First Look At SuSE Linux 8.2

TheMadPenguin writes "Once again I find myself checking out the newest SuSE release, and to tell you the truth, I really enjoy it. My personal computer is running Slackware (yes, I upgraded to 9.0 immediately), and I wouldn't trade it for any other distribution in the world, but I've got to say is that SuSE is still at the top of their game. When you look at all the desktop distros out there such as Mandrake, Lycoris, and Red Hat, they all really have their endearing factors, but they all are lacking in one way or another. Check out the entire review at MadPenguin.org. Complete with screenshots :)"

Comments

Re:It's funny

[gmuslera]

I think that the reason is more big packages released recently (KDE 3.1, Mozilla 1.3, GNOME 2.2, XFree 4.3, etc) and a big amount of critical packages fixed (sendmail, samba, etc).

And, of course, time since their last release. If well they don't have to release at the same time, the previous factors helps to do some kind of syncronization (be because "lets release a new version now that package XX version YY is released" or "release now because the ZZ distribution have the XX package version YY and we don't")

Whats new?

[gmuslera]

more than the package versions, most of the things that the author says that are "new" to the distribution itself seems to be already in 8.1 (yast2 package manager, the desktop, the menus, boot, etc).

New packages are important, but I have them installed in 8.1 already, and the changes that should matter should be in what differenciate this distribute to the others, and itself in previous versions

Fonts look nice...

[gbrall]

Does anyone know whether this clean fonts in the screenshots are out-of-the-box or added by the reviewer?

Frames Per Second

[5lash]

I'm not sure I understand this:

on Slackware Linux (and also VectorLinux), graphics performance was about 2500-2600 frames/second using OpenGL. With SuSE Linux 8.2 I am experiencing frame rates of about 2000-2100 frames/sec. This is a noticeable drop in performance, but again, for most users this will go unnoticed.

As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps. Does he really mean he's getting 2000 frames per second? Someone explain please!

Re:Frames Per Second

[badasscat]

As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps. Does he really mean he's getting 2000 frames per second? Someone explain please!

It's a myth that the human eye can only see 30, or 24, or whatever arbitrarily low number of frames per second you want to come up with. First of all, the limiter is not the eye, it's the brain. So the more accurate phraseology would be "the human brain can only perceive X frames per second" rather than "the human eye can only see X frames per second". More importantly, though, is that there is no hard and fast number of frames per second a human can perceive - it's different for everyone, but for almost everybody it's well beyond 30.

Consider motion picture film. Initially, film was shot at roughly 16-18 frames per second. This was later standardized at 24 fps when it became clear that at 18 flicker was still clearly visible. 24 fps is the minimum at which flicker was determined to not be a distraction, and this minimum was used for economic reasons (not because it was the highest number of frames per second people could perceive, but because it was the lowest number of frames per second at which they would not be distracted by flicker, and this helped keep film stock costs down to the minimum while maintaining the increasingly sophisticated audience's interest).

Now, you may wonder why I'm using 24fps as an example when you're talking 30. Simple, really - a film strip that's being projected at 24 frames per second is actually showing 48 images per second, it's just that half of those images are blank. Now, next time you go to a film I want you to look at a bright scene and tell me you do not perceive any flicker at all. You probably won't be distracted by it, but you'll see it if you look for it. And this is at a real 48 "frames" (images) per second - well higher than the 30 you mention. Clearly the brain is capable of perceiving even higher than the 48 images per second projected in motion picture theaters.

I think people get confused by the concept of persistence of vision. Persistence of vision is what allows us to assign motion to static images when they're projected in sequence fast enough for our brains to be tricked. However - and this is the most important thing - the speed of projected images at which our brains can be tricked into perceiving motion and the speed of projected images at which our brains lose the ability to perceive those individual images are not the same. There are two different areas of the brain at work here - one processes raw images, and the other assigns meaning to them. They work together but are independent of each other.

It may be easier to understand this through a musical example. Imagine a piece of music that you've never heard before, but one that makes auditory sense (ie. it's not just a bunch of noise, it follows a pattern your brain has heard before and expects). Now imagine that three times per second there is a period of silence in that music. You will likely still be able to hear the music itself and understand it to be music and follow along with it - but you will still hear the silences as well and it will be annoying. Obviously, as you ramp up the sample rate there is a point at which you first will be able to tolerate those silences (perceiving them to be nothing but degraded sound quality) and then eventually lose the ability to perceive those silences at all, but that point is at a fairly high sample rate. This is obviously the theory behind the CD, which is broken up into 44,000 samples per second.

It's a bit of a moot point in this case because we're talking extremely high frame rates (there would be no perceived difference between 2500 and 2100 frames per second), but it's a pet peeve of mine when I see it stated that 24 or 30 fps are "all the human eye can see" so I thought I should correct it. In the case of

Where to get some Suse love?

[rosewood]

Recently, someone pointed me to Suse's Open Exchange Server and I was blown away by it. I have quite a few small (2-3 people) offices that are REALLY wanting a way to share calenders and other stuff. MS's Exchange server is WAY TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE. It would seem just a simple computer running Suse's OE would be perfect! However...

I am really not a linux expert. Ive run Red Hat for years and I like it -- but its not my primary box. It just sits for web serving and ftp. Ill open up VNC and browse through it when Im doing some random stuff that eats up CPU time on this box and Ill also use it when Im at the library or something and I want to use Phoenix -- but thats about it. So, I dunno if I can handle the switch to SuSE.

Also, the other problem I have is with SuSE support. Recently they started offering This evaluation program for OE server. It sounds like $20 gets OE server and I can install it on a box running SuSE and go to town, assuming I can RTFM. I think this would be GREAT! It gives me a chance to demo this out and decide if I want to try to sell it to the small offices I do work for. However, as stupid as it sounds, $30 (after shipping) is hard to come by as a college student. So, I sent them an e-mail asking 1: How long it takes to get shipped out post order and 2: Could I just pay the $20 and download the isos? That was Monday and today is Sunday, and I didn't receive anything back from them. Considering part of the $1,250 paid for OE Server is a year of support from Suse, I need to know that they will be there.

I'd read the article posted, but it has already been slashdoted :( Are there some good community sites out there for Suse? People that actually use OE Server?

PS -- If anyone knows of any alternatives to OE Server, please let me know! I need to be able to share calenders and address books for clients running outlook 2k/XP/2k3. If you know of a way to make iCal and vCards work and well for outlook, I could even live with that.

Re:It's not funny at all!

[rosewood]

FTP installs are PERFECT for this problem

I too used to download the 6 ISOs and burninate all the CDs. No longer.

Ill take one CDRW and burn the FTP boot disk image, boot that up and specify my FTP source and go to town. Of course, I only use Red Hat but I think this works for all major distros. The redhat one doesn't allow me to do the pretty install. I think the redhat team should jump all over that.

Its also nice because you dont download any RPMss you dont need.

Another distro diary

[Telex4]

I'm getting a little bored of these reviews... they read more like little diary entries than full reviews. This one is better than most, but it is still just a rambling tale of the odd things this person noticed about the product. At the moment, the only way to determine which distro is better is to try them all, or to sift through reviews weeding out the occasional shred of information from the random problems each person had.

A breakdown of what the distro offers in the way of tools, unusual packages, speed, stability, etc. would be nice. I know it might get a bit repetetive over many versions, but it's still useful to get it all down, and also to comment on how well they work.

Me thinks it's time to set-up www.troll-diary.org and let these reviews be posted alongside the usual ill-thought-out "Linux won't succeed until..." and "distro x isn't as good as BeOS because...". It'll save me checking them out at least :)

GENTOO PLUG

[Syncroswitch]

I find SuSE to be a bit rough on the updates, and the live cd, no download thing is not acceptable. Dont get me wrong I like suse, and I paid for boxed sets of 6, 6.1, 7, 8, but its just not worth it anymore. Gentoo gives me all the bleeding edge that I can handle, with a 10th the fuss, and its free, AS IN BEER.

Re:About ISOs

[diffuze]

SuSE does not provide iso images of their distros.

There are iso's available for their Live Eval distros though, but that's not quite the same thing, as they are run directly from the bootable CD, and not installed on the harddrive.

I personally always make an ftp installation, as that options fits me best.

You can read about the installation options here: SuSE Linux Download