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SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available
twener writes "The SUSE 9.1 FTP version is now available on SUSE's ftp mirrors for free installation via FTP/HTTP (installation instruction). It's almost identical to SUSE 9.1 Professional except some few packages which are missing due to licence reasons. Also don't miss "SUSE 9.1: The Complete Review" recently published by DesktopOS.com."
why is it unusable? There is a boot.iso, burn it, boot it, install from ftp. If you want to have everything on you local disc, mirror the whole tree and install then.
...
btw: YaST2 is GPL now
Novell GPL-ed Yast2, so SuSE is free now. The packages that are missing from the FTP install are things like a database package and some other app. Nothing you cannot do without.
Ok then is there any concensus about which distro is the best? I realize that there are a lot of variables here but I would think that stability, support and documentation would be three big factors.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
so is it Suse, silent 'e'? Or SusEE or SusAY? or what??
I did that on SuSE 9.0, downloaded the entire tree and mirrored it on one machine. It worked great! It's still not the same as downloading the .iso files, burn them and boot up. The entire tree was somewhere close to 9 gb, while the iso files are often only 3 cd's.
It does work rather well though, so if you have a fast connection and don't mind waiting a bit for it, downloading the tree is an excellent way of getting SuSE.
Even before Yast2 got GPLed, they supplied the binaries with the FTP version. You can, and always have been able to, install the FTP version fine. In fact, I've been doing so with every version since SuSE 8.1. (I bought some earlier versions)
The only difference to the commercial version is that the FTP version doesn't include proprietary software that they can't redistribute via FTP for free for licensing reasons. They do have licenses for some proprietary software, such as Acrobat Reader, Opera, etc.
Know the facts before you criticise/troll.
That would explain why last week i downloaded their FTP install boot disk and was unable to get it to work.
In the meantime I've installed Slackware instead...and much more atisfied with that then I was with SuSE 8.2.
My experience so far has been that RPM-based distros like SuSE and Red Hat that attempt to simplify dependency problems with propreitary upgrade tools inevitably just end up causing me much more frustration. SuSE had NO provision for getting software other than what was in the version I'd installed(8.2) and wouldn't even install apt4rpm due to dependency hell. I've found installing and upgrading new software in Slackware a 1000x simpler than any RPM.
I will attest to Yast being a nice tool, that was easy to use, and did a pretty good job of detecting my hardware. But the complications in upgrading individual packages in a registered copy of their distro proved too frustrating to justify sticking with it.
I would only reccomend SuSE to a newbie who has no desire for messing around with things once its installed, and just wants it to work reasonably well from the beginning.
once you go slack, you never go back
You're new around here, right?
If I had any mod points, I'd mod you funny. The flame wars between the zealots of each distro are so hot we should be using them for power. I think it may be a little while before we reach a consensus (i.e. long term on a scale where the heat death of the universe is just around the corner).
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Here is a Google mirror cache
They do, especially with the Professional Edition.
Personal Edition is a bit dumbed-down (not even kernel source packages, useless if you need proprietary video drivers!) but still has some books, which are more entry-level aimed. Pair Personal Edition with the FTP version though and you're all set.
I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to purchase the full media. For ~$90, The documentation alone is worth that. It's a bargain in itself, plus the satisfaction of supporting the community.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
This raises an interesting question. Can unofficial ISOs now be distributed since YaST is no longer encumbered? I remember that vendors like Cheapbytes and other CD burning houses were not able to sell SuSE as an unoffical CD since ironically enough the license on YaST forbid anyone but SuSE for charging for the software. Now with this restriction gone couldn't vendors just master there own unoffical CD's from the FTP packages. I believe that Cheapbytes has already done this with OpenBSD since they can't use his copyrighted ISO layout.
Tip! Get the IP address of the ftp server before attempting the install! DNS isn't picked up on the SuSE boot/install CD.
Omnis amans amens
An excellent public rsync mirror:p ub/suse/i 386/9.1/
rsync://rsync.mirror.ac.uk/ftp.suse.com/
Hey, I appreciated hearing that someone was considering doing this
So it was a positive thing that the parent mentioned it, but I have to wonder just how someone could bother 'querying someones intentions to do something', and then bothering to mention that here
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution. Furthermore, I use the packaged version, not the FTP version.
/home on its own partition, so a fresh reinstall are a piece of cake without touching my actual data.
/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.
I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, which also turned out the be correct. As a good user, I have
The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way, and worked as it should at once. With one exception.
That xception 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
... you Anonymous Logic-Impaired moron.
... and no, MSDN & Office "updates" don't count ...
... That is no bloat.
All those other CD's are extra CD's containing tons of free software that you can use on your newly installed Linux system.
When was the last time you got 9gigs worth of free software with your operating system? No, don't answer that, I don't want to know
I've got a Linux setup that is only 1.4 megs worth of Linux, kernel, apps and libs. Everything beyond that is add-ons
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I work for the Fulton school of engineering at Arizona State University. There are several hundred Linux systems here, and I support almost all of them in one way or another. I've had people try to tell me that we should be using Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Sometimes this advice is based upon some genuine technical reason but all too often it is based upon ideology, especially where Debian is concerned. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to use a distro just because it follows the FSF/GNU flavor of political correctness. The day the unix world chooses ideology over technology is the day we are doomed.
The distributions we encourage our customers to use are Redhat/Fedora because this distro family is easy to support. Those other distros may or may not have real (technical) advantages over Redhat, but none of them scale as well as Redhat does. SuSE may scale equally well but due to Redhat's popularity we simply haven't had much call to try and work on SuSE systems. If Fedora proves to be unstable we may switch to SuSE, especially if it becomes more popular than Fedora.
The reason why we push Redhat/Fedora and not some other distro is because we don't want to have to install packages by hand or compile stuff from source all the time. Hand installs and compiles are great when you've got one system to support, but that just doesn't work when you're trying to support several hundred systems.
We have to look at what is the best solution for ALL of the systems at the same time, not just what solution would work best for one particular system.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
SOO-suh
As pictured here and detailed here.Using apt4rpm I just completed a dist-upgrade. I have had a few major problems:
My overall impression of the distro so far is that it's suse 9.0, but slightly better.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I switched to SuSE 9.0 when RedHat anounced the end of their desktop products as we'd all come to know them, and it instantly became my favorite distribution. YaST is awesome and performance was good.
So I was excited to try 9.1. I borrowed the full 9.1 Pro CD set from someone at work to try. I installed it on a couple of Pentium 4 machines with Nvidia cards. While installtion was flawless on both, the performance was terrible. X takes forever to start, KDE takes a long time to initialize, and forget starting YaST - I can go for coffe while it loads. Even installing and running Unreal Tournament 2004 was painful because of some changes SuSE made to the way they mount removable media. Starting UT2004 is slow too. Since I dual boot, slow startup times are an issue.
Before anyone says the obvious, yes - DMA is enabled and one of the systems is using fast U160 SCSI drives so there's just no excuse for the poor performance.
Since Mandrake 10.0 is available for download, I tried installing it. I was hesitant, but it installed flawlessly on my system with the SCSI drives. I'm spoiled and used to the bazillion applications that SuSE installs, but no biggie.
Mandrake 10 performance is what I expect from a P4 system : fast, responsive, snappy.
No offense to the SuSE team intended, but they need to get their act together a little better. There's just no excuse for the poor performance of SuSE in my opinion - and yes, I have just as many services running in Mandrake as SuSE.
I'll keep using Mandrake for now and try SuSE again when 9.2 comes out.
I'm sure glad I didn't pay for 9.1, I would have been really p*ssed.
"Use your favorite peer-to-peer network, don't hesitate - it's legal!"
See, it's not.
The CD layout is SuSE's, and they don't want you copying it. This is why they have the FTP install instead. If you were to create ISO's on your own, based on the FTP download, then go ahead and distribute away.
ISO images are not a GNU-given right.
I think I need a new sig here.
Ah, and on this 1 CD, you get the operating system, several complete office suites, several browsers, mail readers, news readers, a web server, a mail server, a news server, a database, compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Java, Ada, Pascal, Common Lisp, and the complete set of development tools for that (debugger, profiler, IDE, ...), a raytracer (Povray), several graphics programs (including Gimp), several players for sound and video, sound editing software, video editing software, a complete TeX/LaTeX-system, and in addition the sourcecode for all of that. And certainly lots of things I didn't mention.
Now you may say that you don't need all of that. True, but then you don't need to download all of those 9GB.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I've been using various Linux distros since 1995 and I've never encountered such a buggy release!
Most of it could be blamed on KDE 3.2.1 but that IS the most common Suse window manager. Between not being able to log out without locking up the X-Server (and no, cntl+alt BS doesn't recover a console so you have to reset or log in remotely) and the DHCP client refusing to allow KDE to load I think I've effectively demonstrated why we wouldn't want to use Linux at my company. I've been trying to get management to give it a try for years and now, this one experience, will effectively negate my efforts.
I know that not using KDE or installing a later, less buggy, release is simple. But the suites don't and the fact that an install that should take 1/2 day took 3 days is all they see. What the hell happened at Suse? I've never had this kind of trouble with an install.
I have an onboard intel 810 AC97 sound card. Installed SuSE 9.1 via ISO. I started with a basic install, and everything worked fine with sound. Then I went to install the rest of the packages on the 5 CD's. After this... Sound was gone. The funny thing is that the sound card is still detected and it's module is loaded. Also, the mixer works, because I can turn up the microphone and get feedback. But NO SOUND other than that.
I spent hours trying to probe sound modules, reconfigure ALSA, reload my sound card drivers, etc. to no avail.
Like a confused windows user, my last resort was to re-install the opperating system. I did so, and it worked fine, until I installed the rest of the available packages. Then: Silence.
I'm about to shit-can SuSE because of this. It's unfortunate that this OS isn't ready for your average Joe Blow computer user because of critical problems like these.
-Henry
To blog is sublime
I have SuSE 9.1. Yes, many packages are out there on the distro disks that I use but I have upgraded many just by using YaST to remove the SuSE package and then installed the updated package. No big deal. It is just as easy as doing an uninstall/install package in Whinedo$e. The process is just as easy as you want to make it. I can think of worse things that this...fixing a messed-up registry.
The sound failure is due to the kdemultimedia mixer app. So when you install "all KDE" you break the sound.
Suse have posted a fix on their support page ( search under sound). I'd say its a bit of a poor show, but otherwise it seems OK.
Its poor form that they havent fixed this yet in the updates!
Setanta
"I see lots of Pengins, is that good?" "Thats good Dad, click yes."
The upgrade version is the EXACT same software. The only difference is the upgrade version does not come with a new set of manuals.
I can't imagine why this was a problem even before the YaST "restriction." Why couldn't Cheapbytes or anybody else create a YaST-compatible package CDs/DVD of free software that would work with the downloadable SUSE install ISO? SUSE's install CD itself is only about 20MB which even dial-up users could download and burn, and then have a few GB extra software for use by YaST.
I don't think it would have been that hard to do. Am I missing something?
You can change your wireless settings through YaST. Network Devices -> Network Cards
Earth is a single point of failure.
It seems 9.1 needs to go back in the oven for a few more minutes. It's basically 9.0 with problems. This is revealed upon further inspecting the 9.1 box and finding the product slogan : "It may be buggy as Hell, but DAMN if we don't support the 2% of the Linux user-base who use AMD64_x86"
As always, YMMV.
"You and your third dimension."
A more logical reason behind their continuing with the FTP method over the ISO method might be bandwidth. If you have looked at what bandwidth costs, and when you think that most Linux users will never use all of the programs included in a Linux distribution, and most won't use even half, it makes sense to go the FTP rout. The software may be free, but the bandwidth to distribute that software is not even close to free, not to mention the time that companies like Novell/SuSE, Mandrake and yes even Redhat take to compile all those programs into a distrobution than from a business stand point distributing Linux in an FTP installation format make great business sense. Now I agree that not having the CD's is a real pain-in-the-butt, I go to my CD's/DVD almost daily, but if that is your only gripe with SuSE that why not take the time you spent typing out a complaint on /. and write Novell/SuSE a formal letter explaining to them the reasons why putting ISO's up for download would be a better option to the FTP method they have opted to use, if not than go back to your Fedora core and stop waisting your time and /.'s resources complaining about something that has no affect on you.
"Napalm is nature's toothpaste" - Chef Brian
I just installed it, and it is the buggiest Linux release I have used in a long, long time. I love the features, like automatic spell-checking as I type this in Konqueror, cool eye-candy stuff in KDE, Linux 2.6.4, etc, etc, but it is truly full of bugs. YaST doesn't start up the user admin module. I created a user using adduser, and that user can't log in because of some IPC bug. During installation, I installed it in just the plain old way and it gave error messages. This is truly beta-test software; it should never have made it through the release processes. I would have rather waited a couple more months for something that isn't full of bugs. I think I'm going to have to re-install it now just to figure out how to get basic stuff like adding users to work. It's a mess.