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Suse 9.1 Reviews?
Bruha asks: "There have been several reviews of SuSE 9.1 lately in the online press. However I'd like to hear what the buying public has to say about Novell's first release of SuSE since buying the company. I'm currently typing this article from SuSE 9.1 x86_64 and I have to say past a few quirks I'm really starting to love this distro and admire how polished it has become since 8.2 my last SuSE purchase. What are other's opinions of the software after trying it out and what problems and new things have you discovered? And if you're sticking with it after a move from another distro why did you decide to stick?"
(hint hint, Novell..
Be careful if you're going to put an Escalade 850x RAID card into an AMD 64 box and run SUSE linux on it. I've been having hell trying to get it to work with 9.0. The vendor is sending 9.1 around on Monday (so this story came a couple of days early for me
The hardware is fine (works great in Windows), but the entire system can hang in 5 minutes once it's had Suse 9.0 installed on it. For some reason, the windows drivers are a lot better as well - the peak read and write speeds are higher
Just a cautionary tale - I'll be as happy as anyone if 9.1 fixes it though
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Darl, just step away from my computer. I can write the review on my own, thank you.
Go back to the basement.
I've always been in the minority when it comes to new things, or so it seems to me. You see tons of people notice huge speed increases when they try gentoo for the first time.. Yet, it didn't seem any faster to me. This is another similar situation. A lot of people have noticed a lot of improvement in SUSE every release that I simply never notice. The changes from 8.1 to 9.2 haven't been very great at all -- at least, not from my perspective. Probably, I just don't make use of these newfangled things. I did notice the new menus on 9.0 and I liked that, but for the most part SUSE 9.1 seems just like SUSE 8.1 to me.
That is why I am sticking with Red Hat. I have been with it just long enough to have 'familiarity that breeds contempt'.
I'd switch to SuSE if they still produced SPARC binaries in modern kernels. They stopped updating that arch at about 7.1.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
There have to be more folks using this...
How 'bout some links to the reviews?
(I'm a long time Mdk Cooker fiend, but also past SUSE purchaser)
in Vegas for Veritas Vision. (Sorry, does'nt that qualify as an oxymoron?)
I a FreeBSD bigot, but I a very impressed so far.
Stable, easy as BSD to install, the fact that you can tap into NDS, which is big at our company, and translate to LDAP is nice.
Looks like a good stable of apps too.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
That it's not Gentoo, and well, we all know if it's not Gentoo, it can't be any good.
I do wish, however, that there were an app like Sonar or Cubase (and no, I haven't and won't consider running those under Wine.
The install is a breeze.
Both Gome2.4 and KDE3.2 work very well.
I've had some issues with my Haupauge card though.
The 2.6 kernel seems to be working fine.
I can see myself using this quite a bit.
...it takes a long time to compile.
Oh, he said buying public. Cheaparse bastards like me who compile the source don't count, I guess ;)
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Suse 9.1 is very nice. The only problem I have is hardware support. It doesn't find my Soundcard which is a soundblaster live from dell with the addon for the outputs on the front of the tower. And also it won't see my Video Card which is a GeForce FX 5600.
First, Yast is GPLed; and seconde, if your too lazy to buy the distro, just do a ftp install...
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Have you tried 9.1?
and it' s the kernel version downloaded via YOU.
- Beautiful boot screen and polished feel.
- Easy installation from freely available CD-ROM images.
- Automatic hardware detection via kudzu, at install time and when adding new devices.
- Updates released regularly with the Fedora Legacy Project providing updates for older distributions.
- Many pre-built RPM packages are available on-line from projects such as Samba and otherwise.
- Many great console & X11-based applications included by default.
- Files and configurations are in logical places.
How does SuSE compare on some of these points? If I recall correctly, their installer made me select my network card myself, whereas Fedora did it on its own without me having to open up my machine.I'm hoping that future releases of Suse will focus more on a decent (and current) Gnome environment. Most of the must-have productivity apps for Linux are Gnome/GTK based (Evolution, Mozila Firebird, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape), and Evolution seems to be a key component in Novell's desktop strategy (standard Groupwise + Exchange support, Windows version coming soon).
I use and like Suse 9.0. But I burned a Suse 9.1 Live Cd and it kept failing to boot. (I've *never* had this problem with Knoppix). It kept getting hung up on various things, different each time (weird), but the most common failure was with my LCD monitor, where it said my horizontal and vertical refresh rates were out of range.
Anyone have an idea for a fix for that?
Also, do I understand correctly that there is a problem with NVIDIA FX cards on AMD and that none of the new AMD 64 Linuxes (Mdk 10.0 for AMD, Suse 9.1 for AMD) work properly?
Suse certainly does provide you with the kernel you're running. If you look at their patches page, you can see all the .rpm's have .src.rpm equivalents, including the kernel.
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that the source for all the things on side 1 of the DVD is on side 2 as well...
As for 'real package management', I think (and I've only just started to use YaST today!) it's great. No problems with package management...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The kernel falls under the GPL, and they're legally required to provide you with all the sources!
I'm running SUSE-9.1 64-bit on a Tyan S2885 dual opteron motherboard with two SATA drives in RAID-0, just great... Boot from the DVD in rescue mode and it even finds /dev/md0 with no fiddling.
As a longtime redhat guy, I've found the new distribution for me.
jeff
I had Suse 9.0 installed and had been using apt to maintain my updates. I recently upgraded that machine to 9.1 and had many problems with kdm and even gnome. Every time I tried a gui login, the xserver would just restart. Since it was a test machine, I just nuked it and installed 9.1 from scratch and I really like it. Not sure if me using apt to keep my system on the bleeding edge was the cause or not, but it's the first thing that came to the top of my head. The basic server stuff can be setup via the UIs, but you still need to hand edit configs for anything non-trivial (DDNS, ldap pam with samba pdc, etc.)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I've never used SUSE, but I'm pretty sure all you have to do to get the source for your kernel is install the readily available kernel source RPM.
Not installing this by default is, IMHO, a good thing since the kernel source is relatively hefty when unpacked.
Of course I could be wrong about this. If so, the kernel is GPL. If you paid for it and they won't give you the source then you should let the FSF know.
That said, I'm sure this isn't the case.
Game... blouses.
"I'd like to hear what the buying public has to say..."
And you're asking Slashdot?
Seriously, my only experience with Suse was my attempt to install it. Failure! It wouldn't recognize half of my hardware, including my network card. So I couldn't install it via the network install (which seemed to be the only way I was allowed to do it). I gave up and installed Mandrake in record time - it recognized everything right away and has worked beautifully.
And people claim Linux is easy to install/use/learn. If Suse is representative of Linux, we're in trouble. Mandrake and Knoppix are what I use to show off Linux.
Yes they do. Sure, it might not be installed by default, but it's right there on the CD. Yes, if you want to do crazy stuff, go with Gentoo - nothing is more flexible. If you want a solid desktop distro, SuSE and Mandrake work quite well.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Does accelerated 2D/3D for ATI Radeon 9xxx cards (for instance: 9200) work out of the box on SuSE 9.1 ?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Mandrake is, by far, the best "newbie" distribution. It is very easy to install and administer, and has a really slick look and feel to it (bested only by the Knoppix 3.4 Live CD).
Personally, I think Debian rocks.
I've been using RedHat for a while now, so I'm probably biased.
Personally, SuSE didn't seem quite so "Finished" to me. The installer wasn't as nice, and getting some third-party apps was significantly harder for me than it was under RedHat.
All in all, it's a nice distro, but it has some significant room for improvement.
--
Nigritude and Ultramarine
Everything works. That pretty much sums it up. Printing, seeing the network, burning CDs, listening to an NPR stream. Perfect. No extra configuration, aside from downloading lame and the full MPlayer from Packman (both of which SUSE can't distribute).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I've been testing it since Monday May 10, and it seems to be okay. It is biased toward KDE, but one can fairly easily configure SuSE to be KDE- and GNOME-free, with Enlightenment as the WM.
One little item to note is that not all packages are recognized in YaST. I typically will generate a list of apps using the command:
to allow me to browse descriptions of the packages and see what files are included. (Understand this can be a very large file.) Notably when I wanted to install a couple of rippers, they did not appear through YaST. Hmmm... Installing them manually:worked just fine. They then appeared in YaST as having been installed. This is a trivial issue, but it is annoying.Bottom line is that SuSE 9.1 seems to be fine so far!
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
for evaluation before you buy the distro try here:
i th-md5sum-informations.txt|3559|20BE144F200097BD77 7AAAD92C5BE617|/
- 32bit-dvd1of2-sideA.cue|359|3A8A6E3DD165038EE0191D 436BE5E896|/ m d64bit-dvd1of2-sideB.cue|360|CAF5AD507EA7144FC6C47 75E708F65BA|/
m d64bit-dvd1of2-sideB.iso|3577905152|806CC1FE4B8872 EDACD34ADAB001B494|/ - 32bit-dvd1of2-sideA.iso|4126703616|BF623B58FD6425F 37D19DDBCD079C1BB|/
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-cd-dvd-w
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-a
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-a
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386
and more..
watch out for the spaces in the urls that get added by slashdot
I had SuSE 9.0 and tried getting PythonCard installed; I gave up! First, even after getting the tarball to try installing from saource! All dependency files were in the "right" places, but it still could not work. My greatest annoyance though was a complete failure of SuSE to accept third party rpms and the fact that YaST2 is very very slow. Another thing is that even after doing nothing about its configuration, YaST still ran its routine, much to my annoyance...geeeeesh...I could go on and on and on...Ohh third party software compiled for SuSE is also hard to find compared to Gentoo, RedHat or Mandrake.
Cb..
I still have bad associations with the name Novell and token-ring ethernet adapters.
*shudder*
I've been a SuSE fan since 6.1.
The main sticking point for me was at that time it was the only distro that could recognise and auto-configure 2 seperate video cards for multi-head X right out of the box. It follows standard (mostly) structure so other software is easy to compile. It seems like there is the Redhat way and the Common way. I would by far recommend SuSE for newbies as the YaST tool (install/admin) is very, very easy to use. Network browsing is impressive to have working right out of the box.
I'm having allot of fun!
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
Debian rocks my socks like a bunch of jocks with eight inch cocks sitting out on the docks behind a door closed with locks.
Still waiting on my copy. It's on back order. No idea when it will ship. Wish SuSE Novell would have it available to fill the orders.
In YaST search for kernel-source and the package appears that you can install.
Shh.
This guy gives an honest review of SUSE (it wouldn't install), so it gets Flamebait? WTF is up with that? That's useful information. It's saved me time and money.
Specifically, my sound and network cards were not detected. They are fairly common cards that work with every other Live CD I've tried, and most distros have worked with them out of the box.
Knoppix 3.4 Live CD is fucking smooth.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
SuSE 9.1 is lovely, it's polished, friendly, YaST is now Free (we've wanted that for so long), and even the box feels nice.
Once the usr local bin GNOME updates are ready (I'm getting there...) it'll be even better.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
I was highly frustrated to see they didn't bother to include Ximian Gnome on the CD -- it was KDE or nothing. I have two network cards in my machine, and I was dissapointed to see that even though only one card had an cable plugged in it made the dead card primary so I couldn't access the internet. Of course, because it did that I got to play with YaST2 a little bit, and it was an impressive tool.
501 Not Implemented
From the topic:
"And if you're sticking with it after a move from another distro why did you decide to stick?"
How does this poster's comments fall into the category of "Offtopic" when the topic asks for the information?
Moderators on drugs, that's all it could be.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I love SUSE 9.1. The one issue that annoyed me to no end, but was probably a good thing, was port 6000 for X11 is disabled by default starting in 9.1. This prevents xhosting to a machine without ssh. This is a necessary requirement for me, and it was relatively easy to fix.
The newest rendition of YAST is even better than 9 which was sweet.
I'm forced to use a number of distros from debian to Red Hat to Suse and frankly I stick with SUSE for my desktops and servers.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Well, my experiences with SuSE are good...SuSE is the first Linux OS I've run thus far, and I'm a better man for it. :) The only problems I've really had are with the ATI Radeon 9000 in my laptop (yes, ATI's own closed-source drivers are cr4p...stupid video card won't work like it should)...I had a hell of a time getting Fedora Core (any version) onto my Dell 600m, so I tried SuSE and it worked beautifully. Definitely go with Linuxant if you want wireless, it is worth the $20, as wireless is also hard to get working in SuSE.
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
Doing an FTP install is only an option if you can afford to wait a month or two for bugfixes (unless you build everything from source). They aren't releasing the binary RPMs for 9.1 onto their FTP servers until June.
I have 9.0 on my system. YaST2 segfaults every time I try and use the package manager or update portion of it ever since I changed my install path to a local directory. I reported the bug & sent them a backtrace and never got a response, presumably because it is either fixed in 9.1 or they're done with 9.0 now that 9.1 is out.
So you can't rely on an FTP install when the latest version availble via FTP lags a few months behind.
Overall I thought 9.0 was pretty good (albeit kind of buggy). I haven't yet decided wether I will just start shelling out to get 9.1 and subsequent releases or switch to something else. I'm waiting on Fedora core 2 to decide.
My Zoom external serial modem won't work in 9.1, did in 9.0 My Audigy Platinum Sound card is silent in 9.1, worked fine in 9.0, even though it configures correctly. Since I cannot connect to the patch site to get the patches, it sits there as a pile of crap on my HD waiting to be deleted...soon. Phone help is a joke as well as online help. If I were a Linux geek it would be a nice puzzle to muck with for hours on end, but my two days of frustration are enough for me...
Suse 9.1 is relatively free of non-free in it's default install. (In fact I've not aware of any non free packages in my install.) Suse/Novell has been very good about GPLing a lot of their linux stuff.
That said there is a bunch of non free stuff on the Professional version, but to install it. You'll need to fire up yast after the install to install it.
The ftp install will be avaible next month.
PS- I really recommend shelling out $30-$90 as having the media on hand for an install makes things faster, and simpler. Also the professional edition comes with both x86, and amd64 plus two ~500 page manuals.
IANALBIPOOGL (I am not a Lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw.)
I bet you wouldn't buy a pickup because it doesn't have a hatch-back. Hatch-backs are allot easier to access the rear cargo area than other cars ya know...
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
Since SuSE distributes modified kernels, they provide their own sources with their CDs and their ftp. They probably don't install the sources for a desktop target cause they don't expect the need to compile modules.
The source is available as a RPM on the DVD (at least it was in 9.0) and is downloadable, the point is that unlike the /. crowd, the average user isn't going to compile kernel modules (or even most software), so development gear/headers + the kernel source is just excess bloat, and will probably only get used to compile a rootkit if/when the box gets compromised.
Before I get modded to hell and back, this is saying nothing about the security of Suse, it's just that a development suite is a liability if you don't actually require it.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
I've been using suse since 7.x, altough now I'm running gentoo on my main computers, it is easier to install/manage on lab machine and servers.
:
:
: .6)
:
Best
- no problems to update
Good
- linux 2.6
- default desktop background in gnome are mountains
- nice(r ?) ooffice
- dependencies management with yast (ok, not really new, but still really nice)
Bad
- gnome 2.4 (and not
Rest is not new from 9.1 but still annoying
- multimedia stuff (codecs, ripper) : it's why I switched to gentoo
- habits of having library.rpm and library-devel.rpm sucks for devel. machine, no way to install directly all the devel, afaik.
#include "coucou.h"
This type of content would fit wonderfully in "Ask Slashdot."
That's exactly why it IS here!
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
... seriously.
i bought suse, i like it, but nothing is as slick as apt, or as refreshing as not having to worry about yast overwriting your manualy configured settings.
oh and don't get me started on rpm, rpm just has to go.
I Just put 9.1 on and would give it a 9 of 10 (i have yet to see 10) on install and initial setup.
This was installed on my most recent box (3 ghz P4 w HT). I did this up as a dual boot box with XP like i tend to do when testing.
As I am just getting into it I can't give a full review but the install process was very smooth and the whole thing has a polished feel and look. But be sure to pre partition your drive unless you don't mind reinstalling windows ( I just installed over my existing debian linux after I took a image of my partion and MBR). The system right after the install was at about 90%. It setup grub correctly and did not mess up windows. I have to say I like the the boot up menue and the linux boot up sequence, simple but functional or as detailed as you like.
It after system setup it recognized my local ntfs and fat32 partitions and mounted them but is having trouble with my USB and 1394 drives so far. The graphics settings were usable but a bit low for my card (radeon 6800) and need minimal tweaking to get the right color depth and resolution. Network and other peripherals worked right from the start. All the major applications appear to work and I have most every app. I want but firefox and wine. I have not yet tested playing media yet as all that was not the drives that don't yet work. All said this was probably the smoothest install I have ever had. Ill bet I will like this more than red hat.
Closing impression is that I am still debian (and knoppix) at heart but this is a very nice desktop all the same.
Jem Matzan of thejemreport.com reviewed SUSE 9.1
SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal Edition Review
SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional x86/AMD64
Jem has lots of great info at his site.
I was sick of spending my time fooling around with stupid little system things. I spend all day doing that at work, I don't need to waste time doing it with my desktop. So I picked the newest distro I could find (still like as close to bleeding edge as possible).
SuSE specific (I think); I don't know why they included things like RealPlayer and Acrobat considering how old they are, and that there are much nicer and less crashy incarnations of these in mplayer/xine and KGhostView (Although I understand there's probably licenseing problems with ram's and mplayer).
Both my monitor (Sun 17" Flat screen) and video card (r128) don't work quite right. The monitor wasn't recignized, so I entered in the -exact- values as was in the manual, and I still can't get a good refresh rate on the higher resolutions. Not a problem in Gentoo. Don't want to touch the XF86Config because SaX2 has warnings all over not to play with it. My video card doesn't do hardware acceleration even though I had it going in Gentoo.
Konq. also crashes consistently if I try to log into a Samba share. I've had to set my username and password in the configuration as the username to browse with. Which makes it very inflexible. Esp. when I need to use many different usernames throughout the day.
Not really SuSE's fault, but I hate KDE. Too many damn options, KMail is terrible compared to Evo. Hard to scan mail because the text is so close together, can't search the bodies of messages in IMAP, LDAP address books will crash KMail every once in a while and I don't care for the way it handles multiple identities.
KWallet also does a terrible job at remembering things, very hit or miss.
Little more nitpicky, I find qt redraws windows a lot more than gtk2 did.. Opening new tabs in Konq. does it and Kopete does it with it's message alert. Drives me nuts.
The KDE is my fault, I know I could install Gnome.
On the less negitive side (I like complaining), lots of updates coming in on my SuSE Watcher (like windows update). Most of them seem reliabilty related which makes me happy. KDE also feels incredibly fast. Even OpenOffice feels integrated and speedy.
Overall I'm still getting use to it. I'll definetly keep it for the long haul, even if I end up using Gnome. Nothing pises me off more now than trying to make my desktop work when I could be screwing around with -real- problems.
I absolutely love it. I've tried several versions of each, have used several iterations of Red Hat, and I think I've finally settled.
;)
The first install was difficult, but that was because I was installing it via ftp, and had several false starts after DSL acted up and a hard drive needed to be reformatted. The second computer installed flawlessly. In the future, for work and perhaps even home, I would choose to buy it. The polish is fantastic. With Mandrake, I had to put in a lot of effort to install certain common software because I had to compile from source, and numerous standard libraries were not installed. I haven't had to compile much because there are seemingly more packages for SuSE. The online update is slick, although I have little to compare it to. I use RH's up2date, but only the command-line version as it's on my firewall.
The KDE install feels much richer than the one in Mandrake. I've always preferred KDE, and now I'm really starting to have fun with it.
The basic networking options were the main reason I switched from Mandrake. It was infinitely easier to setup name, file and printer sharing in SuSE, as it is all built right into YaST and installed by default. I program for a living; the last thing I want to do is spend forever reading documentation and configuring software when I can be so much more productive with a nice tool set. I'll play on my own time.
All in all, a very nice distro. I don't mean to rag on Mandrake at all, just that I can best compare to it because I used it until recently. I switched to it some time ago after trying SuSE 8.2, so perhaps I'll switch again.
I'm looking forward to 9.2, with the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2. I think we'll also be in for a laptop this fall, which will be a substantial improvement from the silky-smooth P2 450's we're both running SuSE on.
And did I mention my wife loves it too?
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
I have been a RedHat user until it switched to Fedora. I took that chance to try Mandrake 9.2 for a few months.
Eventually my brother wanted to switch too and he runs more of a server environment. He felt the Mandrake product life was much too short for him (less then a year if I recall right). SUSE doesn't seem to have solid dates. But considering they still support 7.x stuff I'm not too worried.
We bought the Professional box.
PRO:
- More stable then Mandrake.
- KDE, etc. was polished.
- Surprisingly nice set of games.
- My SATA HD was properly recogniced. I think it installed it as a SCSI drive (which surprises me...).
- Much better product life then Fedora or Mandrake.
- YAST more stable then Mandrakes update. YAST is just as stable as up2date in RedHat. I've had issues with mirrors for Mandrake giving unreliable service.
- Windows partition properly recognized and configured. No problem (just like Mandrake).
CON:
- No ATI support out of the box. I guess ATI has no 2.6 drivers yet (so not SUSEs fault).
- Kaffee/Xine which is the build in Media player in Konquerer just downright sucks. Which per SUSEs manual is because of copyright issues. I now manually installed Xine (off the web RPMs) and it's hosed now. I have to tinker with it a little. I didn't have that problem in Mandrake/RedHat though (Mandrake was fine out of the box, RedHat it was easy to install).
In general I'm happy. The Media player in SUSE is a big disappointment. It's a tad bit more polished then Mandrake.
ha
That is what I did. I am something of a Linux veteran having installed my first Slack back in '94. Dabbled with Caldera, Corel, RH (various including the quite nice RH 9), Debian, Slackware again (9.1 - nice but not many packages) I decided it was time to dip my toes for the first time into one of those KDE-based everything-is-done-for-you distros.
Result? I love it. I take back all my past suspicion and reluctance to use KDE. It just makes life so easy. Yast is cool too. I am getting old and lazy - point and click configuration is fine by me.
For me, Suse 9.1 (+KDE) is the best desktop OS I have used. Not everyone is going to find it easy to use and not everyone will find all their needs satisfied by it the but I it does all I need.
Supports my printer, scanner, camera, wireless LAN card, 3D graphics card and sound card with minimal effort - and God, how much time have I spent wrestling those into submission with other distros in times past.
From now on I choose the easy path - Free Software wherever possible but no more hair shirts.
I am the biggest Linux noob on the face of the planet. *shame*
That being said, I've completely given up on ever installing drivers for my graphics card. NVidia seems to have special instructions for SuSE users, which is disturbing in itself. After gimping it up for a while I actually installed the source stuff like I should have in the first place (I did an FTP install), and it still doesn't work.
I think I found a few forums talkinga bout the same problem, and one of them seemed to solve it, but with strange methods that were beyond my ken.
I suppose I should actually bother to learn Linux, but everytime I open the console I black out, and wake up five hours later choking on my own tongue. Is that normal for a first time user?
For me, it's great.
I had somethings on my laptop not work right out of the box, but it wasn't hard at all to make it right.
The last distro I tried was buggy in ways I could not fix.
I'm not the kind of user interested in doing too much to the system other than install the packages I want, so I recommend it.
Michael
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It isn't that they don't give you the kernel source, it is that they don't give you the source for the build you are running if you install on an Athlon machine.
When I went to install something that needed the kernel headers of the running kernel it fell over with an error stating that headers != running kernel.
I got round it by compiling my own kernel, but kernel-source != kernel.athlon-source.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
tried suse 9.1 and IMHO it's got better eye-candy out of the box than any other distro that i've seen. also the systems seemed pretty stable, though i'm still using 9.0 on my machine and sticking with it coz it's much better than other distros and programs don't crash as frequently as on other distros plus the updates are easier and straight forward with all of my updates working fine without any problems during or after update. living
i live on an alternate planet
which happens everytime I upgrade apache... RHL and Fedora never fsck with my settings.. SuSE does.. wonder what gentoo does?
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
For me one of the deiciding factors is support from the community. SuSE packages are still very rare, most projects just don't provide SuSE RPMs. There is also a lack of third party repositories. Sure there's some, but for example Fedora core has apt/yum repositores for basically everything these days. Installing your-fav-media-player shouldn't be more than a minutes work.
I think the problem above is related to my other pet pevee, the free SuSE version is just frustrating to install over the net. In the year 2004 I have a very low threshold for these kinds of things, you've pretty much got 20 minutes to make your case for me using your distro. Asking me what network card module I want to install doesn't impress me. Otherwise I think SuSE has a pretty good reputation, they're one of the very few distros besides Red Hat you see actively contributing man power at for example the Linux Kernel Mailing List, GCC developement etc. and not just working on their own pet projects unlike certain other loud but little contributing distros. I have much respect for that.
I did try out Suse 9.1 and Mandrake 10 on an older laptop I have. My personal feeling was Mandrake runs faster than Suse, and I found setting up urpmi with the easy setup easier than getting apt-get installed on Suse. On my home machine I installed Mandrake 10 because it has a repository for MythTV (Thac's). I have a MythTV server downstairs and only need the frontend on my computer. After the OS install, I configured urpmi, and was watching TV in a matter of minutes. I really wanted to install Suse 9.1, but I don't want to have to compile Myth from source to get a small piece of it.
SUSE 9.1 works great on this. I installed it on 250G RAID0 off the megaraid controller.... however, I have had a few X lockups... probably due to the nvidia drivers (running with the latest) or XFree86.
In general, it's a minor upgrade (despite the move to the 2.6 kernel) from 9.0. Anyone who has 9.0 and it satisfied with 9.0, won't gain too much with 9.1 (unless you want to go thru a few annoyances with 2.6.. like SCSI device abstraction abstracting your LVM devices a 2nd time!!).
IMHO, 9.0 users can live without it. 8.2 users might want to consider the upgrade. Anyone using SUSE before 8.2 should definitely consider the upgrade. I'll probably stick it out with my more predictable 9.0 and leave 9.1 for just testing.
Well, I do have a review in my journal. It's the free download version tho.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For a desktop OS I'm sure it's grand. But don't put it anywhere near my servers. *I* want to control my configuration files. I don't want yast overwriting them every time I try to get package updates. BTW, unless suse has additional mirrors, the time to do updates was incredibly slow with yast last time I checked.
Thanks to a hard drive failure the last Suse machine I had was put to rest as debian replaced it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The network guys were fiddling with the wiring and one of them left a cable undone and, uh, I think, the token fell out. We can't find it and the network is dead. Please, I didn't do it---not that---not the dreaded line terminator.....
YaST didn't bang it up the ass properly.
I use SUSE LINUX Professional 9.1: Rock stable, large amount of the packages are GPL or other OSI opensource license. Two install modes: There is a "do all" install, or custom that allows you to control everything. The install outlined above I guess was the custom. With the "do all" if you go with a basic install first, then make your choices of other software later will save install time along with not having anything you really don't want. The time is not important if you get the system you want the first time. The YOU for updates/patches works for me without a problem to date. Not to knock, but other distros as Slackware are still some what un-polished when it comes to being a non-tech users desktop. On the Slackware website, it reads: "Slackware 9.1 uses the stable 2.4.22 kernel, but is 2.6.x ready". My only question is, why not use the lastest if it is ready. I look forward to the new kernel, and all it has to offer to build on.
does SuSE 9.1 come with Centrino support built in? the latest Knoppix does, but I've installed SuSE 9.0 and am having a HELL of a time because the kernel is so old ipw2100 won't even think about running on it...
buy linux....wuts is that? Suse 9 aint bad if i was gonna buy "out of the box" i would consider it. they may charge me for Micro~1 but I aint payin no foo fo linux
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
Suse 9.0 looked slick, but NFS didn't work right. Not as stable as Debian testing.
Hey, its all Linux - lets hope they share any fixes.
"I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that the source for all the things on side 1 of the DVD is on side 2 as well..."
;o)
Actually no - DVD 1 contains binaries (IA32 in side A and AMD64 on side B). DVD 2 contains the source (IA32 in side A and AMD64 on side B)
Couldn't resist
Live long and prosper...
You need the kernel source if you want to install the NVIDIA driver
I've been using SuSE since when it wasn't SuSE yet, but just slack, sls and some other crammed together on a single CD (We're talking about 0.97 kernel here). I've tested Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and Gentoo in the meantime, and I came back to SuSE every time.
;)
Right now I'm running SuSE 8.0 on my Firewall/Server, 9.0 on my Desktop and 9.1 on my laptop. If that doesn't call for little troubles...
If I look at the laptop as a stand-alone machine, it just works. 3D (ati rage 128) works.. well, not really good compared to the GF4Ti in my desktop, but for a R128 its ok. UT is playable at 800x600 and thats ok for that laptop. Sound, USB, Network, it all works ok. And you gotta love SCPM.
The internal modem doesn't work. Ah well, not suse's fault, 3com should release either driver or specs so that someone else can hack a driver together.
Gnome does not work, but hell, I'm not using it anyways...
Now for the quirks, sorted into standalone quirks and network quirks
standalone: the suse mailing list says USB memory sticks give trouble. Can't verify, dont have one. My casio R41 attaches as a storage device and works ok. Logitech Wireless Laptop Mouse works, too. Another point of trouble is SuSE's switch to Unicode for the default encoding. Gives you some piece of KDE starting weirdness when you install as an update or restore $HOME from wherever after a fresh install because some pathnames are now unicode but in the config files are still ISO8859-15 encoded, but suse provides a simple script to fix that once and for all. Btw, suse switched from a min UID of 500 to a min UID of 1000 for freshly created users, so there's another point of pain.
networked troubles: the switch to unicode and higher default uids really spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E when you're in a NIS/NFS/Automounter setup on a lan with different versions of SuSE linux... gotta figure out how to pre-fix that before I install it on my desktop box.
And a comment for all who complain that it's so hard to find precompiled stuff fore suse, compared to redhat:
1. why do you think SuSE pro comes on 2 DVDs?
2. ever tried packman (http://packman.links2linux.de)?
thats all for now.
[L]
I _just_ finished installing SuSE 9.1 on an oldish machine (HP Netserver LCIII PII/400) It seems to work fine - except it can't figure out the nic.
The WIERD thing is that it did the ftp install USING THAT NIC. but now I can't make it work at all. It _thinks_ it's up...
(It's the NIC that came with it - an HP branded NIC that's really an Intel Etherexpress. The doc says use eepro100, the autodetect wants e100. I've tried both; neither work)
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
You call this linux? More like NooBix. Put away the Gui's and install something real. Slackware > *
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
set ACPI=0FF in your kernel boot manager. ACPI problems often casue NIC problems (failure to work). This drove me batty with my SUSE install, untill I found that out.
..........FULL STOP.
I've switched to SuSE FTP installs for my desktop machines because the other free choices don't have 3rd party vendor support - no Eclipse, etc.
More bullshit problems to deal with. Think about how much time and money you would save if you just bought Windows XP.
If there's one thing that's worse than Microsoft, it's Novell. Their apps run slower than legless elephants (ie, GroupWise), their services are so nonstandard as to be totally useless (ie, BorderManager), and their marketing relies solely on mindless zealotry instilled in a few key people. (If you don't believe me, wait for a few replies to this saying "flamebait"...)
First of all: rpm is both a format an a tool. Both are fine. The format used in debian is deb and the tool used in debian is dpkg. Both are fine too.
Suse's apt-get equivalent is yast. But if you don't like yast, just install apt.
Second: yast md5sums all your configfiles and refuses to overwrite any modified files:
So what's your problem with suse again?
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Actually it appears you're bitten by the same bug as you would get bitten by in RedHat. The kernel-source package on an Athlon platform is your currently installed kernel rpm package or the latest one if there are multiples. However, the Makefile for the kernel has the kernel version modified from the one you are running. I forget what SuSE does to it but Red Hat add "custom" to the end of the kernel version that you've installed the source for.
Hope that helps.
The updates come from the exact same source in both the FTP installs and the CD installs.
SuSE 9.1 Personal
SuSE 9.1 Professional for x86 and AMD64
-JemFirst I thought to really test the system so I installed it with XFS formatted LVM partitions (these were all options given by YaST). The installer looked great and it seemed to work like a treat....until it came to the reboot where I got a "Kernel Panic: no root device". To cut a long story short I tracked it down to the boot image disk not having 'libc' installed in the correct directory so that 'insmod' could not run to insert the required modules.
At this point I was not impressed since this is a fairly major bug to have escaped notice making me wonder how rigourous their testing was but, hey, I'm a generous guy, the installer looked really cool and the install options were somewhat on the bleeding edge. So I fixed my ramdisk image and emailed their support address with a description of the exact problem......time went by with no response. So I emailed them again....and again....and again....still no response, in fact I'm still waiting for any acknowledgement of the email let alone a fix! (and no, my email does work - I did test that!)
To add further irritation the machine crashed after a few months of uptime...and when it came backup something had magically re-broken the ram disk. I tried to track this down through crontab and the rc scripts but no luck (possibly partly due to my unfamiliarity with the SUSE setup). Now I just have a cron entry that copies the fixed image back every hour....not a really sensible or reliable solution!
When Fedora Core 2 comes out this week I'm dumping SUSE. It's the only time I've ever paid for a Linux distribution and, while my experience was still way better than I've had with Windows and by no means horrific, for a Linux distribution I would rank it as my worst experience yet by far. To contrast that I've found Fedora far more like the "old" RedHat in terms of support, stability and longevity....not quite what the original RedHat press releases implied.
The parent wasn't supposed to have that subject -- it carried over from a post I made weeks ago with that subject (it was a joke). So I'm not really an arrogant bastard, despite the post subject line.
-JemI tried the Live CD. It booted, I left for awhile, I came back and it looked like Windoze. Also, it didn't find my HP 7110 USB printer/scanner/fax. Next.
I'm waiting for Blue Linux.
Have you tried the mailing list to see if anyone else has had your problem?
As for myself, I've been using SuSE since 6.x and I've never noticed that particular bug in Yast.
I've been using linux for some years, starting out with SLS in 1993, then moving to slack before the end of that year. I switched to redhat around 1997, and pretty much stayed with rh since then. I've looked at other distros, but always stayed with redhat.
I liked fedora core 1, it works pretty well for me and runs my apps, but I was keeping my eye on the market and looking at alternatives as usual. This week I switched my work desktop from redhat/fedora core 1 to Suse 9.1 - I'm impressed by the fact that everything "just works" with suse, and that it comes with absolutely everything but the kitchen sink. I installed the nvidia drivers with one click in the yast menu, and will be installing ut2004 after finals...
I'd tried mandrake numerous times over the years, and it always seemed "cute but flaky", whereas suse is more along the lines of "cute and solid".
Maybe Solaris x86 would work for you. Currently free, I think, but this changes a lot. Updates are free, supports java quite well :-) You can get gnome from ximian, if you are doing the desktop thing.
WS3 is step backwords from RH9. Its like they are trying to make their OS crappier with each version.
My RH9 box has timed out too and I don't know what to use. RHEL WS3 is lame, ES is too much. Debian is too old (are they still using kernel 2.2? ;-)) I think I might try krud linux.
9.1 is released. The source is out on FTP. Its what this whole slashdot story is about.
My point is that it is not available via FTP right now and won't be anytime soon. The only way to get it is to pay for it or obtain through unofficial means (which is questionable for security reasons).
This was my first distro. After trying Red Hat, Slackware, and Mandrake I returned to SuSE 8.2 and have stuck with it ever since. Why? It just seems to have a more complete set of desktop applications than the others. Configuration is quite simple with YaST. I can set it and forget it. I don't have to constantly search for the settings to add to some configuration file somewhere on my system. Yes, it's end-useritis and blasphemous to admit, but I like to use my system, not configure it.
ZZ
I got a copy from a friend, I did not purchase it. But I'm not expecting support. I was simply reporting a bug.
No. I tried googling though. I only reported the bug via their web based bug reporting system.
Beautiful boot screen and polished feel. Well, I'd say that the default boot screen was ugly as can be, but that's not important to me since I rarely reboot.
The look of my kde 3.2 desktop is absolutely beautiful after I switched to the plastic theme. I cannot praise the beauty of it enough.
Easy installation from freely available CD-ROM images YES
Automatic hardware detection via kudzu, at install time and when adding new devices.
Well, this is something debian could be a bit better at, but the new installer beta did find my network card and everything was easy to set up, but I admit that Suse was an easier install.
Updates released regularly with the Fedora Legacy Project providing updates for older distributions. Nothing can beat debian when it comes to updates. Argue with me on this point and you will lose ;-)
Many pre-built RPM packages are available on-line from projects such as Samba and otherwise. Debians packages are well tested, the configure scripts they have are in my opinion a bit better that Suse's or Gentoo's.Installing Apache for example was a breeze.
Many great console & X11-based applications included by default. YES. A lot more than Suse or Redhat ever have had in their repositories. All checked to work together. All pre compiled for your downloading pleasure
Files and configurations are in logical places. Configs are in logical places in /etc.
People coming from other distros often wonder at the odd places debian puts its files. An example is when installing Apache or CVS since they both have their "user files" in /var. The thing they don't see that every project has their own logic for where they want to put their files where as debian has its logic, but makes sure that every package and program adheres to this one logic. It is very handy, and making backups etc becomes easier.
Now why did I switch from Suse to Debian?
Suse 9.0 was getting old, an old KDE desktop, Gaim wasn't working for long periods of time (MSN changed their protocol) and although Yast waas nice in the beginning,it managed to screw up my xmodmap reqularly, didn't have the programs I was looking for in it's repositories and then one day after deleted a few partitions it screwed up my whole partition table. I'm no newbie when it comes to computers so I know thistime it wasn't my own fault.
Why did I switch from Gentoo?
Basically I got tired of building and waiting. Although their packaging system works in practice very apt-get likely (yes I know there is many huge differences, but that's not what I'm talking about!) in the way that it "resolves" dependancies automatically and has a very large repository of software. The build scripts were however not very reliable and I can remember many occasions where I had to wait a few days before being able to build a package because it was busted (this acutually happened during install, andthat was really annoying). Also after 5 kernels (maybe a dozen compiles) and still not remembering every module that I need, I got annoyed.
Also when I installed debian I didn't notice *any* loss of speed. I had a default kernel for my arch and all the stuff I needed (glx, dri etc) installed and it worked beutifully.
My desktop with debian is gorgeous fast and has everything I want. After a few modprobes I even got my old Gravis GamePad working. Sound was no problem and both my nics were recognized (a7n8x deluxe).
The first distro I ever installed was RedHat 5.0 way, way back when. Then came debian 2.2, Mandrake 7, debian woody, windows 98-2000 - Gentoo - Windows XP - Debian WinXP- Suse 9.0 - Gentoo - Debian sarge.
Suse 9.0 was the first distro that I felt so comfortable with that I forgot about Win(XP). Gentoo was next, and now I'll stick with debian. If I have to recommend a newbie a distro I would first let them try out Knoppix, then install Suse or Debian, depending on how much I care for that person (Debian requires a bit more work, but it is nicer in the long run).
And that poor poster would be... you?
:D
feh. stuff.
It's funny how as Linux strives to become a modern OS with polished installers & excellent hardware detection, a minority opted to turn the clock back to Linux circa 1992 & then claim it's somehow more advanced...
It's tiresome how these same folks keep evangelising their dubious performance claims ad nauseum.
I decided to check the facts about source based distro's rather than take others word for it.
Next to a default install of Suze 9.0 Pro, Fedora C1 & Mandrake 9.1 I installed & configured Lunar, Onebase, Sourcemage, Linux from scratch (LFS) & Gentoo.
For comparison I also installed Slackware which is a binary based distro but can be compiled if desired.
INSTALLATION
My impression was that Lunar & Sourcemage had simple effective ncurses installers. Onebase had a crude installer but it worked. In all cases there was ample opportunity to geek around in the install if you must, but not required.
LFS & Gentoo were simmillar in forcing you to do everything tediously (& error prone) by hand requiring encyclopaedic knowledge at times.
Slackware had simple effective ncurses installer.
CONFIGURATION
All the source based Distro's took _a_bloody_long_time_ to compile & configure everything needed to obtain a working desktop PC with a simmillar level of functionality to binary distro's. This process was complicated by bugs & documentation errors in the software tools of all 4 of the sourcebased distro's.
Slackware booted to a working desktop PC immediately after install but some configuration details required inquiry on the Slackware forums to rectify. The fixes were very simple once known.
PERFORMANCE
All of the distro's including Slackware booted more quickly than Suze, Fedora & Mandrake due to far fewer services starting.
The default KDE desktop seemed to come up far quicker than Suze inparticular.
Once started there was _no_perceptible_difference_ in speed of operation of the PC.
Day to day maintenance of the source based distro's was significantly more time consuming due to compile times & immaturity of the code.
SUMMARY
Of all the distro's Slackware stood out as at least as fast as a compiled source based distro's in operation without the massive overhead of compiling & the benefit if being a much more mature Linux. The other binary distro's were polished but obtainibg & installing new software in the rpm format was a constant source of frustration. Gentoo in particular seemed to be a poor choice due to it's virtually non existant installer or configuration tools & negligible performance benefit.
[Gentoo zealots may now censor my post, thank you]
The only problem I've had with it so far was trying to install Xamian Desktop 2 on SuSE 9.1 Pro. Xamian's installer said that it didn't recognize the current version of SuSE.
Other than that, it's pretty mean.
as a user (for some time) of another distro, and being quite happy with it, i'd like to pose a question to supporters of suse 9.1:
;)
what features or aspects of suse 9.1 would you consider to be compelling reasons for me to consider suse as a replacement?
i can offer as a starting point the path that i've taken in arriving at my current distro of choice:
1. Debian (got an install disc free in an issue of wired back in 1996; nothing but problems in getting it up and running on an old compaq desktop; eventually gave up and went back to winnt).
2. Red Hat (bought a "bible" book with 5.2 install cd; install went very smoothly, and i dual-booted this with winnt for about a year(?); was still a linux "newbie" and didn't get very far in terms of productivity)
3. Mandrake (on a suggestion from a friend that it was "friendlier" than red hat; used it and enjoyed the experience for a couple years, albeit had little more than a novelty/experimental type experience)
4. TurboLinux (got a packaged install set as a demo; began to explore linux more deeply, and eventually went back to red hat after experiencing frustration with system maintenance)
5. Red Hat (acquired a 6.x version from an "unleashed" book; ran this with satisfaction for a couple years, eventually getting frustrated by the overall design and its resistance to customization - admittedly, due most likely to lack of experience/know-how on my part)
6. Slackware (downloaded 8.1; was very comfortable with the installation and config process; have been running it ever since, eventually abandoning the "winnt dual boot" safety blanket in early 2003)
i currently run slackware 9.1 on an old compaq armada notebook and am absolutely satisfied. however, as can be seen by my track record, switching distros does not cause me anxiety
i like the simplicity of the slackware distro; admin tasks just seem to be easier, and i haven't experienced the compilation problems that frustrated me in the past (again, though, i was very much a linux tenderfoot prior to my slackware experience). i also like the slackware package managemeny system very much.
so... why would i (or should i) consider giving suse 9.1 a test drive?
Bought it at Fry's. Went online to see how to configure wireless according to SUSE. Saw documentation directing me to YAST2. Couldn't find anything in there to configure encryption. Configured it the old fashioned way in /etc/sysconfig/network/
This guy is way out there
I'm a long-time Redhat user (also a long-time reader, first-time stander-upper). I've been bouncing back and forth between Fedora Core 1 and SuSE ever since Redhat EOL'd Redhat 9. Fedora core 1 is more familiar to me since I've been using Redhat products for so long. However, I can't help but be impressed with SuSE. They've produced a very clean, very user friendly distribution that actually eliminated some of the problems I'd had with Redhat 9. I'd heard from friends who tried it that Fedora core 1 was not a good choice for laptops so, when it came time to install Linux on my new laptop, I went straight to SuSE.
I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to configure my laptop's wireless card (D-Link DWL-650) in SuSE than it had been under Redhat 9. The graphical boot is beautiful and the default configuration is sleek and easy to use. I won't get into the whole default Gnome versus default KDE issue except to say that I liked the look of their default desktop better than the default desktop look of Fedora.
I upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1 three days ago and so far my only complaint is that my Cisco VPN client refuses to build under it. I've tried and tried, along with several other SuSE users in my office, to get the client to build under the default 2.6 kernel with no luck. Googling for help returns only a few references to discussion groups in German that say (roughly translated) "konfoundit! Cisco VPN clienten builden broken! Sheizer!"
I attribute the incompatibiltiy of Cisco's VPN client with SuSE 9.1 to SuSE's need to be on the bleeding edge. They're (arguably) the first big distro to release a version with 2.6 as the default and they've done an admirable job. Unfortunately, Cisco isn't going to get their ass in gear and support 2.6 until almost EVERYONE is using 2.6 as their default kernel. Oh, well.
If anyone has found or knows of a way to get the Cisco VPN client to build on SuSE 9.1, please post.
I make my living supporting computer users. I know my way around Macs and Windows. When I started using linux a few years ago I tried several distributions and settled on SuSE. In retrospect that was a poor decision. In most businesses I see Red Hat. YaST is so easy to use I never learned how to administer a box. I wish I had spent my early months learning Red Hat so I would be better able to help my clients.
I eventually switched to debian to get access to more applications. I'm severely coding impaired and even basic tweaks to get a program to compile under SuSE are beyond me. I have been using debian for a couple years now.
I have a chance to buy, for very little money, a laptop-from-hell. It is a Acer TravelMate 342T. They worked well enough with Windows 98 but they are a nightmare under W2k. They would regularly lock up for 30 seconds to several minutes. Sometimes they would just die. After about 30 seconds running libranet 2.7.1 OSS would chew up 100% of the CPU then get killed. Once OSS was dead it is rock solid. I plan on using it to watch TV. Not having sound is a drag.
This laptop is flawless under SuSE 9.1. It is noticeably faster than stock libranet. I took libranet to the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2. SuSE 9.1 seems about the same as, speed wise, as libranet with 2.6 and 3.2 but the machine would seldom run for more than a minute with libranet before locking up hard. No doubt due to my ever-so-very-leet skillz doing the updates.
I'm sure that a competent person could get any distribution running better than I have this machine going but for an incompetent person SuSE is a godsend. I put in the CDs and it works. No tweaking required. SuSE reminds me of Macs 15 years ago. Macs enabled people who are not smart enough to use computers to use computers. SuSE does the same for linux.
The downside of SuSE is that packages are not as available as they are for other distributions. I would like to use VideoLAN to watch TV. Under debian I type apt-get vlc and I'm done. SuSE does not seem to have a rpm for VideoLAN and, so far, I have not been able to get it working on my own.
That was what drove me to debian last time. For this computer SuSE is perfect. The 2.6 kernel allows a PIII 500 to display MPEG2 streams without breaking a sweat. Something I never got close to with W2k. For a person who just wants a computer that works with normal applications SuSE is wonderful. For a Mac/Windows admin who just wants to run amap or dsniff SuSE can be frustrating.
Dan
This is a linux distribution!
This isn't some old $500 SCO Unix license. This isn't a $150 copy of XP Pro. This is a linux distribution. The reason you only see real attempts at reviews from the mainstream press. Even then, most of the time they're reviewing features common to all mainstream distributions, with rather little emphasis on the significant differences* between the distributions.
Why?
Because it's so insanely easy to just try it out yourself. If you know for sure that you're going to be installing some breed of unix or linux, then just download the free ISO and go at it some weekend. You'll learn a hell of a lot more about what you like and what you don't by installing two or three distros/running two or three LiveCDs, than you ever will by reading some other guy's opinions on the subject.
Do yourself a favor, and hammer the hell out of linuxisos.org for a little while. It'll be time well spent.
(* no, the packaging system doesn't count as a major difference, anymore. unless you're using gentoo's portage or some other freaky thing, the frontends, apt support, and pretty pictures have been developed to the point where they no longer count.)
Hi, I'm seriously considering moving over to Suse. Right now I'm running RH9.1. I'm wondering: upgrade or do a fresh install?
Cheers, Michael From sunny Toronto
Stability and features are terribly important to me. SuSE so far has given me both. I haven't used it in years. Recently started messing with SuSE 9.0. I've given up on RedHat Fedora. I have been using RedHat since 4.x came out and while I realize they need to make a buck, Fedora has me worried. I've been on the mailing list fighting a flurry of problems along with other's. The hardware I have is top of the line (x86). So I started looking.
I can only imagine what 9.1 is like. I'm still waiting for my copy. If it's anything like 9.0 then I'm in for a treat.
I know you all were looking for a 9.1 review. Wish I could give one. My experience with SuSE has been excellent to date. I would recommend at least checking them out. I would be surprised if anyone was terribly disappointed with them.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Blue Linux really doesn't exist.
After the press reports, IBM upper management sent out some e-mails trying to find out about this project because they hadn't heard about it. The response, neither has anyone else at IBM. There really is no Blue Linux.
First Yast is *NOT* GPL , because YAST is not used anymore it came in the earlier version of SuSe and whas buggy and shitty as hell (dont bother defending it even SuSe came to the same conclusion and changed it ) .
.
Yast2 is not GPL either its a modified by SuSe QT copy/Inspired ( definite Copy with some other option if you ask me ) of command center from Mandrakesoft , wich they copyrighted ( Dont bother there either , MCC whas in 2 distribution release before SuSe included YAST 2 , and they bot look alike )
YAST2 in ALL the box before 9.1 is *NOT* GPL. Its also copyrighted and whas sold by SuSe.
YAST ( 2 or 3 , not sure ) wich is sold/come from Novell/SUSE wich is in the SUSE 9.1 as been newly GPL'ed , Thats what GPL , *ONLY*.
Which version of rpm is that again? *smirk*
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
BACKGROUND
A little perspective: I was Apple from the ][ up to a PowerMac. Then I was Windows up until 98. I've been using linux, primarily Redhat, for over 5 years. I have a server running Redhat 9.0, and a desktop that's been running Redhat 7 -> 9.0. I switched to linux for three reasons: 1) it's significantly cheaper to build a machine and install linux (in terms of $, but not time); 2) although I've foobarred the OS more than once, it literally has crashed about 10 times in 5 years, and I've *never* lost my data; and 3) open source development is a fundamentally more sound way of development *for some things*, including the operating system, so I support it by using it.
My choice, money no object, would probably be a G5 tower. Mac has done great things towards making the computer easy to use as a tool right out of the box. But for the reasons above, my considerations were limited to linux. Since Redhat stopped it's support, I decided to consider my options before jumping directly to Fedora. To give away the punch line, I chose Suse 9.1 as my new Desktop. Read on for more details.
DESKTOP, NOT A SERVER
I want a server that I can configure by hand, that has a minimum of software (No X), with uptime that averages around 45 days. Redhat's done a nice job of providing that. Combined with Bastille and a few other things, I've been very happy.
But I use my Desktop computer on a day-to-day basis, and above all else, I just want it to work. I don't want it to crash, and I don't want to lose data, and I'm happy to upgrade regularly for my own benefit, but I don't want it to be difficult or slow me down. I'd like the installation of new software to be be relatively easy (though I don't mind compiling that wondrous open source software when need be).
First, I looked at what several new distros provided. Now, you can upgrade any system all day long, but out of the box (or off the disc), Suse has the newest kernel, the newest KDE, the newest Gimp, the newest mozilla. By "newest," I mean relative to the other distros I checked out, and thus closest to what I could download the source for if I were the gentoo sort.
INSTALLATION RESULTS
Redhat 9.1 (for comparison), the installer crashed repeatedly when I attemped anything other than a stock install. And, they've ceased support.
Fedora is running much older package versions than are available on the web (the 2.4 kernel? helllllloooooo). I decided against it just based on this. Also, I was particularly interested in switching to an "over the counter," distro. My logic is this: If they're spending the money to box it and put it in stores, they're also spending the money (presumably) to make it relatively easy to use.
After ultimately finding the correct command line voodoo to get Knoppix to boot on my machine (already a bad taste in my mouth), I got it installed (once I found the command line instructions for how to do that - grrrr), the installation itself was painless - a giant copy, and then a reboot. At which point, my screen resolutions were wrong, my screen driver was wrong, I was utterly unable to convince the OS that my wireless card existed, let alone get it configured, and -oh- -my- -god- - WHAT is up with that start menu? Don't tell Eric Raymond about Knoppix, or his recent review of CUPS will seem but a pale and pleasant discourse.
Mandrake is a close second to Suse, but it's still running older versions than Suse makes available. Further, I know Mandrake is back from the brink, but it still concerns me that support could evaporate, and I wanted a distro that was likely to last a while. I suspect Novell will work to see that happen with Suse for some time to come.
Suse 9.1 Personal installed pretty easily. The installation appeared to be a Curses interface, which didn't seem very pretty, but it worked. Having had a framebuffer problem during initial boot, it may be that there's a nicer installation inter
That's right. If it's Dell CT0200, the SoundBlaster Live 5.1, you gotta pay for it. Pester the Dell support that you need to replace your soundcard coz it doesn't work in linux so that they do something like write a driver for it. :D
http://opensource.creative.com/soundcard.html
-- Pls separate your sig from your msg so that I know when to ignore it.
Here.. It involves tweaking the kernel a little bit, bit it's not a major hassle. 3D acceleration is now working fine on my Radeon 9200 under SuSE 9.1 :)
I think the real trick is to switch off the "Use register arguments (EXPERIMENTAL)" option, as this is known to break binary only modules.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Went down to Best Buy and just bought it after work. Typing in this reply on the freshly installed system.
/proc/version:
My system specs are:
AMD Athlon 64 +3200
Nvidia Geforce4 MX 420
1 gig ram
MSI K8T Neo with Via K8T800 Chipset motherboard
Anyhow after backing up my data I put the DVD in. It was labeled 64 bit on one side, 32 bit on the other. I had put it the wrong way accidentally, but it was smart and told me "Cool system! But you are about to install 32 bit software on a 64 bit computer." Flipping it around I rebooted and went into Yast without a problem.
It didn't look too much different from Suse 9.0 for the installer at first. I went with the regular install of packages plus the compilers. Network, video, and sound appeared at first to be found correctly - minus that there weren't any Nvidia 3d drivers (just 2d) included in the box. The 3d drivers had to be installed via the online update tool. Haven't tested it yet in Unreal Tourny 2004 or Neverwinter Nights.
After the first reboot the audio didn't come up right. One more reboot (with me making no config changes) the audio came up right.
I use Lotus Notes 6.5 at work, and I use the web interface at home. Trying that out turns out that Java wasn't installed in Mozilla or Firebird. It did come up with the download plugin, but you'll have to make sure you are root in the browser to have it install right. I'll see later if Yast has a package for Java.
As for enterprise features that may come in handy with our Novell environment the installer had the option to authenticate to LDAP for users.
Getting deeper into the details of the box I pulled up what version of the kernel is from
Linux version 2.6.4-54.5-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux)) #1 Fri May 7 16:47:49 UTC 2004
Good, 2.6 as advertised. Going into other apps everything appeared to be very KDE based like in pervious versions of Suse. Doesn't appear to have much influence from the integration of Novell+Ximian. In the programs menu everything was not based on program names, but on purpose. For example Gimp 2.0 was labeled as "Image Editing".
One of the few apps linked to on the desktop was Office, which opened up into Open Office 1.1.1. It still appeared to have a limited set of fonts that I've seen in other OO installs. That is more a limitation of OO than Suse.
About X, SaX2 (Suse's X11 config editor) reports the version is:
XFree86 Version 4.3.99.902 (4.4.0 RC 2)
I was interested in seeing in SaX2 some config options for Tablets and Touchscreens. Might be a nice item for work's graphics department to try out.
Other items included in the package were Rekall (a database frontend), Samba 3.0, KDE 3.2.
Going through the manuals (remember those?) there were two volumes, each about 440 pages. One was the user guide that went into basic installation and the individual programs. Examples of programs with screen shots in the manual were Open Office, Gimp, KGPG, Xmms, gtKam, Mozilla, Audacity, and a full chapter on the command line toward the back. The admin volume went into the details such as troubleshooting the install or using logical volume manager (LVM). Other chapters were also on networking, ipv6, NIS, Apache, Samba, Squid, SSH, Kerberos, filesystems with acl's, and development in a 64 bit environment. Needless to say I was impressed with their manuals!
Good for the desktop in the enterprise, perhaps also the end user at home if the install went well on their particular hardware. That is probably the sticking point to turn anyone off is how well the install goes. That's where buying the package with support comes in. In the "Support at SUSE" pamphlet in the box it says on one of the supported items: Installation on a typical private workstation [non-networked] or laptop equipped with a single processor, at least 128 MB RAM, and 2 BG of free hard disk space. Other support items are reising Windows partitions, conf
It's far too early to tell what impact Novell has had on Suse. Remember back when Microsoft bought Foxpro? Everyone was excited, because they released v2.5 shortly after, including a windows version (it was dos only prior to that). I took a class at MSU (Microsoft University) on Foxpro shortly after 2.5 was released, and discovered that the original designers were preping a windows version long before the merger. The first Microsoft version of Foxpro was 3.0. It was dubbed Visual Foxpro, and had all of the trappings of other Visual development apps. I still have the magazines with developers in an uproar about that.
The same was true with Corel buying Wordperfect and Quatropro. Or AOL buying netscape.
While I do believe that Novell will be a good thing, I'm waiting until the next release to formulate an opinion based on mergers.
GrueMaster
I was a die-hard redhat user until redhat exited the free-software business. SuSE was amazingly easy with only a few gotchas when it came to configuring it for my rather complex network environment (sometimes I'm dhcp on eth0, others I'm on dsl.. suse forces you to use an "idle timeout" for ppp - awkward).
Yes, Debian is the kneejerk migration path, but good luck getting nonOSS software to run. My company uses a proprietary vpn client, along with VMware, Sophos (antivirus is a requirement on corporate networks), etc.. These apps are certified on RHEL and SLES only -- SuSE9/9.1 lets me run these apps on a free OS.
I, for one, welcome our new SuSE overlords.
-edfardos
I run Debian stable on my servers, and Fedora Core 1 on my desktops. I've got Test 3 running on older machines. If the tests show anything about Core 2 (which they do) then Fedora Core 2 is definitly a better choice. I've been through mandrake, slackware, debian, freebsd, suse, lycoris, and a few others, just when I was about to do linux from scratch I figured I'd give Fedora a shot (which was new at the time) it definitly impressed me, so much so that I've set it up on many friend's machines, and any new servers that I've set up. Its really nice, and Core 2 with 2.6 and SE is even nicer. Suse isn't bad, but I had pretty bad experiences with it in comparison to the others. On my list Suse is third right after Fedora and then Mandrake. Just figured I'd give you another user's perspective:) (not that there aren't enough of those on /.)
Regards,
Steve
Does anyone know if Suse will post updated rpms on their site for 2.6? I know they have for past versions.....
While I won't comment on your aversion to not-totally-free stuff, I will give you credit for putting a smile on my face ... I love a good Pulp Fiction reference.
Just started setting my SUSE 9.1 up on Wednesday night. I'm upgrading from SUSE 9.0, and elected to do a completely fresh reinstallation, replacing the miniscule 40 Gig hard drive Linux was running on to a 160 Gig behemoth capable of storing all these SHN and FLAC concert audio files. ("Of A Revolution" comes highly recommended at http://www.archive.org )
The biggest disappointment so far is that the installer doesn't want to run in graphical mode. It would only do text. SUSE 9.0 did graphical right from the top without a problem. My Gateway FPD1910 LCD screen seems to be giving it fits. But after doing a quick and dirty installation through Text Mode, I ran SaX2 and had X-Windows running fairly easily. But it means the ease of installation was thrown right out the window. It's so much easier to pick which packages to install with a GUI than it is with plain text.
Had to use the ALSAMixer program to get Audacity to record from the microphone.
Some programs hang in memory. I shut down Audacity a couple of times, but the system failed to realize it. It shut down from the screen, but when I went to restart it, I was told it was already running. I had to kill -9 it to restart it properly.
Then there are the little things, like my DVD Recorder being referred to as "CD Recorder (1)" which is annoying, but not a killjoy.
I've been fidgeting with settings as I go along, but I like the updated KDE. Lots of pretty icons and animations. The error sounds are annoying, but I'll get rid of those soon enough.
I still have to run WINE Rack against this system to see how QuickTime installs and see if I can get C
Have no idea if the 3-D graphics are working yet, but I'll install Unreal Tourney 2004 soon enough to find out.
I don't feel any big speed increases or noticeable functional differences so far, aside from the extremely annoying installation glitch. I use KDE, but I prefer the Nautilus manager to the Konqueror, so I'll need to install Nautilus and/or whatever GNOME stuff goes with it.
I dropped Windows completely at the end of December and haven't looked back. I've been using SUSE 9.0 since then, but am using SUSE 9.1 to give myself a fresh start. I've learned a lot in the past four or fives months. Some of the mistakes I've made can be erased now, and I'm looking forward to restarting this system, basically. 9.1 so far is a nice little tweak, but it's mostly cosmetic.
-Augie
Go into Yast2 and software install. Search for "kernel" and you'll see the source. It's not installed by default, but then again, most users don't need the kernel source.
It won't just "find" your printer. You need to install the printer. I have an HP PSC 2110 Printer/scanner/copier. After installing Fedora Core 1, it was not auto installed (XP didn't notice it either and required me to install a driver CD before I even plugged the thing in). However, when I went to the printer option under the menu, and clicked new printer, wham, there it was. I have printing and scanning working great with no extra drivers required. So use Yast to try to add a printer and it should notice the HP printer and use hpijs to print and hpoj to scan.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Heh... Yeah, I just saw that one. 8]
Some *other* poor schmuck answered the question posed in the article and got bitchslapped.
Fortunately someone with good sense hopped in and corrected the situation.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Thanks. I was kinda hoping it would be more plug'n'pray.
BTW, any preferences over SnuSE, Debian, Mandrake, others? I've been using Linux as my desktop instead of Windoze since Slackware 1996 (jeez 8 years). Slack was pretty good replacement for Win 3.1. I've also tried RH, later versions of Slack, Mandrake, etc. I really like Mandrake 8.something, but it didn't support my new video card, so I went with RH 9.0, which kind of sucks. I've gotten lazy when it comes to installing applications that aren't included, and RH puts things in nonstandard places. I'm thinkging of trying MDK 10. Seems like with Linux distros you need to hit the sweetspot of hardware that is not too new or too old.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Plus I've seen a few UT2004 framerate jumps, so that's nice ;)
Very install-n-go... I don't have time to powertweak anymore, and SuSE is built ready to go. Only thing I've had to modify has been the look and feel of KDE. And a small bug with the UT2004 installer where you have to remove your DVD-ROM's subfs entry in fstab.
I'm a debian fan myself, but this past weekend I installed SUSE 9.1 on my dad's computer.
.wax. So, I had to install mplayer and mplayerplug-in separately.
Having tried a lot of different distributions in the past, I expected that I would need to help him out, or that there would at least be some sort of trouble with hardware detection or a bug of some kind.
Wrong.
I believe SUSE will be the distro that brings Linux to the masses. It is easier to install than Windows. OTOH, if you know what you are doing, there are options to finetune it exactly the way you want.
Install went perfectly. The bootsplash screen and progress bar look great. There is none of this confusing text that people always comment on with Linux distros.
Things that take a long time to set up on Debian, such as java and realplayer plugins work out of the box with SUSE.
The SaX2 screen config program works amazingly well, letting you position the desktop on your screen just the right way. It autodetected my dad's monitor and videocard with no problem.
The only difficulty was that he wanted to listen to preview files from a website that sells classical music (classicalarchives.com). The format is
I have installed a lot of different distributions and this had to have been the easiest. We haven't run into a single bug yet.
If I had to recommend a distribution to someone who had never used Linux before, who didn't want to take the time necessary to understand and learn about their system which is necessary with Debian... I would recommend SUSE 9.1 without hesitation.
slashdot isn't the first place i would have thought of to ask the 'buying public' when it comes to software. that's kindof like going to a microsoft forum and asking about free versions of windows, isn't it?
all kidding aside, i use debian testing and have never used another distro which is so easily managed. i used suse once a while ago, but fell in love with apt-get instead.
SuSE 8.2 personal ed has been a bust at handling palm hotsyncs via a USB sync cradle. What is your experience trying to sync a pda in the 9.1 environment?
SUSE 9.1 autoinstalled it as a printer and scanner. I was kinda shocked. Their CUPS integration (and the autoinstallation of the HP ptal tools from the first boot) blew my mind.
--
Evan "Forgot about that nifty point"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
That really depends on what software you install and run. If you run non-free software, you can't be sure what it is doing. It doesn't matter if this is non-free kernal modules or userspace applications like RealPlayer, Netscape, and Opera. An entirely free software system gives you the freedom to inspect your system (in addition to other freedoms which are also valuable) and change it to suit your needs. It's up to you to decide what's more valuable to you--the freedoms of free software, or the allure of non-free software.
Digital Citizen
Since then I've supported SuSE by buying each & every release (rather support them than M$) and I can honestly say that they get better with each & every release (except 8.0, what a pain).
The 9.1 Pro upgrade came in last week, but I've been up to my ass in alligators so haven't had time to finish the install on the new box with an Adaptec 2100S controller with 128 MB memory, there's a precedence issue with the onboard Adaptec MB SCSI that I have to work around (want the raid to be the boot disk, MB wants it's own SCSI first).
The big home server currently runs 8.1, will upgrade to 9.1 when the other boxen are done. Portable has 9.0, office boxen are 9.0. Just waiting for down time to upgrade all to 9.1.
Yes I've tried other distros, Gentoo, Mandrake 10, that Red Hat community thing, but they all lack polish & immediate usability for my purposes.
SuSE best features for me:
1) Sucker just installs & runs, finds all the hardware
2) Yast Online Update to install latest bug fixes, painless.
3) Relatively up to date packages, less build by hand.
4) 9 times out of 10, if I look for something it's in the distro
5) Well integrated, well packaged, they dot all the i's and cross all of the t's when they do a release
6) Gecko Gecko Gecko
No shit. Rpm flat the hell out blows goats!
It always has and more than likely always will.
I had a similar experience with a recent attempt to install Debian. I've been using Fedora Core 1 since it came out and a colleague said I should try Debian. I want very much to not have to follow technical issues anymore, I'm simply tired of doing things that way. I don't want to give up my software freedom and I don't think I should have to. So I tried installing like a novice would do. My previous experience with Debian was fine (Debian Potato) but the installer was nowhere near what a novice should be expected to deal with.
/dev/dsp1, sound config is not easy and should not be necessary at all for the end-user, generally not enough focus on apps that "just work" and not enough work on documentation and too much focus on adding silly features that appeal to a few geeks and make the app hard to use).
Debian's installer (which appears to be textual, although in a lot of languages that look like they're using the right glyphs) is still not very good. Fedora Core's installer was a breeze to deal with (the graphics for things really do make things easier to handle and navigate). Not only was Debian's installer still asking questions it didn't really need to ask (my hostname? I know what this means, but this is far too technical and not completely necessary since my DHCP server dictates my hostname, also other GNU/Linux installers don't do this) but the disk partitioner isn't as nice as the Red Hat/Fedora Core's partitioning interface.
The showstopper for me was the dodgy networking interface software--the installer appears to proceed along two stages: the stage where you boot off the CD, and the stage after the minimal system has installed and the rest of the system is downloaded from Debian servers on the Internet. The first stage appeared to go well, identifying my wireless and wired networking hardware.
The second stage did not recognize my networking hardware and then the installer asked me if I wanted to configure PPP. There was no apparent way to tell it that I wanted it to use the same interface it had just used before rebooting and to go get Debian packages using that interface. I don't need PPP at all. I'm sure if I really cared more about this issue I could have done something to fix this and keep installing, but I wanted to go through this as a novice might, not as a longtime Unix user with some years of experience using the Linux kernal.
Given this constraint, I figured I had wiped a hard drive for nothing. I reinstalled Fedora Core 1, updated it, and then kept using the machine. FC1 doesn't identify my hardware correctly (kudzu thinks I am removing and reinstalling my wireless device), the network configuration profiles don't work correctly (I can't use the GUI to remove profiles or make a profile for an unencrypted wireless network connection and also have one with a WEP key), and the USB hotplug support is lacking (USB hard drive, USB key, and Griffin iMic support are not really working smoothly enough for novices to use). However the vast majority of the system works well enough for me to do a lot of real work. Other things that don't work well are things that will not work well in other distributions too (/dev device labels are a sign of a programmer's interface, not a user's interface -- use device brand names instead so I see "iMic" never
Digital Citizen
nothing.
They broke Suse!
Suse 9.0 would start YaST when you clicked on an RPM, 9.1 doesn't know how to handle the file type. Even if you tell it to open the file with YaST, it still doesn't work right. You have to drop to a CLI and do the "rpm -i" thing, which is a PITA.
On the plus side, supposedly they have support for the Realtek 8180 chipset based wifi cards...I'll find out tomorrow if their "how-to" article works or not. (think ndiswrapper)
I love SuSE 9.0, and have been looking forward to upgrading to 9.1. It arrived in the mail today.
The 32bit sides of the DVDs are not readable in my machines, but the 64bit sides are. Does me no good, my systems are 32bit. A big part of the reason I wanted the boxed Professional version is for the DVDs, and now I find them useless.
So, I still have the CDs. I booted up and attempted to upgrade my system. No go. None of the partitions on any of my drives are identified. It shows "unknown" for every partition. Even if I manually select my root partition, it fails to mount it. Keep in mind this machine was set up from scratch with 9.0 and works just fine.
I checked SuSE support, and it turns out that there is a bug in the SuSE kernel that prevents it from mounting XFS partitions. Amazing, all that testing and nobody tried to use XFS. There is a driver hotfix released as a workaround, but it can't handle root on XFS. Guess what, my root (and others) are all XFS.
This means I can only install 9.1 if I'm willing to throw away my entire config and start over with a fresh install. Unacceptable. At the very least I'd like to be able to download a replacement CD1 ISO that fixes the problem. It's ridiculous to keep shipping a broken product that can't be installed as an upgrade by an otherwise satisfied customer.
So here I sit, with 2 unreadable DVDs and 5 CDs that I can't install because apparently nobody ever tested a perfectly normal and supported configuration as an upgrade path. Sigh.
on a KVM switch.
And if you're doing anything with networked services, anything BESIDES windows is what you want. Not that I think Windows is inheritely less secure if properly set up, but that because they want you to pay for and license anything that can get you to... ICS, IIS, SQL, mail, file sharing with more than 10 people, etc.
That's bullshit.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...perhaps you might've been tokin' a wee bit too much?
I have switched from Red Hat after 6.2, then went to debian because I wanted sleek and fast and small, but I found playing 3rd party games really bytes when you have to go and find and download stuff, so I switched to Suse at 7.2, I have been using 8.2 for quite awhile, I tried 9.0 but it screwed up with my NVidia 5200 Ultra amongst other annoyances I have found with 9.0, so I stayed with 8.2, Now with 9.1 I am testing it on an old P2 400 and it seems they fixed alot of it, I will prob install it this weekend on my main workstation and see how she runs.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
I used SuSE from 7.0 through 8.0 and had terrible problems with it annihilating my custom sendmail configuration.
Since what version have they started leaving sendmail config alone?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I loved SuSE 9.0 and 9.1 shows great promise, but hasn't anyone else noticed that Samba client just doesn't work out of the box as shipped and their new disk mounting system has got to go. That being said, wicked fast and a nice upgrade...just need to fix the samba client and disk swapping. Dave
What is needed is an ACID workalike for Linux. Yeah, I know Sonar can also do loop composition but nothing is quite like ACID. And neither one runs under Linux. Yeah, the program's now owned by Evil Sony. Bleah. Fat chance they'll port it. :P
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I bought an HP zv5034us laptop, repartitioned the hard-drive and installed a purchased ($US90.00) version of Suse 9.0 professional on the newly created partition. The sound did not work. I emailed Suse support, and they told me they did not cover sound support on the installation of their distro. However... if I wanted to pay even more, they would help me out.
This is plain and simple, ridiculous. Just about every computer produced today has a sound card, and just about every user that uses a computer wants sound (and I'm not talking about the ever decreasing number of command-line-only junkies either :-). Not supporting sound installation is outragous, especially considering I was one of the few individuals to pay for it. I used to believe that one should occasionally pay for a distro to keep them in business... not after that. Mind you... although they have jumped on the Linux bandwagon, I would have to say that I haven't found a great deal of non-server Linux support from HP either. You would think they would provide drivers for their hardware. Ah well... I guess Linux is also a good buzz word for the BHB's of the world.
So once again, I would say the biggest improvement Suse needs to make is in customer support. I guess I'll try out Fedora, or Gentoo next.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Does anybody know if downloading the ISOs via the donkey network is legal?
Look around -- you can download both the DVD version and CD version on BitTorrent, and via various other methods. Not the best download speeds at the moment, because it's brand new so everybody and their mother is eating up the bandwidth, but it's there. And it is legal to redistribute the SuSE CDs for free, even with the non-free stuff on them. It's when you charge for them that you run into problems.
Can I get 9.1 for free yet? I'm on 9.0. I like it, but I want to go to 9.1.
When I upgraded from Suse8 to Suse9, I experienced the same thing. I have purchased every major upgrade since 5.3, and have seen this distro go from arguably the best, to distinctly average. In my case the support I needed but didn't get was for ADSL broadband. The rigmarole you have to go through to obtain support is tortuous in the extreme. If I didn't know better, I might think that it was intended to make it all too much trouble. That is what happened in my case. I am using Mandrake 9 at the moment and Suse is lying unused in its box alongside the pounds of documentation. I should warn the original poster that this is the sort of posting which will result in his/her karma being slashed.Er... you do know never to praise MS don't you?
So, I'll admit that I could probably figure this out, but since I did just install the amazingly ontopic completely standard SuSE 9.1 - could you be more specific about how to add this? (Is it in YaST somewhere? Do I need to edit some config file? I know how to do it once in the boot manager...)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I used to be a RH user, but I got mainly fed up with playing disc jockey on install. I tend to do a completely fresh install on a box instead of update (my main stuff lives on a core server so it's not a problem). Not that don't keep trying, but I found little to switch back for.
;-).
;-). That by no means makes me an expert - just reasonably able to get myself out of self-dug holes 8-).
What I like about SuSE is that most of the time I can just kick a DVD in a drive, click a few buttons and go for lunch, coming back to a machine that works (the exceptions usually tend to exotic hardware where it needs some convincing). Even with the CD install I can select from all the available software and install, the fact that RH Pro is an unintegrated heap of CDs is IMO not very helpful - I don't have the time to hunt around for code.
The only thing I haven't tried yet is to use server configs (like BIND and Postfix) from Yast - I normally do this by hand. However, it's something I must investigate because from experience SuSE works best if you let Yast do the thinking
As for 'under the hood' I have always found SuSE to be several factors more useful than RH. SuSE had decent keystrokes for terminal windows from v6 or so, where as RH still needed them defined.
I also feel SuSE is more practical in the way it's engineered, like someone who actually uses it him/herself for work had a solid word in the configs.
Having said all that, I'm still planning to have a look at Debian (already got Sarge on a DVD here) and Gentoo.
The problem is time, which is precisely why I use SuSE Pro 9.1. It just works, and I have yet to be let down by automatic upgrades (well, OK, I've only been running that on auto for the last 2 years or so)
As for experience with Linux, er, Let's just say that I remember installing Slackware from floppies (and I think I may have a cut of the latest version somewhere for boxes that are short on space/resources
Insert
Tried Suse 8.1 and 9.0. I'm not a big fan of the entire RPM strategy. It has some problems with it that are clearly superceded by Debian and Gentoo packaging methods. Once an installation goes to crap, it's very hard or cryptic to recover from it and it takes a real slice of time to figure out what you need to do in order to recover.
I found SuSE 9.0 to be getting a little too easy to use. For a workstation it was nice, but for a server it limited. I'm working on moving off SuSE this week for my servers.
With better video support (libdvdcss) under Debian, or better configuration management under Gentoo, they would have really great products.
Debian suffers from non-proprietary support problems and Gentoo has the worse tool I've experienced for resolving configuration changes in /etc. They could use a lesson from Debian. I've tried several times installing Gentoo and have always eventually rendered the system unuseable because of configuration changes. It's far easier to make a mistake than to get it right.
Running SuSE 9.0 presently. (mirrored a mirror locally for a hard drive install) I haven't bought SuSE since the 6.x and 7.x days; one of the reasons I like it is that everything works, you don't have to munge through config files to get your peripherals going. One detractor; if you do have to make some changes to config files for options that aren't available through suseconfig or yast, the changes you make get overwritten, and you have to run suseconfig just about any time you want to make a change to any system settings. I suppose I could write a script to run after suseconfig to put the stuff back but I shouldn't have to and don't want to. Over all, for ease of use and getting windows users over to linux, SuSE is THE BEST! If you are setting up any kind of server, try RedHat or Debian. One of these days I'm going to roll my own, but I haven't found the time yet.
So's an automatic car, and you see how popular those have become.
SuSE comes with both binary and source RPMs.
The downloadable Personal version doesn't
How do you know? There's no harm in trying!
The whole story that Suse 9.1 is realeased and available. Of course, you can only have it now if you're ready to pay for it.
Otherwise, if you want it for free, you'll have to wait until it is available via FTP on the 14/06 (IIRC).
If you want a totally free distribution, may I suggest you to use debian, gentoo or slackware ?
For the security updates and bugfixes, suse linux products have a 2 life period, during which all updates are freely available through FTP, as soon as they are released.
#include "coucou.h"
SuSE was my first Linux experience, back from the free 7.2 LiveEval CD they sent as a promotion. Since then I've used a few versions of Mandrake, and Fedora Core 1 in addition to SuSE 8.2 through 9.1. Mandrake 9.1 was the first Linux I installed, but eventually I decided I preferred SuSE. I've tried both Mandrake releases since then, but never stuck with them. FC1 lasted only a few hours on my system before I got fed up.
:/
Two main things keep me with SuSE. Excellent KDE support, and YaST. The choices SuSE makes for the default setup are the closest to what I'd pick myself. That's not to say I don't change the settings significantly -- SuSE just gets it the closest.
They're also quick to pick up on new, useful stuff. I was disappointed to see that Mandrake 10 used DevFS, as I wanted to see udev in action without having to configure it myself. SuSE 9.1 uses it, and it seems nifty so far.
The 9.1 install was pretty much the same as previous installs. Not quite as simple as the Mandrake install, but not horrendously complicated either.
One interesting choice is that they now include Supermount in the kernel. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another on Supermount, except that there doesn't appear to be a configuration option for it in YaST (Mandrake has one) and I don't seem to be able to open data CDs properly. Installing packages from YaST works fine, and I can open DVDs (viewing as a directory and playing in Kaffeine). I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that one.
The ULB folks say that the GNOME setup is vastly improved in 9.1. I'll take their word for it, as I mostly regard GNOME libs as a necessary evil on my system.
My biggest complaint isn't really a problem with SuSE per se. There aren't any Synaptic packages for 9.1 yet, and the 9.0 package seems to crash on every startup. Apt itself works just fine, but manipulating large numbers of packages via the commandline is awkward. And yes, I do realize that I said above that I loved YaST, and I still do, but all the unofficial package repositories are apt.
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution.
/home on its own partition, so I just reinstalled from scratch without touching /home - and that worked flawlessly. Allmost everything was installed the right way, and worked right away.
/boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited /etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.
However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.
In short, it quite simply sucked.
Luckily, I have
The only exception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited
In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I tried upgrading from 8.2 on a little fileserver. This is an ancient 500mhz K6-2 but with 512mb RAM which sits on a windows/samba network at home. After a lot of trouble I had it working well -- ie invisibly -- for about six months, and then one night it crashed and when it came up again would not find the network or accept an address from the dhcp server. No idea why it crashed. This happened unattended in the middle of the night.
So I poked around on google a bit, and found other people had been having problems with dhcp on 8.2, cured by setting "acpi=off" in the boot sequence. Astonishingly intuitive, even by Linux standards. Anyway, I tried it, and it didn't work.
Since 9.1 is out, I thought I would buy an upgrade and see if that fixed it. This is, after all, version 9.1, which suggests a degree of stability and sophistication, right?
Sat there shovelling CDs in for an upgrade for two hours, fortunately with a good book. Everything seemed to be working slickly. The machine goes online as it should and offeres to get upgrades at the end of the installation process. I agree to this. It upgrades some small stuff, and, curiously, the kernel, and then asks to reboot.
Ah. At the end of the reboot, I try to log in, and after the username and password, it hangs. No prompt appears. After about five minutes, a message about eval being unable to fork.
OK. Try the rescue CD. This works, in as much as the machine boots happily into the rescue system. But nothing I do will make it boot into a working system form the hard disk. In the end, I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch. Guess what. It still couldn't negotiate properly a DHCP lease.
Nor is it secure. this machine is in a pretty common configuration: a small network behind a router/wireless thing olugged into a cable modem. So it needs to know that other machines on the 19.168 subnet are trusted, and nothing else is, even though they are both plugged into the same network card. Christ only knows how you tell the suse firewall this. I never did find out. I could only get the networking working by turning the firewall off altogether.
On top of that it was dog slow running KDE 3.2 on this (admittedly ancient) hardware. It took four or five seconds just to open configuration files for editing. So after wasting a whole day like this, I gave up, booted it back into Windows 2000, and everything just bloody well works. WinVNC is slow, but no slower than KDE. A lightweight windows webserver is infinitely easier to configure than apache. Activestate perl is easier to upgrade. All I want is to serve a few files and run a home installation of movable type. It's rather shocking to discover how much better Windows is than Linux for this purpose.
OOo word count at http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.
...and I don't seem to be able to open data CDs properly. Installing packages from YaST works fine, and I can open DVDs (viewing as a directory and playing in Kaffeine). I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that one. :/
Ok, I'm a retard. I tried several CDs, but they were all the installation CDs, since they were the closest at hand. But the install CDs automatically get mounted elsewhere, for proper YaST operation. Other data CDs work fine.
I'm a fan of SuSE, and have run either SuSE or RedHat on my server systems for years. One thing I've noticed is that while SuSE used to have tons and tons of different software, now they have about the same number of packages/programs as other distros (full install; "rpm -q -a | wc").
Back in pre-8 days, it would take 6 or 7 CDs for a complete SuSE install. This was about 1200 separate items (not separate RPM packages, several of which are often used to make one complete software title. For example, "rpm -q -a | grep -i apache" will show 5 or 6 different RPMs for one title).
I really liked some of the obscure packages...lots of old text-based games, and my favorite was a complete set of LAPACK & BLAS mathematical libraries.
I'm not really bitching, but I do miss the huge labor of love that went into trying to include virtually every single item the SuSE developers could find to compile for Linux. These days, many of those items have dropped off the install list (only three CDs these days, which includes the vastly grown binaries & sources for desktop software). It must have been a business decision, given that some of those packages were pretty obscure and no longer maintained. You can still get some on rpmfind.net, and might be able to find the source, but I haven't seen a distro with so many packages since earlier days of SuSE. If there's still one out there that's comparable, someone send me a clue about it.
I'm running 9.1 on my new 3.06Ghz dual Xeon box with ~5TB of disk (yes, terabytes) from asacomputers.com. It's a sweet system! I also have 9.0 on a new dual Opteron system, and am finding the SuSE transition to 64-bit Opteron land to be pretty painless. It was a little unclear at first where I needed to get my license from for Yast2 upgrades (turns out it was from Novell, but then I went to suse.com to activate it - this is for the $795./year server license which was about the only easy path for an AMD64 distro on a production server needing ready access to patches etc.). Consider this a positive review for SuSE!
The specs of my hardware at home are rather common: nForce2 chipsets, some old Intel chipsets, some generic noname nVidia GeForces and some old S3 PCI cards to accomodate other monitors, a pile of generic 8139 ethernet cards, a D-Link ADSL modem, and the aforementioned TFT monitors, together with a Canon flatbed scanner and an inkjet printer. I have never had any problems installing the hardware, although I had to use a commercial driver to make my cheap printer work. In SuSE 9.1 installation of several monitors with SaX went absolutely smoothly and if I weren't so picky about DPI settings and such, I could have just used the default XF86Config it made during the installation. NVidia drivers were downloaded by the YaST Online Update application and installed in the background so that I didn't even notice the fact until I ran an OpenGL screensaver and it was really fast!
The installation went smoothly as well. First of all, I am Russian, and I am oh-so-pleased to see my native language back again in YaST since it was missing in 9.0 due to some glitch. What's even better is that now SuSE ships with decent Unicode TrueType fonts with Cyrillics glyphs, so you don't have to stare at ugly bitmap fonts during the installationg, and, again, if one is not very picky, he or she would perfectly go with these bundled fonts without any need to install standard fonts from Microsoft Windows.
And now for the surprising facts I have discovered so far. Maybe I wasn't reading reviews too carefully, but the default locale is now UTF8. We all remember how bad UTF8 was implemented in RedHat 8.0, and it never became better in RedHat 9.0. It mostly likely won't make any difference for people who don't use Cyrillic characters, but here (in Soviet Russia
Fellow font maniacs, beware! If you try to build the latest Freetype (currently 2.1.8), which you most likely will want to do, at least for the sake of turning the bytecode interpreter on -- DO NOT DO IT. GTK1 and other applications using bitmap fonts will crash your X after this! I've investigated the matter and solved the problem. For the curious I can e-mail an explanation, but to cut a long story short now, the steps to take to make sure your fonts look pretty and no applications crash X, do the following:
After that you should have no problems and crashes. I know that's by far not an elegant solution and will greatly appreciate other suggestions!
Samba 3 on a SuSE 8.2 box and Samba 3 on a SuSE 9.1 box export file ownership and permission data! I don't know why this works and I
___
On Slashdot, Russians comment on YOU!
Nop, since said NVidia driver comes pre compiled for suse...
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
urpmi gnome2 .......
To satisfy dependencies, the following 43 packages are going to be installed (82 MB):
Ist das in Ordnung? (J/n)
or
apt-get install kde
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
0 packages upgraded, 79 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 51.4MB/56.5MB of archives. After unpacking 162MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
oh ? you can not ?
every modern distribution has an autmated dependency checking and software installation over the internet. And unstable repositories....
This is a feature a linux user needs to have every day !
Sorry folks, suse is far behind.
My last experience was with SuSE 7.2, and I hated that functionality, especially the way I would change a setting in one small specific area, and YAST would then run SuSEConfig across the whole fucking system. It constantly kept re-ordering my hosts file and making a mess of postfix. I had to keep copies of the files as *I* wanted them to be, and manually copy them back after every invocation of yast.
I hated SuSEconfig. What's wrong with having a standard way of managing config files that is common to all Linux distributions?
It just smacks of Not Invented Here syndrome.
I liked 9.0, and 9.1 is better in every way EXCEPT one or more of the security updates kill my wireless connection. From newsgroup comments, others have the same problem. No one seems to know the answer. So, I'm working through the updates one-by-one, installing, rebooting, testing wireless, rinse and repeat. My major suggestion to Suse is that they post a page with known bugs and solutions. Having to test each patch myself is a pain in the butt.
Their problem with SuSE is that its not Debian.
Think that sums it up.
I've installed it on several desktops of varying speeds from a PII 350 to a P4 2.6. They are a mixture of file and web servers, a development machine, a desktop/gaming machine, and a laptop with a wireless G card. All are working great. The changes from SuSE 9, which I'd been running for several months, aren't all that apparent on most of these machines, but with a faster machine the performance improvements are pretty obvious.
ndiswrapper is included and after a few lines of setup and 3 lines at startup I can get my wireless G card on my laptop up and running.
No GNOME 2.6 and no packages yet, which dissapointed me, but I'll live. GNOME 2.4 is still a step up from the 2.2 version on SuSE 9. I use the new KDE on my servers and it seems to get a nice speed boost from the new kernel. All in all a fine desktop experience.
I've tried serveral distros lately since abandoning Red Hat and after a few bad Fedora experiences and SuSE seems to strike the right balance of everything for me. Even my wife is running SuSE now with no problems and she doesn't even know how to login to a computer. (Yes, I'm an IT professional and yes, it's shameful.)
I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) good Mono experience with SuSE. I figure since it's been thrown into the Novell bag with Ximian they should be supporting it a bit better than other distros. So far that's been true with the Red Carpet support for SuSE 9, and the 9.1 Red Carpet rpms waiting for something on their ftp. I've installed them and they run fine. I'm not sure why they aren't listed on the install page yet. All of the channels aren't set up yet but the mono and SuSE 9.1 channels are up and running.
So all in all I'm quite pleased. I'm glad I paid for the pro version they definately deserve my cash for this release.
One...Point...Twenty One...Gigawatts!
I've had no problem with the built-in 802.11b in my laptop (HP Pavilion ze5300). I HAVE run into ATI problems though. ATI is in copout-mode on these. They say that the individual manufacturers add/remove different features with their mobile parts, and hence, ATI won't give you drivers for a mobile part, saying "get them from HP/IBM/whoever".
I was under the impression that's what reference drivers are for eh? At least let me TRY and get 3d working.
However, I obviously don't hold SuSE responsible for this, it's by far my favorite distro. I'm a Linux-only type, so I want something that is comfortable and consistent between my home system, my work system with Xinerama and my laptop, and not to run several differnt distros.
I like music
Incorrect. They are required to provide you the MEANS to acquire the source, i.e. a copy of the GPL, and a hyperlink or mailing address.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I just installed Suse 9.1 yesterday. I have 9.0 running on the box and then upgraded to a 160 gig SATA hard drive. 9.0 slowed down a lot...due to DMA problems and such....I couldn't get it to jive. So, I installed Mandrake 10.0 official and waited for SuSE 9.1
First, I had to recompile my kernel. Every time I rebooted the machine, I would have to unplug my keyboard and then plug it back in to have SuSE recognize it. There were NO warning messages...no nothing. A recompile of the kernel tho (their kernel source...not the kernel source from www.kernel.org) and everything was working fine.
Then, I used the packman rpms for xine-lib etc...and used their source rpm for kaffeine. A WORD OF CAUTION: If you recompile the kaffeine source rpm from packman..and it keeps bombing at at an update system files macro, then you need the SuSE rpm update-system-files. You can get it through yast...it's on the disks. The packman srpm left it out of the requirements by error.
But, that's ALL I had to do...just those couple of things and I now have a wonderful SuSE desktop. I ran Redhat Linux for 6 years...and back then, I didn't like SuSE. But, after redhat tanked and I gave suse another try (after first trying debian, mandrake, and gentoo)...I love it. SuSE is twice the distribution debian and gentoo even dream about being. For me, it's on par with the now defunct Redhat Linux and I see no reason to switch ever again.
Here are the specs for the box it's running on:
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard
Athlon XP 2600+ cpu
2 256 Meg Ram chips working in dual channel for 512 megs
Samsung 52x24x52 cdwriter with 16x dvd
160 Gig SATA drive
Nvidia GeForceFX 5700 video
The biggest thing that bugs me about the Suse distro is that although over-all it is pretty good, they won't (notice I didn't say "can't") support the people who support them... especially those who support them financially. I guess to their mind, there is a minimum limit to what they need dollar-wise, before they will do what they should do. You can pay them for the distro, but woe is you that thinks you should get anything more than the freely downloadable software for it. It is this kind of business strategy that will keep people from purchasing and using Linux on a large scale.
As for MS. I use it as well. I am sure most of us here do... it is ubiquitous in the business world. For the most part, their programs work quite well, and do what they do as advertised. If their program doesn't do what you want, you use another. On the other hand, I think the security in their programs is horrible. As well, I think they use their monopoly in a very bad way to trample innovation and competition in the market (my own opinion only... in case they want to sue me!).
So... I am on the side of Linux, and wish that companies like Suse would get their heads out of their asses so that 'Mr./Ms. Average' would be able to have a credible alternative to the monopolist. The average person doesn't want to have to spend hours of their own time researching why something doesn't work. Heck, the average IT support person doesn't have the time to do that either... and businesses won't pay for the support person to research a problem because the combination of a non-working driver/configuration and shitty support from the distro is preventing a business user from having their 'net meeting'. Not every business can afford to have enterprise level support contracts. In fact, I would say most business can't afford that. And if they are asked to pay, say, a US$300.00 per ("enterprise") seat license to a company for a package of software written mostly by others, then why isn't MS also a viable alternative?
The nature of the software is not the only thing to consider when making a purchase. I think support is every bit as important. So I don't think slagging a distro because they won't support the paying end user is a terrible thing. If others do, that's their problem. :-)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I am at a crossroads for disto's now. I am currently using Fedora Core 1, and am not having any problems with it. I have used Mandrake in the past but had too many problems with configurations. Not unsolvable, but annoying to spend time on simple things like that.
I would try out all three I am interested in, but am not willing to pay $90 to try out the professional version which you need to use the SuSe server configuration, and that narrows it to Gentoo and Fedora Core 2, which will be available next week. I think I will try them both out, and which ever one has fewer problems, and is easier to set up as a server will be it. I am tired of trying out all the different disto's, and want to settle down with one for good.
I tried the liveCD, and I looked the look and feel, but it is hard to test server functionality with it. If anyone has tried out a few, and KNOW that SuSe is different enough to be worth it, let me know.
I have actualy moved from redhat to suse since novell purchased them. in the last week i have migrated 20 machines from redhat and windows xp over to suse 9.1 and love it, both my users and clients have had no problems adjusting to it, of course i did have to ditch kde in favaor of ximian gnome,
I think with novell backing suse will be the desktop of choice in the next few years.
GO NOVELL!
Heres a link to a radio show that reviewed Suse 9.1 on the air and had Charlie Ungarshick (Director Of Marketing on as a guest. SuSE Review on the Radio
What video card do you use with that setup?
I'm using Suse 9.0 on the same mobo also with dual Opteron and multiple SATA drives, with nothing but trouble in terms of the graphics card (nVidia FX 5200).