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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."
"Oh SUSE Q, oh SUSE Q!
Oh SUSE Q, Version 9.2, SUSE Q."
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 Just seems somewhat unwieldy to bundle so much software in that is going to go out of date so quickly.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.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Mad penguin review
german review (translation)
- Jj
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.
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?!
I've just installed SuSE 9.0 on my laptop this evening. I wasn't sure if it would be worth upgrading from 8.2 as the changes didn't seem that major, but I like to support SuSE since they do such a good job, and I've bought every version since 7.2 so it seemed like a shame to stop now...
Anyway, I copied all my important data onto the server downstair, stuck the disk in a did a full install. (I've always done an upgrade before, but I thought it was about time to have a clean sheet again).
I was really impressed with the installation - went really smoothly, and detected nearly all my hardware straight off, with only the Wacom graphics tablet not detected. It was improved over previous versions in that it gave options for connecting to networks and authentication via LDAP and stuff like that. One of the last things it offered to do was connect to the internet to get the latest updates, which I allowed it to do. It also got the proper NVidia drivers and the MS TTF fonts.
I did the usual fiddling to get the display exactly how I like it, copied the data back from the server and I have a fully working system again.
Now I'm starting to notice the improvements. The first thing I noticed was the considerable improvement in boot speed. The next thing I noticed was how the fonts were all looking really nice without me having to change any settings. (Although I have now changed to Bitstream Vera because I prefer that).
Then I plugged my camera in, and a new icon appeared on the desktop for it automatically. (I tried to ages to get 8.2 to do that).
My samba connection to the server is working without me having to fiddle with any settings.
I'll admit it's early doors yet, but so far things are looking really good, and I'm very pleased I upgraded.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
I think I'll wait to see what Steve Ballmer says. Odds are he'll discover that SuSE/SUSE is just as insecure as all the other Linuxes.
Better safe than sorry.
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.
I think I need a new sig here.
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I've never understood why people care about the iso thing. You can do a ftp install off of two floppies, or burn the ftp/http/etc install cdrom and use that.
FTP Install Instructions
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
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
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Excuse me, but this is real bullshit. You don't pay the programmers, you only pay for somebody who takes open source projects and makes a nice compilation of programs. Plus you get the media, some handbook and installation support.
Suse happens to pay programmers that work on the Kernel, particularly the ISDN interface, the RAID drivers and many other areas. Suse also sponsors reiserfs, several KDE subprojects and a lot of other projects. That's you money at work.
Kristian