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

Why do you need an ISO?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE doesn't give away ISO images for free. Why must you insist on ISOs? You can download all the FTP-based install files for free and then do all the freeloading FTP or SAMBA over-your-local-network installs you please. I think SuSE has the finest, most refined Linux distro going and I actually buy the full version from them every other version or so...to help support their efforts. I also download all the FTP files and set up my own internal distro install server. It's not that much extra work, and I actually like it better since a SuSE install base is huge, it spans multiple CDROMs (or a DVD disk, and I don't yet have any DVD drives) and I hate swapping CD discs during the installation, I prefer to kick off the install and let it run to completion all by itself while I go away and do something else. An FTP install over 100Mbps LAN is faster than even a 48x cdrom drive anyway.

Hardware detection

[rpozz]

I dunno if it's mentioned on the /.ed review, but when I tried out the live-evaluation CD, it auto-detected every single piece of hardware in my machine and configured it automatically withou asking me a single question about it. Why the hell can't windows do this?!

Re:SuSE is awesome...mostly.

[reallocate]

Agree that SuSE is a great distribution, and the FreeBSD is good enough to spoil me, too.

Remember, tho, that it's a European product. All those binaries are in there because, first, it's a great selling point, and, second, because bandwidth costs more in Europe. Systems like ports or emerge are only viable when bandwidth costs are negligible. That's why all those European Linux magazine stick CD's and DVD's on their covers.

Nice upgrade

[AaronW]

As a long-time SuSE Linux user it sounds like 9 is a nice upgrade. I've already ordered the upgrade from 8.2 to 9.

My experience with SuSE was that 8.0 was good, 8.1 was buggy, and 8.2 has been quite stable. They addressed many of my complaints about missing modules in YaST in 9.0, which is good. I also like the fact that they're using GCC 3.3.1, which IMO is *much* more stable than 3.3 or the pre-3.3 SuSE included in 8.2 (although 3.3.2 was just released).

I've already upgraded my SuSE 8.2 to use KDE 3.1.4 (which is available via FTP from the supplementary section of the SuSE FTP site (and mirrors), and have found it to be quite stable. It looks like SuSE 9.0 is basically just an evolutionary step from 8.2. I think the release number should really have been 8.3, although I guess they're under pressure from Redhat. I also like the fact that they backport a lot of features from the 2.6 kernel back to 2.4 (the SuSE kernel scheduler is basically taken straight from 2.6). When Linus came out with the interactive patch that makes X much more responsive I was able to verbatim take the patch and apply it to the SuSE Linux kernel.

I also love the fact that SuSE comes on DVD. It's nice to not have to swap between lots of CDs when installing various packages.

And finally, YaST is a great tool that always surprises me. Last night I went to enable telnet and rlogin support on a machine in our lab (security is no issue) in xinetd and Yast immediately requested that I install the appropriate CD and installed the RPM packages required (they were not already installed).

-Aaron