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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.
SuSE were the first company to offer a DVD distribution. There was a lot of fuss back then because no-one believed Linux could play DVDs.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Everyone says 7+1DVD... That's not entirely true. 7+1 is only for the Professional series. It comes on 3 CDs in the Personal series, which is not much (if any) different from the other major distros.
Are you kidding? When was the last time you installed Windows?
XP virtually installs itself. You barely have to be there.
Win2k is similar, but does have more required user input. Regardless, there are virtually no choices required in either of these two, unlike Linux where you have thousands of software packages to choose from.
That said, under Linux, you have thousands of software packages to choose from. In Windows, you get a few "applications" like a calculator and notepad.
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?
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.
XP virtually installs itself. You barely have to be there.
Might want to check out this article in ComputerWorld before you continue in this vein. Windows isn't as easy to install as the Microsofties try to make it out to be.
After you read the article, you see that the author (R.L. Mitchel, apparently a serious microsoftie) had about the same sort of bad experience with WinXP that the Register reviewer had with SUSE. The only difference was that the microsoftie was out a lot more money.
Of course had you gone into the control center, click "Look & Feel" and "Launch Feedback" you can easily disable this. In addition there are numerous other look and feel settings to make KDE look and feel quite different than Windows.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Erm, you *are* using Mandrake Linux, right? There's such a command, it's called
t ml
...
urpme
E.g. to uninstall your whole KDE3 test installation, you'd just have to run
urpme qt3
and that's it.
Have a look at
http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/basics/brpm3.h
for an introduction. You're missing out a vital part of Mandrake if you don't know about urpmi, urpme and friends
b.
Do you really have to choose between one or the other? FreeBSD offers a binary distribution thats very easy to install, as well as a full source tree for both the FreeBSD system and all of the external packages (which can be kept in sync with -STABLE or -CURRENT with almost no effort, using cvsup).
With Debian, you do.
"apt-get install foo" downloads and installs the binary "foo" package.
"apt-get source --build foo" downloads the source for "foo" and compiles it. You get the best of both worlds this way. You can install whatever binaries you want, and still get the speed benefits of source builds - but at your own discretion.
It's still not as sophisticated as *BSD's ports, since it can't build foo's dependencies, and it doesn't install the packages after they've been compiled. But, it's a start, and hopefully we'll see more advanced features in the next version.
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?