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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?"
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.
- 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.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'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!"
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 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
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.