 a few days ago on my laptop and had a problem-free install. However, the next time I installed it, I had several package problems. No big deal usually, just install them later. Problem is, I had errors on the YaST2 modules. Which are the last packages installed off the first disk. I had waited for 1.3 GB worth of packages for nothing. System won't boot. Nothing.
Question : Is it that hard to implement an "Abort, Retry, Fail?" option? I'd like to do my install in one sitting instead of having to repeatedly go back, look at the logs to see what failed, and install them again.
Just a thought. Sorry for the rant, but it kind of took away my evening last night.
My mother always used to tell me: If you can't find anything nice to say, say something bad about Windows.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozill a1.0rc1/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/
that you should buy me a delorean.
Why do all reviews of distros end up being reviews of how long it takes to install... then a review of kde?!
Seems to comparing apples and oranges on one thing.
With Windows there is a base install, I know you can choose if you want wordpad and such but for the most part a simple base install.
With SUSE you have to pick packages etc. but its seems that time spent here would be saved by not having to install them it later, as you would with with Windows.
Not saying one is better than the other just different.
With the modern distros of Linux, installation problems are a thing of the past. I just tried Mandrake 8.1 and the install found everything, *including* my external usb NIC!
The problem is not with the installation of the OS, but with the installation of any subsequent programs.
IN the MS world, one can download a nice binary single file install. Not so with Linux, I attempted to download and install a Doom for Linux clone. Long story short...forget about it. A million individual files and makefile statements with arcane modifiers later, I simply gave up. It's like buying a new car that comes completely unassembled.
Until that changes, Linux will *always* be a niche OS.
Does anybody know if NetBSD has been ported to this yet?
Long time SuSE user here, who in the past always went with the "install everything" option.
With 8.0, there was no "install everything" option -- or I missed it -- so I picked "Default KDE w/ Office".
You'd expect that info would be installed with such an option, yes?
The reason I needed info was because SuSE is still using lilo, and I'm sorry, but grub simply rules, alpha or not, so I had to do that bit manually.
Also, I have a GeForce4 TI 4600 and I can't for the life of me get the thing to work right (yes I have the latest nVidia drivers), but I attribute that to it being a new card and all and fully expect somebody else to figure it out for me. Not a big deal since I stay in text mode most of the time anyways (use the GeForce for Windows games.)
Oh, yes, and one last thing... NO STICKERS!!! SuSE always has an assortment of somewhat-silly-but-nevertheless-cool stickers I can put on things and regret having done so later, but none were to be found in 8.0.
So sad it makes me.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
KDE 3.0 is getting really close to something I would give Mom to use (she has Mac OS X right now) but it is still not there. It still has some bugs and useability problems like the clipboard. The KDE office suite is...well...sweet! I am truly impressed by that part. I am wishing that KDE/KOffice gets ported to XDarwin (We have Gnome -- Yuck!). Would give M$ Office v.X a run for its money in the home and educational market where Apple thrives.
My only huge complaint about KDE (And GNOME) is how freaking ugly the font rendering is. I guess I am spoiled with Apple. However, if they can get the font rendering from Nautilus (ex-Apple folks) into KDE, you got a real winner there once you run the desktop environment through a usability and consistency review.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Why does the improved file-download window look a little too much like the one in Windows XP?
Is this what developers at KDE consider improved?
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
I love the new KDE 3.0 Artwork!!!
it is easy on the eyes, beutiful and profesional.
man....I am impressed.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
And all that playing around took how long before he could actually use the thing? After spending how long praticing (he does clearly say you need to know what you're doing)?
...
At my charge out rate I wonder how many copies of Windows I could buy for the same time
SuSE looks like something I would like to try. However It will be very difficult for me personally get past the no ISO thing.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
The brief version is that he had to buy a new scanner, new CD-burner software, upgrade to Office XP, upgrade to PAgemaker 7.0, buy new versions of kiddie games. And it all took a LOT of suffering on his part!
THe author concludes by saying
This is easy? This is ``ready for the desktop''? Don't tell me that Linux is hard to install or has hardware compatibility problems! I've never had hassles like this with Linux. But this horror story is pretty typical of what I've gone through every time I've tried to install Win-anything.SuSE isn't bad, but I've found the following problems so far:
SuSE 8.0 is missing the gtk-config script. For that matter, I'm pretty sure (can't check now) that there's no gtk-devel. Yes, the gtk lib is there, but if you have any apps that you need to build, it's a little bit annoying.
The online updater is screwy. When I first tried, I got the "bad GPG sig" message talked about in the article. When I tried again, it wouldn't even try to download the updates. A detailed problem report (submitted via YaST2, nice) has not been answered in close to a week.
It looks like KDE 3 assumes that root can write to a user's home directory. I use NFS at home (and map root to nobody). KDE 3 doesn't like that at all. We use AFS at work. KDE 3 doesn't like that any better. Not SuSE's fault (same problems with RH 7.3 and with KDE 3 compiled myself).
On my laptop, YaST2 won't recognize my Xircom modem/ethernet card or my Lucent 802.11b card. The modules aren't even listed in their setup program. Tricky business, I know, but Red Hat handles it.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Why is it that so much effort is spent on a task that should be only a very minor part of your computing experience? X-based GUI installers, playing games during installation, focusing on installation during reviews, etc. All wasted effort, unless you're the kind of person that likes to reinstall once a week or so. Once a distribution has a "good enough" installer (say, Redhat's installer circa 5.x, or SuSE's YAST, pre-7.x), shouldn't they focus more on common computing tasks? KDE is gettting much more useable (GNOME's taking its time ...), but there's still plenty of work to be done, and if these distributions truly cared about being "easy to use" they should be focusing their energies and monies on that area of development.
Surely I can't be the only one who thinks that it's completely silly to put so much work into installation for an operating system which advertises its robustness (thus implying that installation is a rare task).
Im rather pleased with SuSE, though I did manage to cause a hiccup in an otherwise smooth install: I wanted to keep my / partition small, thus I did a minimal install and symlinked /opt to /usr/opt then did an update from my minimal install to a default. The installer didnt smoothly configure my graphics card and such, which I had to resort to sax2 to configure. Not much of a hardship at all. Perhaps I should just read up on LVM and just fiddle with the sizes of the volumes after the install.
Anyway, my point: The SuSE DVD, part of the SuSE proffesional pack doesnt work with certain Pioneer drives (along with a few others): http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/wessels_pioneerdvd. html. Apparently its a vibration problem. The DVD starts to spin up, then sticks? with a low clicking sound. Firmware updates solve this problem for a few of the Pioneer models. My own, a DVD-115 will happily read the CD's.
Beyond that Ive hand no significant problems )beyond some rushed editing of the manuals) and am happy to attest to SuSE 8 being rather slick indeed.
troodon.net
is based on what people are familiar with. The lay person out there has a lot of experience with Window flavors so its installation seems to be easier and more intuitive.
I'll give an example. On most cars changing the sparkplugs is no big deal and sum what easy, yet since most people don't have experience doing it, its considered hard. Same way with Linux.
Plus, I suspect the average person gets confused if more then a couple of options are given.
he lueger! luegen sind verboten!
that may be, but you forgot that hitler was gay.
I think we can all agree about linux's importance in a wide range of computing environments. Unfortunately it is clear from the review of SuSE 8.0 that it's place on the home-desktop remains limited to those who have a developed and decent understanding of computer systems, and the related issues, as well as the time to carefully customise / fix their installations. Linux distros still force users to deal with issues that many users don't or won't want to deal with. This is not necessarily a drawback, as many of us would like to know exactly what's going on. It does remain clear however, that destop linux solutions remain, at best, a niche market.
We used to use linux on many of our desktops here. As business moved away from web site-oriented things to audio production, we had to slowly move back to windows, a painful process but one which was aboslutely necessary, as our main application was designed solely for high-end film / video work on windows-based machines (hopefully they will port it to OSx). The Linux-kernel has remained an important part of our business environment as a router, http and ftp server and much more, ensuring it a lasting presence in our daily lives. More seriously, one that has never failed us, averaging over 180 days of uptime, interupted solely by extended powerfailures. Let's see windows, any version, do that. Long live the penguin.
ps- gay=linux
linux+kde=deutschland ueber alles
...because in my opinion, it's a fetid pile of Windows wannabe crap, and you can quote me on that. First, off, even choosing the "minimal" settings in the initial setup screens when you launch it for the first time, there is more useless graphical crap cluttering my workspace than even Windows. And WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE LITTLE ANIMATED ICONS NEXT TO THE MOUSE POINTER?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Ye gods, if I wanted that crap, I'd have stuck with the Win98 Plus! that came installed with one of my machines. You can't even turn them off. How in the world can something like this, in an open-sourced window manager for goodness sake, be an option you can't turn off? Hint boxes popping up all over the damn place. Animated "working" hourglasses in the toolbar. Why not just copy the Windows interface whole? I can't even used it on my 266 iMac (running only YellowDog Linux 2.2) because there's so much flash that I CANNOT TURN OFF that it slows the machine down to a crawl whenever I so much as launch a terminal window. Gnome, however, runs like a top, and doesn't have all this mandatory idiocy associated with it.
I used to like KDE alot, but I'm definitely sworn off it, now. And hell, with Gnome I can run KDE apps, and don't have to deal with all the wasted memory and processor.
KDE 3, to hell with you.
Flame-retardent suit, engage!
I recently upgraded 3 different computers from SuSE 7.3 to 8.0. I had a number of issues with the original 7.3 but those were fixed with later patches (like the updated kernel).
/etc/rc.d and that doesn't work because /usr/sbin is not in the sudo path. If the user's path is being inherited this could cause security holes.
.0 release and needs some more polishing. If you don't need the bleeding edge support, stay with 7.3 and wait for 8.1.
SuSE 8.0, while mostly stable, has a number of annoying bugs.
1. sudo relies on the environment variables. I need sudo support to start and stop various services under
2. The upgrade on one system failed because 8.0 remapped one of the SCSI devices causing a failed mount of fstab. I had to go back and search the logs to figure out what went wrong. When problems occur I shouldn't have to go to the logs to find out what happened. It should have popped up a dialog or something. As it was, the mount was for my USB zip drive. If I could have told YAST to just ignore it I wouldn't have had to start over.
I also found that yast failed to properly upgrade everything. For example, on all of my systems gpg stopped working properly. I had to manually reinstall the rpm to fix this.
I also wish yast2 were more extensive. The firewall configuration could be improved, and many more modules are needed for configuring things like a DNS server (for my internal home LAN), an imap/pop mail server, a news server, and samba. Hardware configuration needs to add support for installing a CDRW drive.
I also found it a real PITA to get my CDRW working again after upgrading to 8.0. In addition the KDE tool I used before for burning CDs keeps crashing whenever I try and configure it.
I found that the video for Linux support is working much better than it did in earlier releases (although the 2.4.16 kernel upgrade for 7.3 was stable as well).
I also like KDE 3.0, which I am also running on Solaris at work.
During the initial upgrade I missed being able to do detailed selection of packages to install in the categorized way it was in 7.3.
Over all I am satisfied with SuSE 8.0, but I think it is a
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
a) I like free software to be popular, especially software for Linux or BSD, because that leads to more of it being available to me :)
;) For my own hardware, I think putting on Mandrake is considerably easier than Windows + Assorted Drivers, but I have not installed Windows recently except for the idiotic ghosted-image-no-choices variety.
...
b) for free software to be popular, people must be willing to install some of it; a tough install is a big stumbling block to get over.
c) I usually have at least one machine (not saying this is usual, just that it's the case) set aside just to experiment on. If a particular system is a pain to install, that's a bummer. I am not a masochist, I like things to be easy and good.
d) neither of my parents have even my small experience in installing things like Mandrake -- perhaps the easiest of the mainstream Linux distros to put on.* That's why I told my mom to get a Mac
timothy
* Have not yet tried Lycoris or certain others which are also supposed to be easy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
subject says it all.
Unfortunately, with 8.0, SuSE has gone to a Redhat-style mess under /etc/sysconfig/ instead of the relatively clean system they had before. The system boot scripts have become about twice as complex as they were in 7.3, with little gain in functionality AFAICT. It works, sure, but aesthetically, it stinks.
Also, the PCMCIA management took a turn for the worse. PCMCIA configuration information isn't stored in the time-honored /etc/pcmcia/ directory, but somewhere under /etc/sysconfig again. This makes it difficult to use the extremely useful PCMCIA scheme support. The apparent solution is to define multiple instances of a PCMCIA NIC through YaST, and the first one corresponds to slot 0 while the second one corresponds to slot 1. Weird, and not documented in the SuSE manuals.
It is a good distro, just has some warts....
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Just put that on my laptop the other day.
I normally use BSD, but I needed linux, so I gave Gentoo a shot after hearing it had a 'ports' type package system.
It kicks ass! IMO, best linux distro I've seen so far.
Yeah, people whine about how long it takes to compile a system, but I'd rather take a day
to build a system that runs well on *my* hardware, than take an hour and build a generic system that runs like shit.
:wq
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
if you think that all germans are nazis, you are the one with unreasonable prejudices.
there are more nazis and more racists in the US than there are in germany.
Hey, sorry if the U.S. could crush Germany....you just have to accept the fact.
Germanys colleges suck dick just like its citizens
The brief version is that he had to buy a new scanner, new CD-burner software, upgrade to Office XP, upgrade to PAgemaker 7.0, buy new versions of kiddie games. And it all took a LOT of suffering on his part!
... for a very good reason, actually, which is it that it costs them money for no return - indeed, negative return, because if they don't bother to make the drivers they get to sell you a new piece of hardware.
Well, there's no accounting for idiots, at the end of the day. When I upgrade an OS I do first check whether it has a hope in hell of supporting my hardware. Far too many hardware manufacturers can't be arsed to produce drivers for new operating systems to drive their obsolete hardware
It was ever thus. Anyone who tries to put a new OS on an old machine without being aware of this aspect of life has things to learn.
And the software? There's a lot of crap software out there. If you run commercial shrinkwrap software with appropriate debug tools you can spot all the bugs that the developers couldn't be arsed to detect and fix. It's reasonable that a new version of an OS will respond differently to broken API calls.
I'm slightly surprised that he "had" to upgrade to Office XP, though. What was he upgrading from, and what didn't work in the old version that meant he "had" to upgrade?
One, the font rendering in Mozilla is total crap. Looks horrible, great browser, but looks like poo. But this really isnt a SuSE problem.
Two, for some reason, when booting up SuSE it detects my MS USB mouse..and then promptly forgets it on the loging screen. About 3 times out of 10 I can unplug the mouse and replug it back it an it will work. The other 7 times it still dosent detect it. It's really the main problem I'm having and it keeps sending me back to my XP partition because I need it to work everytime I boot up.
Any ideas?
Otherwise, SuSE really is nice..especially with the LiquidExtreme theme for KDE3. Super nice.
Anyone know if Evolution will work with SuSE 8.0?
that's a key point that nobody seems to catch when talking about easy installations
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
..Ever since I tried it out once and was greeted with what looked like a carbon copy of Microsoft Windows. For what it's worth, it seemed to be a good copy, but it was just that - and why would people switch to Linux to use a copy of Windows, when they could stay with the real thing?
;)).
Perhaps it's of some value for people who are somehow 'forced' to use Linux, but, I don't see too many of those types around.
Yet, I'm glad KDE exists. Why? Because I can use Blackbox. I don't have to run KDE. I can actually even run individual KDE apps if I want to , without swallowing the whole fish. This truly is the strength of the Linux desktop.
Now, about installation difficulties.. I haven't touched SuSe in a long time. It was rather difficult back in the day, but from what I hear, it's tons easier now. But, I'll break off on a tangent and offer a glance at RedHat 7.2.
First, selection of mouse and keyboard - that's easy enough. I've yet to have a problem with the default choices. Then comes the interesting part - Do I want a Server? Workstation? Laptop? What's this custom option?
Partioning is pretty easy with Disk Druid, and I've walked several beginning Linux users through it, but they would've never done it without my help.
Package selection, again, if you choose to select packages individually, could use some help.. But then, the average user shouldn't be selecting packages themselves - they could easily leave their system in an unusable state.
Hmm.. A lot of options, compared to the MS way of insert the disc and bam - out comes a Windows box.
And I think, this is what distributions need. An 'automatic' installation for desktop systems that will format and install automatically with absolutely no hassle or further instructions (Well, perhaps setting the root password!
Especially welcome would be if this automatic install could resize/slide existing fat/ntfs partitions and install around them, that dual boot setup on a single disk wouldn't be beyond the reach of the average person.
Everyone keeps complaining that they like SuSE (or any other distro for that matter), but it doesn't do this one little thing they like, so screw it. Christ, people. It's LINUX, you can make it do whatever you want to. Apparently, Windows is so popular because it just won't let you change some things. Here's an OS that lets you do whatever you want and people still complain. Too lazy to make these changes themselves, but never too lazy to bitch and complain about them to anyone who'll listen. I've been running SuSE 8.0 on my home machine for three weeks now as my only operating system. Sure, there were some things that didn't work or I didn't like out of the box, but with a little time and effort, it suits me perfectly now. If you can't handle an OS that gives you the freedom to do whatever you want to do because someone else didn't do it for you, then load Windows and shut up. I realize that Linux isn't for everyone and not everyone has the time to sit down and learn the difference between /etc and a hole in the ground, but Windows is a perfectly fine operating system for those people.
let's start with the fact that KDE started in germany, but was developed and is developed by people all over the world. mosfet (an american), though not as involved in the design now, is just one example of a non-german who contributed to KDE.
you are much more bigotted than the average german. if you go to germany, the people are hospitable and fun-loving. there is much guilt about the atrocities of the past. they are not hatemongers. but you are trying to target hatred at a group. does this not make you a hatemonger? (hint: the answer is yes.)
germany has a well designed democratic government and is one of the US's top allies along with GB. if you go back far enough in history, there are horrible things in every culture's history. (anyone remember that rancid institution called slavery? how about the human sacrifices of the anglo saxons? the list goes on.)
and when you are done flag waving and chest beating, be sure to take in this fact: besides england, more americans have ancestors from germany than any other country.
you should try out these american ideals and supporting the open doctrine of truth, liberty, and love. it starts with figuring out that a person's worth is not determined by there ethnicity or cultural heritage.
Besides the fact that SuSE uses some non-free licenses in their YaST tools, SuSE is a fine distro.
I have 7.3 a try some time ago, and it was pretty nice.
Yes, it's true! This new generation of cutting edge technology (codenamed InterTransGenObsidianPyramidObscura) will take advantage of the inevitable switchover to pure wireless, broadcasting itself from Redmond over the very airwaves themselves, using cellphones as booster stations. Once those little quantum perturbations detect a computer nearby, they will zero in, and with no effort whatsoever, install this exciting new upgrade, free of charge. A truly cross-platform OS, InterTransGenObsidianPyramidObscura will replace previous versions of Windows on Intel systems, as well as dynamically configure itself to run on Mac, Sun, Alpha and Palm processors. Upgrade packs are already in the works for electric blankets, HDTVs, Macrovision-disabled VCRs, and low-water toilets. It will be sure to be everywhere you look -- Very, very sure.
Be sure to register within 30 days!
GMFTatsujin
Very slick! Even had a DVD drive, so no disc swapping.
KDE 3 rocks your nads!
The best part... booted on the DVD, partitoned drives, installed software (lots of it), system booted. NO REBOOTS! Eat that M$!
So tired of reinstalling Win98 and rebooting 800 times for plug-n-pray to get it's crap together.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
The fact that mozilla has the ability to block popups and IE seemingly doesn't is the reason I wrote that tool. Try it out, if you use win2k or xp (rationalization for limiting it to those operating systems -- they're what I have available to test with. Also, it uses UNICODE for all string handling, which win9x doesn't like). IE can block pop-ups just as well, because IE is extendable (through Browser Helper Objects, just COM objects in dlls that implement certain interfaces). It's still a work-in-progress, and it's got its share of rough edges, but it works quite well. Well enough that it proves that IE can do just as well as Mozilla, even if it does require a bit more work on the IE side.
I think SuSE is a great distro - however, a 0 out of 10 for their online update (YOU), and, worst of all, their "support service". (Which is after all what you pay for when you spend EUR 90 on a few CD's with GPL software, apart from a nice box and a few manuals...)
Their online update system sucks. Has anyone gotten it to work through a proxy? Or downloading the files and then changing the update source to "local directory"?.... I've had no luck with this, and SuSE hasn't bothered adding a simple proxy setting to YOU to ease the update. (Setting the environment variable doesn't work, at least not for me...)
In 7.3 I used to use ximian red-carpet to do the updates, however there's still no ximian for 8.0...
The worst, however, is that in 8.0 YOU simply breaks horribly after changing the http_proxy variable (and changing it back to ""), (it causes Yast to crash). I've tried reinstalling all the Online Update bits, but to no avail...
Now here comes the truly disappointing part (at least to me): I've mailed SuSE for support and they haven't even bothered to answer (two weeks ago...), I've only received an automatic reply from their server....
I think this is rather disappointing - for gpl software to succeed the support services given by linux distros to their money spending customers should be outstanding, and it the case of SuSE it isn't.
I'm gonna have to go with Debian in the end. (Or maybe Microsoft and just not be surprised at the "once you've paid we forget about you" attitude)
I switched my desktop system from RH 7.2 to SuSE 8.0 because of Mozilla.
I d/led the RPM for Mozilla 1.0 RC1 and tried to install it, rpm told me I need another source, I get that source it tells me it need 10 other sources to install. I give up and switch to SuSE, sure it uses RPM's but they seem to all WORK for me.
I haven't seen any differences between KDE 2 and KDE 3 except the cool little aqua-like inflating icons on the panel. But I'm not one of those people that can look at the root dir and tell what distro I'm running.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Does anyone know the approximate release cycle time? Suse 8.0 sounds great and looks even better, but experience has taught me better than to install anything that is x.0. Maybe I am wrong in this instance, but I am strongly considering moving to Suse and doing a fresh install on my system, but I would be more comfortable installing 8.1 without assurances that 8.0 is truly production-quality software. I have not really been tracking the Suse release schedule, so I was wondering if anyone could either quell my concerns or let me know when 8.1 should be expected.
The number of reboots is VASTLY different between Win2K and Linux.
I just installed Win2K last night and I counted 14 reboots to get it installed and patched up with all the latest patches. When I installed SuSE 8.0 I had to reboot once (and I really didn't HAVE to reboot, I just wanted to after the install finished).
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I recently got a used K6-3/400 PC, which I promptly wiped. Problem was, I had no clue as to what was inside the thing (I originally thought it was a Duron 600 until Red Hat told me otherwise). and installed Red Hat 7.2. It installed like a charm -- hardware all recognized and correctly configured, Net configured and away we go.
Then I decided to install Windows 98 SE, which I need to test websites (other than this PC, I only have Macs running either Linux or Mac OS X). It was a nightmare -- constant reboots (usually without warning me or waiting for a confirmation) and it failed to recognize both the video card and the Ethernet card. I ended up having to reboot into Linux, do cat /proc/pci to find out what kind of cards they were (hardly anything exotic -- an old TNT video card and a Realtek Ethernet card) and trying to install drivers. The ones from the Windows CD refused to work, and of course with no Ethernet I couldn't easily download them...
So I ended up booting again into Red Hat (damn, GRUB is nice), downloading current drivers there, copying them to the Windows partition, rebooting and reinstalling -- and it *still* didn't work at first (with a reboot in between each attempt, of course). Eventually it finally decided to cooperate (I still don't know what happened -- after one of the many reboots the video card and Ethernet card suddently started working).
Red Hat took me about 30-45 minutes to install and configure (I just did a standard workstation install), mostly just waiting on the files to copy over to the hard drive. Windows 98 SE took over two and a half hours of PITA work.
OK, granted, Red Hat 7.2 is much newer than 98 SE. But remember that a *huge* number of people still use 98 SE as their primary system, and it's still more or less the standard most users look to. I'd say Linux has come a looooong way already as far as easy installation goes.
Best of all, my wife, who up till now has only used Macs and is techno-phobic, saw the GNOME desktop, got curious and soon I had her playing Civilization: Call to Power on Linux. And she fiddled around with surfing in no time.
I am now fantasizing about romantic evenings with my wife recompiling kernels. ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
I've realized something about Linux that I hadn't before. I can express it in the following prediction -
The first Linux distibution which makes significant inroads to the desktop market will be universally hated by today's Linux community.
Put another way, the present Linux community prizes "options" and "power-user friendliness" and "control" over things like "simple" and "easy." No, these things aren't always mutually exclusive, but I think the two are at odds often enough to make my prediction valid.
Consider the following quote from the article.
"The packages have been separated into even more categories now in hopes of simplifying the task. I don't think it helps much; but I really like the freedom of choice. That is, after all, one of the chief virtues of Linux."
Yep, Linux has got virtues. Freedom of choice may in fact be one of them. I'll give it that. I seriously doubt, though, that when all is said and done "freedom of choice" is going to mean much to most novice computer users. "Easy to use" will. Can't we at least have one distro that is willing to provide this even if it means making a distro without some of the traditional Linux virtues like freedom of choice? When someone does make this distro it will be trashed endlessly in these forums. And it will get a good contract with a hardware OEM and make serious inroads to the desktop OS market.
And another thing. When the Linux community is asked about ease of use, etc., they usually give answers amounting to "we need just a little more engineering time." In other words, "each new distro is getting closer to this goal than the last and in the next one or two we'll really have it to the extent commercial desktop OSs do." I think the "we need a little more engineering time" response is somewhat inaccurate. The other thing that is needed is a shift in priorities - the willingness to create the truly easy to use (and geek-hated) Linux distro.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I tried to find where to download via FTP all the stuff necessary to install SuSE 8.0 but on their own ftp server and every other mirror out there, I'm finding only the 7.3 still as the latest version you can download all the installation filesets. Is there an ftp site up yet where I can download 8.0 for later installs from my local ftp server? I know they don't offer any free downloadable ISO images, except for that crippleware "Live Eval" thingy, but at least they should offer for download all the filesets for a manual "offline" install.
"Instead of sound software engineering, we now have "Free Speech" flag-waving."
Er, okay. My experience, going back-and-forth between Solaris and Linux daily, is that they're of about the same quality, which is quite high.
And BTW, I like 'killall' on Linux, regardless of its history.
Glad to hear so many had installations that went flawlessly. I can't say that was the case for me. I had a couple minor issues and one major one. The minor ones just had to do with the rendering of fonts by KDE/X. No big deal there, but if I was evaluating it from an ignorant user's perspective, I would say completely ugly fonts that the system produced on first boot are totally unacceptable and would have them runnning screaming to their windows installation
disk.
Other problem was a bigger one. The installer,YaST2 or whatever they call it, did not correctly recognize my keyboard. I am not sure how they compile support for usb input devices in the kernel, but about midway through the installation process, my keyboard ceased to function. This was very problematic. When I rebooted the machine the keyboard started working fine again, but the mappings for non-standard keys were not functioning correctly. I changed the keyboard setting to 104-key standard and it began recognizing my keys for a short time before again losing track of the keyboard and forcing me to reboot again.
On the whole not a great experience...I assumed the keyboard problem could have been overcome by recompiling the kernel with the correct usb settings(or at least the ones that have always worked for me) and perhaps screwing around with my X86Config file if things were still not working correctly. Were I evaluating this system from the perspective of a not particularly tech-savvy or curious windows user I would say these problems are wholly unacceptable.
John
I've always thought that it would be better to have the close button up in the right hand side of the screen, like Windows does instead of how Apple does. After all, it's easier for someone to accidentally hit it when they're going for the "file" button, right? But come to think of it, left may be better after all. I can't count how many times a pop up window has come up with the close button out of reach on my Windows box. Deliberately, no doubt. But I've come to believe the whole one-click close idea needs some rethinking. Why not a button that you click and several other buttons come up to the left below it? A double click could minimize, a click and a click slightly to the right would maximize, a click and a click slightly down would close. You could even hold the button down for half a second and then release it over the correct buttons for the same actions. And a "down" arrow would make sense, you click it once and it "brings down" new options, clicking it twice brings it "down" to the taskbar.
:) Does anybody know if I can do this in KDE 3?
Okay, my chest feels lighter now.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
check it out, mr. bill.
advanced linux installation and configuration
environment
Isn't that a riot. I about have a cow when I install
windows nt,2k, xp. What is the deal with having to
copy over 3000 files from the cd to the harddrive?
-
I can have openbsd up and running serving web pages
before XP has even finished copying all the stupid
files to the hard drive.
reboot
reboot
reboot boy
You fixed my problem!!!
The issue was that libGL.so was linked to libGL.somethingelseiforgetwhat and not libGL.so.1.
Changing that and running sax2 gives me a working desktop. KDE is beautiful.
Bless you.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Redhat 7.1, which didn't fit into a single CD, was really annoying about this, but I didn't *want* to go building Debian or Gentoo from scratch on my antique-store lab machines, I wanted a consistent environment. Is SuSe any better? Or should I always pick up another $100 disk drive every time I need to upgrade the OS?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The install is good enough, now let's focus on making a decent GUI, huh?
I think the thing that most struck me about it was the major changes to the init system. No longer do they have this big, monolithic /etc/rc.config. After getting it installed, one of the first things I wanted to do was to get it to add a default route -- I was using a static IP and for some reason that didn't get done correctly during the install. No problem, just vi /etc/rc.config... oops, where'd everything go!?!? Well, /etc/sysconfig as a matter of fact, with all the RedHattish ifup scripts and all. Gonna take some getting used to for this long-time SuSE user.
kkk anyone?
ha, looks like someone tried killall on a sun and found out it isn't quite the same as on linux.
Oh look, and he's bitter too...
Why as Red Hat support about your CPU? OMG the lameless filter :( (Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.) It may be lame, but maybe this guy finds it usefull next time...
/proc/cpuinfo
fferreres@fede:~$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Celeron (Mendocino)
cpu MHz : 432.331
cache size : 128 KB
bogomips : 861.79
unfinished: (adj.)
> destruction and hate (such as Nazism and Fascism), and spawned evil murderous maniacs such as Adolf Hitler.
Uh, they came from austria, not germany, dumbfuck..
Control Center->Look & Feel->Launch Feedback->unclick enable busy cursor
Oh, that's intuitive.
The original poster makes some valid points. He chose a "minimal" setting and got animation left and right by default. What excuse is there for that? And he suggests that his system resources are so overtaxed that even opening the control center to make some changes is difficult and unpleasant. If the KDE team truly values and strives for usability, the last thing they need is a chorus of sanctimonious and unthinking apologists.
Did you even read the review? It focused in KDE3 after it talked about the installer for a while. It generally gave good ratings except for font rendering to it. This is in agreement with most people (love KDE3, hate fonts in Xwindows).
I've been using SuSE for a very long time, at
/usr and /usr/local so you mess it totaly up
work as well as at home. I can honestly say
it sucks for a lot of reasons:
- it is very much self incompatible if it
comes to upgrades
- they have no ISO's one could download,
so you might have to buy the whole package
every 3 month if you want to keep upgrades
- the support is very unfriendly ignorant and
arrogant if you got questions that go beyond
the kde interface or yast manager, often they
simply refuse to answer to technical questions
- the system does not cleanly distinct between
within 6 month if you do not watch out
- the kernel as well as some librarys use tricky
and uncommon patches so you got heavy problems
if you do not want to run things out of the box
so far: stay away from this distribution, download another one for freee and spend the 50 bucks for
one thing that makes you happy!
The darn thing won't recognize Seagate SCSI drives on my dual-proceessor Intel L440GX motherboard. I've removed my extra SCSI card and my fibre channel card but still no go. I guess my review'll have to wait...
Arf!
SuSE 8.0 had problem installing on my system (Athlon XP 1800+, Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440). Everything installed flawlessly until I get to the X portion. Yuck! No matter what I do, it doesn't work. I did manage to get X to work - but the mouse pointer is not shown. If I'm really good, I can guess where the pointer is.
I emailed them (SuSE) for tech support - but they haven't responded back. Bad service. No thanks, I'll stick with RedHat.
I just purchased SUSE 8 Personal Edition. It comes with 3 Cd's and 2 books. I am a brand Newbie to Linux and really went back and forth between Mandrake and SUSE. KDE 3 finally convinced me to go with SUSE. It was pretty easy to install, (I have a sony laptop with a PCMCIA CDROM only, and SUSE installed on it no problem) I am pretty impressed with it so far, Even though I have almost no clue what I am doing, I seem to have better luck keeping it running already than I ever had with Windows ME (which the machine came with) !
Yes, that may well be accounting for idiots - I use Quicken myself, which was vastly better when I started using it.
Excellent point. I noticed that myself but wasn't really aware of it.
Distros aren't the same (like someone said here) and these install+KDE reviews are totally useless.
First, I prefer to install once (not every day) and use GNOME that's not overloaded with unnecessary crap.
Secondly, there are many subtle differences between distros that make big difference in ease of implementation of Linux-based solutions (for example, RH72 came out with a non-functioning OpenLDAP which turned out to be a major annoyance because I needed to fix it after every install) and, to me, those are much more significant than "ease of install" or whether Mozilla can or cannot disable JavaScript.
Thirdly, if I do install several times, I tend to make it automatic (network deployment).
I'd like to see better reviews, possibly by some enterprise expert rather that some clueless teen.
Then again, distros don't matter that much any more so I understand why there's little interest in making enterprise-targeted reviewes.
At the beginning of this week, I received a copy of SuSE 8.0 Pro and attempted to install it on a Thinkpad 600e with about 300 Mbytes of memory. Installation was in a new 1.8 Gbyte partition. Network access is via a Cabletron (Wavelan) 802.11 card. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this machine; it's a vanilla Thinkpad 600e. Towards the end of a default install I get the message Checking for PCMCIA (using i82365) -- running which is all she wrote. I was able to ^c out of this after waiting 15 minutes to see if anything interesting was going to happen. There's was a lot of chatter in the logs about PCMCIA problems. Sooo, I tried going to the SuSE website to "unlock" my support key. After filling out the appropriate form, which included my email address, I was informed that ai.mit.edu was not a valid domain name, which I'm sure will come as a shock to the folks at the MIT AI Lab. Failing that, I tried calling the SuSE tech support number, which is not a toll-free number, of course. After the usual canned messages and clicking, I was informed that everybody was busy and told to call back later. No voicemail. So, I sent an email to their tech support address. This was three days ago. I got some machine responses, but have yet to hear from a human being. Yesterday, I called back the phone number and succeeded in getting somebody on the phone, a cheerful Irish fellow. He told me that they had, indeed, experienced problems setting up these cards and offered to email me some info that he thought would help. He asked for my email address, which I gave him. He told me I'd have the email in 20 minutes. Over 24 hours later, I'm still waiting. In addition to the above, I can also observe that KDE 3.0 takes FOREVER to come up on login. I think it takes about as long to login to the SuSE 8.0/KDE 3.0 system as it does to login to W2000, which is pretty bad. SuSE claims to support GNOME. Don't believe it. After observing the performance problem with KDE, I redid the install, choosing GNOME instead. Their version is unbelievably minimal. I can also say that after perusing the system logs myself, I decided that the PCMCIA hangup was probably an IRQ or some-such conflict with the sound stuff. So, I redid the install without sound support and this time the PCMCIA stuff didn't hang. But the card is not set up and there's nothing in the installation to help with card configuration. Apparently they expect you to know how to edit the config files yourself, despite the fact that you are paying these guys to make installation easy and despite there being nothing in the documentation about how to do this (there is a content-free paragraph in the *Reference manual* on page 339 about such cards that says "More detailed information about PCMCIA can be found in the *Reference Manual*"! Emphasis mine, obviously. What a joke. All this in contrast to my experience with RedHat 7.1, which installed easily on the same Thinkpad and also on the desktop machine I'm typing at now. I had intended to install SuSE on the latter, but wanted to use the laptop as a test-case. No way in hell am I going to proceed now with SuSE on the desktop machine. I guess I'll chalk this up to experience and go back to RedHat. /Don Allen