Suse 9.1 Reviews?

Suse x64 and 3ware RAID by Space+cowboy · 2004-05-14 09:43 · Score: 5, Informative

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

--
Physicists get Hadrons!

Re:Suse x64 and 3ware RAID by ncookperson · 2004-05-14 10:10 · Score: 5, Informative

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
Re:Suse x64 and 3ware RAID by WhiteWolf666 · 2004-05-14 12:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

Nonsense.

You are talking out of your ass.

Drumroll....Point by Point:
We can all agree that windows always does work better. I use only linux (aside from at school) so don't start flaming me, but as far as I can tell. Windows actually is much more easy to use,install, customize, and all around run.
You haven't said anything yet
Don't talk to me about the millions, exageration, of patches you have to download in order to make it remotely stable. Last time I installed RedHat 9 it told me to download 90+ patches within "up2date", which is not very different.
You best be patching Windows. It takes less than 5 minutes for your box to be compromised. A brand new windows box put on the internet will start rebooting every sixty seconds without security precautions. This won't happen to you in linux. Additionally, the box is plenty stable, without a single patch. The only except to this that I can remember is the recent Mandrake debacle that screwed up some CDrom drives. The patches are generally security updates, or new features, or driver updates, from people like Nvidia.
And tell me, honestly, with all truth. When just starting out, as a newbie Linuxer, what one was it easiest to install java on? Windows or Linux? (and get it working in Mozilla).
Substantially easier in SuSE Linux. Why? Because it comes pre-installed. In Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany, etc. . .
I hate it when people talk about how Linuz is SO MUCH FUCKING SUPERIOR to Windows. No, for a regular ,commercial, customer, it's a fucking nightmare. But if you have the patience, and certain built up anger/loathing for Microsoft, then Linux is beautiful.
Nonsense. My pre-setup SuSE boxes are substantially easier for my parents and sisters to use than the Windows crap laying around here.

They are amazed that my boxes rarely (hardware problems sometimes, like defective ram) crash, never require anti-virus vigilance, and have SO MUCH fucking software built in.

Linux boxes, when properly configured, come far close to computing 'appliances' than Windows boxes. Their behavior is far, far more regular.
Windows boxes, on the other hand (although things have substantially improved since the Win95 days) are far more erratic.

Windows XP still tends to get stale. Things slow down over time. Stuff gets corrupt.

God help you if you get a nefarious virus.

Especially if you don't have access to a broadband connection.

Just my two cents, or in conversion to CAN. that would be about 3.14 cents.

Another Troll Bites the Dust

--
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell

Suse 9.1 is like ... by burgburgburg · 2004-05-14 09:43 · Score: 5, Funny

like ...This is like... Nothing...Nothing compares to Suse 9.1.

Darl, just step away from my computer. I can write the review on my own, thank you.

Go back to the basement.

More polished? by vxvxvxvx · 2004-05-14 09:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:More polished? by paranerd · 2004-05-14 10:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

...notice huge speed increases when they try gentoo for the first time.. Yet, it didn't seem any faster to me.
How far away from a Pentium I is your machine? The more modern the hardware the more boost gentoo and it's ilk provide.
Re:More polished? by discogravy · 2004-05-14 11:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

I just wonder if people who use gentoo know how to generally configure their system better?

If they do -- and I would guess that it's possible, though not in some "they're WIZARDS!!!1!one!" kind of way -- then it's not because of anything other than that they kind of HAVE to: if every single piece of software is going to be compiled and optimized for your hardware, you're de facto going to have a better understanding of your system's hardware and it's relative configuration (as opposed to being a hardware wizard or general *nix guru) than someone who just slapped Debian Sarge or Knoppix or SuSE in there and let it autodetect everything on the install.
Slackware and Debian used to (and Debian Woody still does...and will for the forseeable future, unfortunately,) have a reputation for being a bitch to install primarily because you need to know your hardware specs pretty well in order to install stuff correctly and to get everything working right.

--
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Re:More polished? by utopyr · 2004-05-14 13:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

Well, I don't know--haven't measured speeds & figured out percentages, so I can't say if my ~400 MHz PII box runs faster or slower on Gentoo than it did under Win 98, then Mandrake, then Red Hat, then Debian, then SuSE, but I can measure two things:
1. I've run it longer on Gentoo, and more frequently (no more dual boot) than I did on any previous Linux distribution, probably because:
2. I've learned more about Linux than I did on any of the previous distributions.

So, maybe it isn't faster, but I am, and steadier. That's the advantage I've found--I'm better able to figure out why things don't work--& everywhere, always, something doesn't work in this world (former mechanic).

Makes me happy.
Re:More polished? by AstroDrabb · 2004-05-14 14:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

Who modded this weenie stuff insightful? This is the typical chant of _every_ Gentoo user. "My system is X% faster", yet _none_ of them release any concrete benchmarks. I have been using Linux for many, many years. I built my own Linux system from the ground up based on LFS, I built tons of Gentoo systems and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux extensively. I am also a programmer and do tons of compiling and profiling. Gentoo give little real world performance gains at the price of stability. What is the point in running the very first release of KDE? You do know that there are tons of bugs in those first release correct?
Red Hat and all the other big three distros basically compile their code with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686. Which optimizes for i686 without breaking any non-i686 CPUs. I have seen tons of Gentoo guys screaming about options such as -O3 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer. -O3 can actually cause _slower_ code from over optimizing. It creates much larger executable then -O2. I have done the work from building my own Linux distros to see what is the overall best Linux system. Gentoo does not guarantee anything.
It is actually funny to hear all these Gentoo zealots talking about how their systems are sooo, uber fast now because they sat through a few hours of compilations. Yet they forget that a company like Red Hat has about 5 or 6 of the _top_ kernel developers working for them such as Alan Cox, while Gentoo has zero. I personally will place my trust in these top kernel developers to deliver the best overall Linux system to me then the Gentoo crowd and all their unsubstantiated claims that I have personally tried to verify and found no such evidence.
Let the flamebait mods begin!

--
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison

got a copy when by funwithBSD · 2004-05-14 09:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

I just went from 9.0 to 9.1 by IANAAC · 2004-05-14 09:46 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:Suse: by Welsh+Dwarf · 2004-05-14 09:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

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)

It's been a while, but for comparison ... by william_lorenz · 2004-05-14 09:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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 ... by JabberWokky · 2004-05-14 11:19 · Score: 5, Informative

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

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien

Re:I seriously didnt like Suse by Space+cowboy · 2004-05-14 09:52 · Score: 4, Informative

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!

Re:I seriously didnt like Suse by JabberWokky · 2004-05-14 09:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

since they don't supply you with the source of the kernel your running.

yast -i kernel-source

Not that difficult. It appears to be set up and patched for either 32 or 64 bit depending on what you've installed. You can also install kernel-smp for the a more "standard" kernel, or a couple of specialized/heavily modified kernels (for firewall usage, etc).

--
Evan

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien

It's good.... by jeffmock · 2004-05-14 09:53 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by JabberWokky · 2004-05-14 09:57 · Score: 4, Informative

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

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien

Good; Some Pkgs Not Recog'd Initially in YaST by grahamkg · 2004-05-14 09:57 · Score: 4, Informative

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!

--
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief

suse 9.1 iso downloads here (read: informative) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-14 09:58 · Score: 5, Informative

Since 6.1 by MeBadMagic · 2004-05-14 09:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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!"

It just rocks so damn hard! by riggwelter · 2004-05-14 10:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

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...

Re:Suse: by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · 2004-05-14 10:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

if your too lazy to buy the distro, just do a ftp install...

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.

sweet so far by dnamaners · 2004-05-14 10:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Contempt by Bodhidharma · 2004-05-14 10:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm considering SuSE for my next distro. I switched to RHEL recently because I wanted a stable, supported machine that I didn't have to think too hard about keeping up to date. Today I had to mess around because makedev from up2date conflicts with something I had to add because RedHat doesn't include multimedia support. If that wasn't frustrating enough, I upgraded to their most recent XFree86 rpms. A ctrl-shift-alt-backspace locked up my machine. It's still down because I'm tired of dealing with it for today.

I wouldn't use linux at all if java were easier to set up on FreeBSD. I don't even like java but I need it for enough things that it's worth having.

I must be a closet masochist because I keep going back to RedHat. I've messed around with SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo and Slackware but I always felt there were compelling reasons to stick with RH. Those reasons are slowly evaporating. I really hope SuSE stays good under Novell's ownership.

--
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

Re:Contempt by jdray · 2004-05-14 11:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

I almost agree with you. It's that little "apart from license and money reasons" thing that gets me. Of course, apart from money reasons, I'd be using a PowerBook 17".

Really, I can almost like XP, so long as I can switch the interface back to "Classic Mode" it's fairly usable. But if I don't like the way MS' designers decided that people should use computers, I'm out of luck for changing it. With Linux, I can do a lot at the command line, where I'm comfortable (if not talented), and when running KDE (which is most of the time), I can configure it to do a lot of stuff that I can't do (or it costs money to add the software for) on Windows.

And, as far as the "just works" part, so do a lot of Linux distros. Pick any one of the major distros and you've got a fully-confgured, ready to run system about twenty minutes after starting your installation. The basic software is good (Open Office, Mozilla, Evolution, etc.), and a user that just wants to get by with whatever they're handed is not left wanting for much. And, mind you, I don't say that derisively. With any modern OS (okay, the major three: Windows, MacOS, Linux), the basic distro includes enough software for most users. On Windows you should really add MS Works and on MacOS add AppleWorks and the iLife packages, but without ranging too far or spending an exhorbitant amount of money, lots of functionality is at hand.

But for me, supporting freedom in an OS is important. Microsoft would go a long way toward dowsing the fire of contempt that's burning at their door if they released their core OS (without any add-ons like Paint or Wordpad or any of the myriad extras they put into their distro) as Open Source and sold what are now XP Home, Pro and Server as commercialized add-on packages with support options.

But that's just me. I'm really looking forward to what Novell is going to do once they've integrated SUSE, Ximian and their previous software (NetWare, NDS, GroupWise, etc) into one software line.

--
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011

Re:Contempt by Daemonik · 2004-05-14 12:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

Well, apart from license and money reasons, are there any grounds for using Linux on desktops?

1) Some people like configuring and building things from scratch, Linux gives them that power.

2) No artificially forced hardware upgrades. Linux can still run on a 486 with 32MB of Ram and make it usefull again, will XP?

3) Linux is being constantly improved on a daily basis. The next version of Windows won't be out till 2006. Maybe.

4) Linux doesn't monitor your internet activity and report back to it's creators without your knowledge as a standard practice.

5) Linux is being developed by people who love computers and programming, always eager to find new solutions to your problems. Windows is being developed by people who love your money and want to find new ways to seperate you from it.

6) Linux is packaged and sold by dozens of companies willing to cater to any market and customize their software as necessary. Windows is sold by one corporation unwilling to change except for its largest customers. Your needs are immaterial to them.

7) When you develop software for Linux the market is open to competition. When you develop software for Windows you're constantly looking over your shoulder for Microsoft to decide your enough of a threat that they need to crush you.

8) Linux gives the user unlimited options to configure their system as they wish. Microsoft grudgingly gives limited ability to customize it's software and ties many of it tools to each other in convoluted knots meant to keep the user from straying to other vendors.

9) Linux adheres to open, published standards whenever possible ensuring that your data is easily transportable to other programs or operating systems. Microsoft 'improves' published standards with proprietary unpublished changes that lock you into their software and make moving to other vendors or OSes a logistics nightmare.

10) Linux doesn't make bold advertising campaigns about the new features that will be in it's next release, force VARs and developers to start training and preparing for those new features so that they can be ready to market and then slowly whittle down or outright dump those features because they have become unfeasable/obsolete/unprofitable as the release date gets pushed farther and farther back.

It's very very good by spiritraveller · 2004-05-14 15:40 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by gasp · 2004-05-14 17:42 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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