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First Looks at Suse 8.0 / KDE 3.0

Posted by timothy on from the darn-lizard dept.

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.

7 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Suse 8.0 is Very nice! by garglblaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've been running this on both a subnotebook and a desktop computer and I must say I'm very pleased with it. Especially KDE3.0 makes a difference. (KDE 2 never appealed to me) In addition it was a very pleasant experience to do the installs via NFS from a central machine with the CDROM drive - it went flawlessly.

    Actually I'm definitely thinking about upgrading a few of my Redhat based systems as well..

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  2. hah... speaking of installation by lingqi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:hah... speaking of installation by GreyPoopon · · Score: 2, Interesting
      definitely philosophical extremes here.

      Undoubtedly. XP by default installs a bunch of stuff that most people don't need or want, some with severe security holes. SuSE makes you pick every little detail about your system installation. Both approaches, obviously, have their merits. Unfortunatly, the good part about having to pick each thing you want installed (making the system more secure), is offset by the fact that the people who most need to use it (those who habitually leave their systems wide-open to hackers) are not able to do so (or don't have the patience). Too many parentheticals? :-)

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      GreyPoopon
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  3. KDE 3.0 is nice... by toupsie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I just downloaded RedHat 7.3 (just 3 CDs) which includes KDE 3.0 and installed it on an IBM ThinkPad to play around with it to see where the Linux Desktop is at. I am a dedicated Mac OS X desktop user and use Linux as a server OS. But am always curious how well Linux is doing for the desktop user and how much of the Mac OS X user experience is going to leak into Linux (like KDE's icon magnification in the panel).

    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.

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  4. Caution: Pioneer DVD drives cant read DVD by Troodon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    troodon.net
  5. SuSE 8.0 problems by AaronW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    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 /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.

    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 .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.

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  6. Funny you should say that by Ethelred+Unraed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

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