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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.
Actually I'm definitely thinking about upgrading a few of my Redhat based systems as well..
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
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!"
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.
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.
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
The "kitchen sink" driver has been included with most Linux distros almost since day one. In case you don't know where to look for it, it's called emacs...
Say no to software patents.
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.
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.
This is not a problem with linux, it's a problem with the people that write the programs you download. Open office is a simple install.
I agree, programmers out there love to leave everything in the perpetual beta state. they dont want to waste time with install scripts or making it user friendly to install.. and that has always been a problem with linux AND BSD software..
the Loki installer is awesome... but very few programmers take the time to use it.... sad.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
what do you get with windows, thats right, nothing outside of an internet browser
Last i checked QNX was written by professional software developers, not glue sniffing teenagers and college dropouts living in their parents' basement.
(It's the truth. Cry.)
Can't tell if you're trolling or just lazy.
Control Center->Look & Feel->Launch Feedback->unclick enable busy cursor.
I've been playing with KDE3.0 for exactly four hours now, and while I happen to agree with you that it's annoying, it's pretty simple to figure out how to turn it off.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
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.
snip for sanity...
Animated "working" hourglasses in the toolbar...that I CANNOT TURN OFF
First of all, try the decaf next time, cowboy. Now. Take a deep breath. Ready for the super-secret, totally obscure method to diasble these features that haunt your soul? It's kinda complicated, so you might want to print this out...
1. Open KControl.
2. Select "Launch Feedback" from the menu.
3. Uncheck the "Enable busy cursor" and "Enable taskbar notification" checkboxes.
Whew, that was tough. Definitely worth giving the old CAPS-LOCK key a vigorous workout over.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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?
I have the same problem with my Logitech Optical Mouse. And I made a big post earlier complaining about there being no info, stickers, etc., but this is easily more irritating.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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
Hah. Youcan turn the launch feedback off, but you can't turn trolls like him off.
The middle mind speaks!
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.
This is actually a VERY significant usability feature! Sometimes X applications can be *very* slow to start (StarOffice, Mozilla, etc). What will often happen is newbies will click the Mozilla icon (for example) and nothing will happen. So they click it again. And again, and again. Then suddenly tons of Mozilla windows start opening all over the screen. The flashing icon was put in to solve this usability problem, and it does quite a good job. For the rest of us it is a 10 second trip into KControl to turn it off.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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?
"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.
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
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 $100 disk drive every time I need to upgrade the OS?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why as Red Hat support about your CPU? OMG the lameless filter :( (Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.) It may be lame, but maybe this guy finds it usefull next time...
/proc/cpuinfo
fferreres@fede:~$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Celeron (Mendocino)
cpu MHz : 432.331
cache size : 128 KB
bogomips : 861.79
unfinished: (adj.)
Yes, that may well be accounting for idiots - I use Quicken myself, which was vastly better when I started using it.