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?"

Comments

Suse x64 and 3ware RAID

[Space cowboy]

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 :-) but certainly it doesn't work on the 64-bit 9.0 version. I'm hopeful the shift from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 will have an effect...

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

Re:Suse x64 and 3ware RAID

[ncookperson]

I actually have 4 of the Escalade 850x cards in one system, and they have been incredible stable. You will have trouble (at least I did) and have the system hang if the firmware, driver, and 3DM version don't match up so make sure they all are running at the same level. Nick

I just went from 9.0 to 9.1

[IANAAC]

and I love it so far. I'm using (or rather, plan on using) it for MIDI and audio. I tried for a bit on 9.0 and while I got everything I wanted to work properly, the new kernel is miles ahead as far as audio goes. Everything just works. Some apps I use jack, others I use alsa. But what I've got going now is: Rosegarden, Ardour, Specimen, Fluidsynth/QSynth and Audacity. They're all great programs.

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.

It's been a while, but for comparison ...

[william_lorenz]

It's been a while since I tried SuSE; I use Fedora Core 1 right now and soon to follow with Fedora Core 2. Despite the hype, I still believe in Red Hat. ;) Some of the things I love the most about my Fedora system include:

• 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.

Re:It's been a while, but for comparison ...

[JabberWokky]

How does SuSE compare on some of these points?

Beautiful boot screen and polished feel.

SUSE has a nice soothing look, rounded curves, synced Qt, GTK and framebuffer looks. Theres a simple progressbar with a "Press F2 for details", and even the detail view of boot is on a subtle pattered background and rounded corner view. Very nice.

Easy installation from freely available CD-ROM images.

SUSE has a downloadable Live CD (like Knoppix) or a FTP install disk. In the case of the latter, you download packages on demand rather than downloading all the packages. Considering the professional version weighs in at 8 CDs and 4 DVDs, there's a damn good reason (actually, 2 double sided DVDs, one side is 64bit, the other is 32bit).

The professional edition comes with quite a bit of commercial software. A DVD video editor, SQL Anywhere Studio, etc. That version is not downloadable, of course. That's pretty much the difference between personal and pro.

Automatic hardware detection via kudzu, at install time and when adding new devices.

SUSE uses yast, which does the same thing. I recently swapped a hard drive from a dead laptop into a completely different brand, and upon bootup, it found everything from the correct video and sound settings to the modem and network.

One nice thing is that yast embeds in the KDE Control Center and has a standalone X and curses version... all with the exact same menu and interface layout. If KDE+X or just X is available, it uses it, if not, it runs just fine. Handy when you're using the same tool to poke around your desktop in the Control Center and then later to work on a server.

Updates released regularly with the Fedora Legacy Project [fedoralegacy.org] providing updates for older distributions.

I'm not sure how EOL works. I was running 8.2 (still am, on the non-dev servers), and online_update works just fine.

Many pre-built RPM packages are available on-line from projects such as Samba and otherwise.

SUSE uses rpm.

Many great console & X11-based applications included by default.

Ditto. I've been using the professional version since I moved from Red Hat (server) and Mandrake (desktop), and I've set everything up for a workgroup, web and mail servers, my system and a fileserver right from the packages available on the disks. With two exceptions. lame and MPlayer are missing and not complete (respectively). You get a warning when running the latter, telling you about that, and when you run anything that wants lame, they've patched it so it tells you about Qgg and explains that, due to patent reasons, they can't include lame. And they give you the URL for "more information"... which is where you can download it. I used Packman for rpms for both. All codecs for MPlayer and a nice working lame. I note that the SUSE notices silently disappear after lame is installed. Slick, and a nice solution for a frustrating situation.

Files and configurations are in logical places.

SUSE was the first LSB certified distro. I've been using *nix for a little over two decades now. It feels perfectly fine. YMMV, but I'd imagine that RH is LSB by now.

--
Evan

Re:I seriously didnt like Suse

[Space cowboy]

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

It's good....

[jeffmock]

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

Glorious

[JabberWokky]

I don't have time to play around with settings or trying to get stuff working. I got 9.1 Pro at Frys during lunch. That evening, I popped out my hard drive with SuSE 8.2, left in my data drive (backed up), and put in a new drive for the install, mounting my data drive as /home. A little while later, I went to sleep, and woke up the next morning at 6am and started my work day.

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

Good; Some Pkgs Not Recog'd Initially in YaST

[grahamkg]

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:

rpm -qilp *rpm > suse_9.1

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:

rpm -ivh <your_favorite_program.rpm>

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!

suse 9.1 iso downloads here (read: informative)

[Anonymous Coward]

for evaluation before you buy the distro try here:

ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-cd-dvd-wi th-md5sum-informations.txt|3559|20BE144F200097BD77 7AAAD92C5BE617|/

ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386- 32bit-dvd1of2-sideA.cue|359|3A8A6E3DD165038EE0191D 436BE5E896|/
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-am d64bit-dvd1of2-sideB.cue|360|CAF5AD507EA7144FC6C47 75E708F65BA|/

ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-am d64bit-dvd1of2-sideB.iso|3577905152|806CC1FE4B8872 EDACD34ADAB001B494|/
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386- 32bit-dvd1of2-sideA.iso|4126703616|BF623B58FD6425F 37D19DDBCD079C1BB|/

and more..

watch out for the spaces in the urls that get added by slashdot

Since 6.1

[MeBadMagic]

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!

It's very very good

[spiritraveller]

I'm a debian fan myself, but this past weekend I installed SUSE 9.1 on my dad's computer.

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 .wax. So, I had to install mplayer and mplayerplug-in separately.

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.

Unable to install due to XFS bug

[gasp]

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.