SUSE 9.1 Personal ISO Available For Free Download

twener writes "DistroWatch.com was the first to report that a complete, bootable, and installable ISO image of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal has appeared on SUSE's ftp server and its mirrors. No public announcement on SUSE's website is available yet. This is the first time ever that SUSE makes an ISO for i386 of one of its product flavors available. Don't forget that after installation you can install the packages of the SUSE 9.1 FTP version with GPL'ed YaST to gain an almost (commercial parts missing) SUSE 9.1 Professional installation."

Comments

Heh...

[Xpilot]

I saw it just now and wondered what it was. It's only 1 CD though... is it the same as the boxed set of the SuSE Personal Edition, or did they leave stuff out?

Or...

[Punboy]

About a year and a half ago I wrote a script to parse the file list on the SuSE FTP server, find which files go on which CDs, download them, and create ISOs, then using the boot section off of their network install CD make the first one bootable. Full SuSE professional (commercial parts missing) for free! All on CDs!

Just A Question...

[Steinfiend]

I've always wondered what the advantage of paying for SUSE is? I mean from the user stand point, I understand the desire to support the "community", but when I can get all the same software from other distros for the cost of download time and a couple of blank CDs.

Mandrake is easy to install and configure, Fedora is extremely powerful, Gentoo is geeky beyond belief and Debian is solid as a rock. It seems that all niches have been filled already.

Re:Just A Question...

[Jadrano]

I've always wondered what the advantage of paying for SUSE is? I mean from the user stand point, I understand the desire to support the "community", but when I can get all the same software from other distros for the cost of download time and a couple of blank CDs.

If you downloaded everything that is on a SuSE Professional DVD, that would certainly be quite a lengthy download. For many people, that's probably already enough for preferring to buy it. Then, you get printed books that are quite good.

Mandrake is easy to install and configure, Fedora is extremely powerful, Gentoo is geeky beyond belief and Debian is solid as a rock. It seems that all niches have been filled already.

Yes, I don't think SuSE tries to occupy one of these niches, according to these criteria, it in between as to most criteria you mentioned. But I think a distribution does not really have to fit into a niche. There are big geographical differences. As far as I know, SuSE is the most widespread Linux distribution in Germany (where it's based) and some other European countries. Then, people choose a different distribution if there is a particular reason, but if they just want a kind of "general-purpose" Linux, SuSE is probably the first choice. I suppose that they want to be one of the "mainstream" distributions rather than filling a particular niche.

One area where SuSE Professional really stands out is, in my view, the amount of software that is included. I find that a great advantage - when I read about a program I want to install, chances are good that it's already on the SuSE DVD, and then I don't have to download it and YaST takes care of all the dependencies etc.. It's much easier and quicker to install a working application and everything it needs with a few clicks in YaST than having to care about everything yourself. I find that very important. I haven't compared all recent distributions, but when I occasionally had to do with other distributions, I had the impression that they include much less software than SuSE Professional.

Suse versus Mandrake?

[bcrowell]

Mandrake and Suse both seem to be aimed at relatively unsophisticated desktop users, and both seem to have done a lot of work to make good installers. Good for them!

I recently bought the Suse personal 9.1 box, and although it was impressive how easy it was to get a working KDE desktop system, I really felt hemmed in afterward. The Suse repository only has a very limited set of applications. When I asked around about how you install other apps, people told me either "Oh, generic RPMs usually work," or "Here are a couple of sites where people will point you to individuals' web pages where they host RPMs." I guess I've just been spoiled by FreeBSD's ports system, which has thousands of apps, including virtually every app I ever need to run. I'm really not that excited about downloading binary RPMs from people I don't know -- that's a little too much like unsafe sex. If generic RPMs usually work, that's cool, but then what's the advantage of Suse?

My impression is that Mandrake has a much bigger set of apps available -- is this correct? Even if you have to join Mandrake Club to get them from Mandrake, at least joining the club is an option, and if you don't join, you're just in the same situation as with Suse: werbsurf for someone's personal site where they've packaged the app.

Please don't take this as a troll or a "my distro is better than yours" post -- I'm really curious to know what people think about Mandrake versus Suse. Although I'm now using FreeBSD myself, I'm curious what would be a good distro to recommend to a newbie, and AFAICT Suse isn't it.

Miles between Personal and Pro

[miyako]

I'm a Suse user, I'm typing this on my Suse 9.1 box right now. I love Suse, but I have to say that from what I've seen, the personal releases are crap.
I remember not too long ago, a friend of mine was wanting to try out a new Linux distrobution. He'd used Mandrake a bit, but still hadn't learned a lot about linux. I suggested that he go buy a copy of Suse 9.1 because the manuals are really nice, and the ftp version wasn't available yet.
He took my advice, but got the personal version to save money (who can blame him). I didn't think there would be too much difference, I've only used pro, but from reading comments here on /. it seemed like only the proprietary software and some advanced server stuff would be missing.
Nope
Suse 9.1 personal is more like a Windows install than a Linux install. It comes with practically nothing you would assume would be in a linux installation. No server software at all, no development tools, it was a very anorexic distrobution in my opinion.
It seems to me it would be much nicer if Suse would have released ISOs of what can be had from the ftp version so people could torrent it.