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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?"
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!"
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
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)
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
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'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!
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Someone mod this guy up. I do heavy development under MS Windows XP and Linux. My WinXP box _needs_ to be reformated and reinstalled about every 4-6 months. The registry starts to get hosed, the system starts to slow down and it just gets ugly. I have one WinXP box sitting here with a 1.4GHz P4 and 512MB of RDRAM that runs slower then a PII. When I first installed WinXP on it, it ran fine. Now, at 7 months later, it takes ages for windows to open. I switched to the old Win2k look to try to save some processing of drawing the newer fisher price winXP look. However, none of it helps. Add on top of this a personal firewall and AntiVirus app running, and I want to pull my hair out. The amazing thing is, as soon as I reformat and reinstall WinXP, it will run fine again for a limited time. What in the hell causes it to degrade every few months? My Linux desktops have never degraded like this. They just run and run. I do J2EE dev on my Linux desktops and .Net dev on my WinXP desktops. Oracle JDeveloper 10G starts up just as fast as the day I installed it on my Linux desktop, while MS Visual studio .Net 2003 gets slower and slower each week.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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
What in the hell causes it to degrade every few months?
.NET if your system didn't already have it.
Spyware. Hidden "functionality" and drivers. DLLs installed but not removed (Especially shared ones that you weren't sure if any of your applications were still using). Especially file fragmentation. (That was a big problem for me under WinME and FAT32. I don't know if that is solved with NTFS.)
To some extent, even things you intentionally have on there. Like the latest DirectX. Or installing
These are all things I encountered under WinME and earlier...the machines in the computer lab I work in run XP, are locked down pretty tight, and don't usually exhibit these symptoms. When individual stations are ghosted, there isn't a noticable difference in performance between stations freshly ghosted and the stations next to them that weren't.
Other items I could theorize about would include searching "Temporary Internet Files" for ActiveDesktop components. Memory leaks from cruddy software, especially if you "hibernate" instead of shutting your system down.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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
"A brand new windows box put on the internet will start rebooting every sixty seconds without security precautions. "
But that is complete horsecrap.
When was the last time you TRIED putting a store-fresh Windows box online, especially if it wasn't running XP pro? It will almost certainly get hosed in less than five minutes - I've watched it happen.
-Ed
P.S. There's a down side when it doesn't happen, too: I do know a couple folks who put new machines online - usually on dialup - with no firewall, anti-virus or patching and survived day one. They therefore assume patching and anti-virus are all hype, and NEVER patch anything. Result: another zombie in the next round of worms.
P.P.S. I hate Windows, but I also know that Linux has a long way to come before your typical user can really be comfortable with it. As you said, Linux is designed to be secure, not easy. That said, never take your Windows box online without a firewall.
P.P.P.S. Spell check, dude.
Web Design & Software Development
I will say one thing that I didn't like about it though....The default kde desktop has these huge icons and huge kicker....if I remember correctly, suse 9.0 looked much sleeker. I changed it to smaller icons of course 32 pixels instead of 48.
I think that's a byproduct of Novell buying them out...a gnomeish look. I hope that isn't the case and they realize we want our desktops to be unobtrusive and productive...not looking like toys.
Gnome looks like crap. Don't make KDE look like gnome.