Upcoming SuSE 9.0 Professional Reviewed

molarmass192 writes "Open magazine has the first review I've seen of the upcoming SuSE 9.0 (or should that be SUSE 9.0 now?) Professional distribution. To summarize, they are impressed with the upgrades to Yast (it's fully integrated into the KDE control panel), Samba integration, Winmodem support, network configuration management, and performance. It's not the most thorough review I've ever read, but it's an interesting look at what to expect for those who have preordered SuSE 9.0."

Comments

SuSE is awesome...mostly.

[numbski]

Unless they've changed something, they have a habit of having everything including the kitchen sink included.

I guess that's good. Most everything is behind a version or two by the time it hits your hands though (in the past).

Perhaps I'm simply spoiled by the FreeBSD ports collection (any good package manager really) where I run cvsup to get the ports collection current, then I can either build from source or pkg_add -r pkgname and install the binary quickly across a network.

Don't take this a knock though, SuSE was the *nix that I learned on, and it's still awesome. Just seems somewhat unwieldy to bundle so much software in that is going to go out of date so quickly.

Great for situations without net access though.

Re:SuSE is awesome...mostly.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am only sure about Germany, but flat-rate DSL connections are available pretty much everywhere in the coutry, for reasonable prices. I also know that the Scandinavian countries have decent connections as well, supposedly faster/cheaper than in Germany. Former east european countries may be behind a bit tho. But in general it wrong to say European internet users lack cheap bandwidth.

It's great!

[pumpknhd]

People may ask why we should shell out money to pay for open source programs...well, open source doesn't mean free source. Someone had to put in their time and energy programming this stuff. And since most of us haven't contributed to the source code, we could at least support those who have. :)

Re:It's great!

[big tex]

Bzzzzt. Try again.

As a SuSE user who has been buying boxed sets since 6.1, I know that I am helping to support KDE, ReiserFS, and so on. SuSE supports full-time KDE developers, so I _am_ paying the programmers.
Plus, I really like YaST, so I pay for it.

Also,it's more than "some handbook". It's a frickin' set of doorstops compared to any other reference manuals that I've seen come in a boxed set.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What kind of performance increase?

[Billly Gates]

I use to use SuSE in the past. It has become quite slow and bloated, even on my athlonXP.

I switched to Freebsd because its slim and lightening fast. I have a hunch its mainly its own version of xinet and yast that slows things. I wonder if it could be faster and if it is, if I should switch?

Re:The one feature I want

[locus_standi]

Have you tried Mandrake 9.2. It features wireless network configuration and automatic detection during installation. Redhat 9.0 also has WiFi features.

Re:File transfer problem

[ralphclark]

That's no troll - I've had similar problems with my (heavily patched) SuSE 8.1 system (Athlon 1.2GHz/256MB on a KT7A-RAID mobo, with the two 40GB IBM 60GXP disks on separate channels of the HPT370 controller and a 128MB swap file on each disk) running a recent Hubert Mantel 2.4.21 kernel. hdparms has both DMA and LBA enabled.

Performance is never better than mediocre under KDE but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it frequently seizes up completely.

On many occasions it coincided with memory usage going through the roof for no apparent reason, and swapping like mad. The memory problem appears to be down to either X, KDE or mozilla and I suspect mozilla is the usual culprit. Those moz developers just don't seem to take care of garbage collection in a reliable way.

On other occasions "top" appears to show X taking up an awful lot of memory (up to 50%).

In some cases killing all moz processes makes the problem go away but because of gui unresponsiveness its often easier just to keep hammering on Ctrl-Alt-Backspace until X reboots. Sometimes it is so solidy frozen that I can't even ping it from nearby. And sometimes the box is so totally hosed there's no response even after an hour so I'm left with no option but to cycle the power and hope reiserfs will be able to contain the damage.

*sigh* guess I'll give it one more try with SuSE 9.0. If they don't stay on top of the quality thing this time though I'll be switching distros.

Re:Still waiting for Distro "X"

[PReDiToR]

Working on the assumption that you didn't put this in just to troll ...

Has the command line stripped out with EVERYTHING, I MEAN EVERYTHING possible for the GUI, NO EXCEPTIONS, not even for Emacs zealots)

There you go, spoiling it. You described the perfect OS until you said that.

The command line is NECESSARY you dolt. Necessary, as in, can't live without. As in no matter how pretty you make your OS it still runs on text, and you have to get to that text sometimes. If you want nothing but pictures, grab the funnypages. In this world the command line lets you fix problems that arise in ways that they never teach you in college. Its the command line that keeps people like me in employment while kids straight out of university are still scratching their heads over how to write shell scripts.

Buy one, install many!

[Frodo420024]

Just found this:

Furthermore, no license costs are incurred for the installation on multiple machines or for software subject to the GPL (General Public License).

on their 10 reasons to switch page. Cool.