SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional Released

InnerPhalanx writes "Today, SuSE 9.2 Professional Edition has been released. SuSE writes: 'It combines a fast, secure operating system and more than 1,000 popular open source applications. It is the first complete Linux package to harness both the improved Linux kernel 2.6 and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments. Ideal for Linux enthusiasts and developers, SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 improves support for mobile users and delivers a host of essential tools.' More information at the SuSE website. The price is $89.95. The update version is $59.95. A live DVD image is also available on the SuSE website, for use by DVD. Have fun, SuSE Pro users!" Reader tannhaus submits an early review.

Comments

How about a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

So when will Dell ship a SUSE laptop with compatablity right out of the box?

Re:How about a laptop

[purplebear]

Probably never. Seems manufacturers are eager to support Linux on the server, but it appears the desktop is still out of scope for them.

Re:How about a laptop

[atta1]

When enough people express an interest in buying one that it will be worth the trouble to change their factory process and build an image to put on it. In other words, not anytime soon.

Re:How about a laptop

[tty21]

I've loaded the Suse release 8.1 pro on Dell laptops - no issues other than the panel display wasn't detected the xfconfig for the neomagic - lots of web support for it. If you're wondering about the Dell website not listing Linux, call them direct and if the sales drone can't help, have them escalate. I find you can usually get what you want by whining and snivelling.

Re:How about a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several vendors like http://www.emperorlinux.com/ that will supply you with a fully set up linux laptop.

Re:How about a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Linux is undoubtably the best application for the server, whereas it isn't necessarily the best for the desktop (irregardless of what fanboys like to say)

Re:How about a laptop

[LDoggg_]

(irregardless of what fanboys like to say)

So then you have some regard to what fanboys like to say?

Re:How about a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

How can we express interest in something that doesn't exist?

Take a look at the recent articles and editorials in Linux Journal!

I've been waiting for over 5 years to buy a laptop that I *know* will be supported by Linux (in particular, SuSE, which I run on my desktop system).

Re:How about a laptop

[sloanster]

Dunno about Dell, but HP will ship an NX5000 laptop with suse preinstalled right now.

Re:How about a laptop

[marmoset]

I use SuSe 9.1 (downloaded) on an Inspiron 5160 here at work. Everything worked except the integrated Broadcom wireless (802.11g). I had to perform an unnatural act to get it working.

Re:How about a laptop

[pesky25]

Just do it. Do about 1 hour of research on the web and find a laptop you like that has had a dist. you like installed on it, look at the HOWTO. Safe bet is any thinkpad. go to http://www.linuxlaptops.org/ for more info. and more choices.

All the manufactures support is lame anyway, why relay on them for help/info. Your on your own no matter what operating system you use, supported or not.

Re:How about a laptop

[IANAAC]

Don't know about manufacturers shipping laptops with Linux preloaded, but SUSE, since 9.0 at least, has loaded very nicely on four different laptops I've thrown at it (currently running 9.1 on all but one).

As a matter of fact, I've had much better luck installing/upgrading SUSE than I've had upgrading XP Home to XP Pro.

While nobody was looking (or they were focusing on RedHat/Fedora) SUSE's become a top-notch distro.

Re:How about a laptop

[diersing]

SuSE 9.1 on an HP Pavilion (zt3010) was fantastic, had some minor Centrino hoops to jump through but nothing I haven't done before. Any word on when SuSE 9.2 Personal might be release?

Re:How about a laptop

[theblkadder]

Since NLD (Novell Linux Desktop) is being adopted internally, laptop support is a very high priority and there is a lot of work ongoing. 9.2 has some significant improvements in this regard, and it will continue to improve.

Re:How about a laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried the ndiswrapper? It's effectivly the same thing as linuxant except w/o a web GUI to set it up. Ndiswrapper comes with SuSE 9.1 pro (I can't speak for SuSE personal or Fedora) I have a Dell Latitude C840. With SuSE 9.1 everything worked perfectly, including the 3D acceleration for the GeForce 4 card on board.

Re:How about a laptop

[pgfault]

Dell's Precision notebook may have come with Linux at one time, but not currently. The rest of the Precision workstation line can be had with RHEL or XP Pro. Although we've moved to SuSE 9.1 at work, those wanting their own factory Linux system are encouraged to check out the Dell Precision. Hopefully a SuSE solution from Dell will be on the horizon and hopefully we'll see Linux on their luggable M60 tank (er, notebook).

If you ask nicely and order a sufficient number of units, Dell will drop the MS license from some their Optiplex models and simply ship you a copy of FreeDOS. These are known as the 'n' models. E.g., GX270n. Do you remember getting such a model back in the 90's? I don't either.

Standard disclaimer applies (I don't work for Dell) and YMMV.

Re:How about a laptop

[StarTux]

"While nobody was looking (or they were focusing on RedHat/Fedora) SUSE's become a top-notch distro."

Actually I have used SuSE for years and also had to use RedHat when at work in the past. SuSE was ahead of RedHat for quite a few years, but they were noticed for some reason...I guess maybe because RH is American and its easier to then get the headlines in the English speaking world?

StarTux

Is Mandrake better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake is 0.9 ahead of SUSE!
They just released 10.1 !!! :)

Re:Is Mandrake better?

[suso]

Well, I doubt it. I mean Windows 98?

Re:Is Mandrake better?

[umshaggy]

Who modded the parent as funny? It is a fact.

From the news post: "It is the first complete Linux package to harness both the improved Linux kernel 2.6 and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments."

Just plain false. Mandrake 10.1 Official was released two days ago (on the 27th) and offers all of kernel 2.6, GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3.

Now, I'm not trying to bash SuSE. Both SuSE and Mandrake are good distributions. Still, it is false that SuSE is "first".

Re:Is Mandrake better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Mandrake 10.1 (which I'm using ATM) only supports KDE 3.2.3. KDE 3.3.0 is on the 4th CD and not everyone has access to it. Also, it's still labeled as experimental, and is not installed be default. So Suse 9.2 is the first to have it by default.

The Linux Mirror Project...

[tcopeland]

...is hosting BitTorrents of the SuSE 9.2 LiveCDs here. 1.3 TB transferred on the DVD so far!

Re:The Linux Mirror Project...

[suso]

For those of you that live around Bloomington, IN. Suso Technology Services will give away free copies of the live CDs (Gnome and KDE) versions. They should be ready later today like around 5pm. We'll be open til 7pm.

Pick them up at:
Fountain Square Mall, Suite 008B
101 W. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN

Re:The Linux Mirror Project...

[psyco484]

Additionally while SuSE doesn't distribute their "professional" version in cd image format, net installs are of the professional distribution and are very easy to do. They offer a boot cd image (or a floppy disk set) to get the net install started. There are a lot of mirrors around the world and the net installs are usually pretty speedy.

Re:The Linux Mirror Project...

[York the Mysterious]

Novell actually gave out a 4 DVD set with all this server software on it and a DVD of Pro 9.1. It was my first SuSE exposure, but unfortunately the damn thing constantly overheated my laptop. I'm looking forward to the new power management features.

Re:The Linux Mirror Project...

[psyco484]

Ah, the "Linux Technical Resource Kit." I did get one of those a couple months ago (though, it took about 2 months from request to actually receiving it). Very nice to be able to check out SLES8 and Openexchange Server (though both products are now available for download at http://www.novell.com/products/ it seems, wish I knew that before I went and waited a couple months for them). I'm not 100% sure how I feel about Novell, but that was definitely a nice gesture. The link for the resource kit was http://www.novell.com/community/linux/order.php but that doesn't seem to work anymore.

Re:The Linux Mirror Project...

[hubs99]

I have a few of these lying around if anyone wants one.. I believe I have 3 extras but I could be wrong. I kept forgetting I had already signed up for it over the two months I was waiting and then all of the sudden.. BAM>. 4 copies arrived over a week span.

It might cost you stamp but that would be it.

Question

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

Is there a need to upgrade SuSE [ever] if I use APT to keep up with the latest and greatest packages?

It's something I have always wondered. Do I not need to worry until they release v10? Or do I not even need to worry then because I can use apt to get the updates they make to Yast et al?

Or will the packages for 9.2/10 be in a different repository than those for 9.1?

Re:Question

[purplebear]

Updates for each version of SuSE have always been in separate repositories. If you want to stick to standard packages, you'll have to upgrade.

Re:Question

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

So that is my main question I guess.

What is actually upgraded with 9.2? I've got KDE 3.3x and up to date programs now, so will just Yast and SuSE provided utilities stay where they are for me unless I upgrade?

Re:Question

[purplebear]

Any standard package that you don't independently update will stay at the latest SuSE released update for the distribution version installed.
Once SuSE releases a distribution, they do not do any major version updates to it that aren't needed for security.

Re:Question

[74nova]

ive always wondered the same thing. as i understand it, apt(et al) doesnt get you the major package updates, just patches. gentoo's updates are not like this, iirc. im no expert, tho.

also, nice username. im only 1/32 hawaiian and have never even been there, so is that the abbreviated spelling nowadays? i figured the apostrophe is for the two missing a's.

Re:Question

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

it's the longest username they would allow :)

Re:Question

[Pros_n_Cons]

Triggerfish right? My familiy is from there.

Re:Question

[andywebz]

You would be stuck with the same glibc that the original release came with. The easiest way to update glibc is to do a new install with the new version, otherwise, you have to recompile ALL your programs with the newest version. If I understand it right, this is how Gentoo does it...but not really sure, I've never used it. I only have linux nerd badges for compiling my own kernel, and not using windows. Gentoo may be next.

Re:Question

[QuoteMstr]

Erhm, no, not at all. The standard C library is dynamically linked. I can't remember a situation where every program had to be recompiled on the system -- even during the switch from A.OUT to ELF and from libc5 to glibc, all the libraries could reside on the system at the same time.

Re:Question

[sloanster]

I will definitely want to go to 9.2 for various reasons, I don't see any benefit to staying on 9.1 when it's easy and free to upgrade. While current and older releases will continue to get security fixes for awhile, many packages will never get upgraded, and you'll need to move forward to get some of the fresher goodies in 9.2 (and later versions)

As far as upgrading 9.1 to 9.2 via apt, it is just a matter of pointing your apt sources to a 9.2 repository - next "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" cycle will get you on 9.2 -

Re:Question

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

that is simple enough. thank you kind folks of /.

Re:Question

[Daengbo]

And a popular song...
"While the humuhumunukunukuapua'a go swimming by..."

Re:Question

[KilobyteKnight]

That's shitty. Their upgrade price is way too much.

Then wait for the download version and download it, use something else, don't upgrade, or pay. Trolling here doesn't help.

Re:Question

[DanteBlack]

Yes you should update. Online updates keep you patched, but the difference between 9.1 and 9.2 may be subtle and distinct at the same time. SuSE releases are seperated, preusmably to maintain package/library consistency. If you're on the 'online update bandwagon' you can simply perform and online system update. I've used this feature in the past and it works well enough, occationaly I've had problems but for the most part it works. I'll be updating this way once I figure out why my network is Flubber.

Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be interested in this then:

Last January the borough of Newham in London reversed course on a planned change to Linux after a consultant's report said Windows would cost $600,000 less to support each year. The Finnish city of Turku also changed its mind about dumping Windows after a three-year experiment with Linux showed employees resisted the switch. There are reports of glitches and cost overruns from other Linux adopters, including Munich and the German Parliament, which had to revert to Windows servers temporarily in mid-October when a third of its 5,000 PC users couldn't access the Internet or get e-mail.

From http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_45/b39 07083_mz054.htm

Read it for additional information.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes he was!

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[davidmcw]

Isn't funny how the guy that posts this does so as 'Anonymous Coward' - we may have worked out who steveb or billg was

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I am interested in bringing a bit of reality to Slashdot. The fact is that it is not black or white. Linux is not a good solution for everyone, and should be approached with caution - just like any other migration.

I also don't want to be personally attacked by the zealots, which is why I post as AC.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[shawn(at)fsu]

I use SUSE at home and I enjoy it, that said I don't see how this posting is -1 troll.

This kind of crap on /. needs to be fixed or it will stop being such a great site. You have all the tin foil hat people that say how they fear any new technology becuase it will be an invasion of privcay. You have the people that start yelling about teh goverments actions before the even read the article and you have the we hate microsoft so much we willmod posts that are citical of linux to -1 troll. It's getting crowded here.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Finnish city of Turku also changed its mind about dumping Windows after a three-year experiment with Linux showed employees resisted the switch.

Funny, we said to those "resisting" that they either love it or they can find another job.

the strange thing is, they love it.

only a dipshit would allow the workers to control them.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[strictfoo]

And let's not forget the political modding. Say one thing that slightly supports one candidate or the other (although, especially a conservative candidate like "Bush doesn't eat babies! He just hunts them.") and prepare to have your post moderated into oblivion.

The other major problem with the moderation system is how how one post, say a post that many people find funny, but others find offensive, can completely decimate your karma. On my old account I went from Excellent karma to Terrible because of one post. The mods that found it funny kept modding it up +1 Funny (which ads no karma) and the mods that found it offensive kept modding it down -1 Troll or -1 Overrated.

This happened with this account as well, but it only went from Excellent to Positive. The unfortunate thing is that there's a easy fix to this. First, Overrated mods should only take karma away if a post has already received a positive mod. Otherwise, it should decrease the score (or shouldn't be allowed?). Two, there needs to be a limit on the amount of negative karma one can get through the moderation of a single post.

See, nothing complex here....

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll because if you try to dig more info about those examples (Newham and Turku) you will find out that Microsoft's "anti-Linux" fund was heavily involved. Newham in particular is relevant, as they were considering Linux exactly because they couldn't afford a Windows upgrade (and Exchange, IIRC) with their IT budget. Guess what, the budget didn't suddenly grow larger.

Paying for an article and then pointing to it as "independent" info makes a troll.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[minus_273]

Mods, read the article in question. This is not even close to a troll. It is something that is on topic and people should see it. The article is quite interesting and does not takes sides. It is also not something that would ever be allowed on the front page becasue it presents an objective overview of the problems that Linux adoption has faced in Europe. If nothing else, this shoudl be a good lesson for future adoption efforts. Some of the mods just dont want people to read this becasue it is not full of glowing praise.

Mod Parent up!

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Botty]

Holy crap?! You mean companies shouldn't be trying to keep workers productive and happy by listening to their needs? No wonder Google is doomed. On a side note, the grand-parent has already been found to be a troll. Those "Idependent studies" were found to have major MS influence. Posted by an AC too, go figure.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[sloanster]

I use SUSE at home and I enjoy it, that said I don't see how this posting is -1 troll.

Easy, he's painting a distorted picture, using innuendo and carefully selected opinions to make it sound as though linux doesn't work, and windows does.

It's an obvious troll.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Glamdrlng]

The fact that the post is somewhat anti-linux doesn't make it a troll, agreed. It has little to do with the release of Suse 9.2, so it is by definition off topic. What makes it a troll though is the signal to noise ratio. Read the parent again, it's just a copy and paste of a news article along with the link to businessweek. No additional commentary, no effort to conduct intelligent conversation, and no intention of responding to any replies. He's just posting copied text that is likely to generate controversy for the sake of generating controversy, while putting minimal effort into any actual dialogue.

That would be a troll.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Glamdrlng]

Holy crap?! You mean companies shouldn't be trying to keep workers productive and happy by listening to their needs? No wonder Google is doomed.

I think you're forgetting the mentality of the average office drone. And if you want to see someone worse than the average office drone, try the average government employee. The terms "worker" and "productive" don't apply to 90% of the gevernment employees out there, so they need not be addressed. As far as their "needs", I'm willing to bet that solitaire is at or near the top of that list.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Glamdrlng]

Some of the mods just dont want people to read this becasue it is not full of glowing praise.

You must be new here. The post was a troll, probably somebody throwing a hissy fit because their article didnt get posted. If the article they submitted had as much thought provoking commentary as the post did, than it's not surprising. The folks who modded it down recognized that the article linked had nothing to do with suse 9.2, and beyond some copying and pasting from the article, the post had no substance.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am a troll, then disregard the part about the "study" (which I agree probably wasn't objective) then explain this part:

The Finnish city of Turku also changed its mind about dumping Windows after a three-year experiment with Linux showed employees resisted the switch. There are reports of glitches and cost overruns from other Linux adopters, including Munich and the German Parliament, which had to revert to Windows servers temporarily in mid-October when a third of its 5,000 PC users couldn't access the Internet or get e-mail.

Those are facts. That doesn't come from a study. I am not a troll.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wanna see glitches? Work in a windows shop. Users resist changes in Windows!

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[CerebusUS]

I tried SuSE 9.1 on my workstation and immediately noticed a problem integrating it into our windows environment.

We named our domain mt.local, because that's what our MCSE-trained consultants told us to do, ignoring the fact that Rendezvous uses that tld for local domain browsing.

Our Macs using osX broke immediately, of course, but there's a patch to their DNS resolver that fixes it, so we patched them and stopped worrying about it.

Apparently SuSE 9.1 supports Rendezvous, as the exact same behavior cropped up when I installed it.

So to bring this post back to topic, I wonder if this had anything to do with their problems converting?

The symptom is dastardly: nslookups or digs work and return the ip addresses you'd expect, but ping fails to resolve the name. Rendezvous is rude.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Too Much Noise]

On the off-chance that the parent is not a willing troll, here's some additional info on one of those - Newham. No "reverse course" there (the OSS consultant suggested a mixed upgrade, not a full OSS migration) They used the OSS trials as baragaining chip to get the Windows deployment price down:

Netproject's Eddie Bleasdale says his consultancy was used as a negotiating tool to get a better deal out of Microsoft. He argues that the council never really intended to deploy an open source solution at all - because it doesn't have the expertise to do so.

Link. To follow more of the story, search for Newham on the Register.

yeah, and the report of the consultant that favored Windows (Cap Gemini) turned out to have been funded by Microsoft. Surprised?

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[shawn(at)fsu]

The folks who modded it down recognized that the article linked had nothing to do with suse 9.2
So then the mods should have went with offtopic....

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The post was a troll, probably somebody throwing a hissy fit because their article didnt get posted"

Jesus christ. Get a fucking clue. If anybody is a troll it's you.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Glamdrlng]

If I'm the troll then why are you the one posting as an AC? You may wanna get back to the bridge you've left unguarded.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds fishy.

Why wouldn't they use redundant linux server rather than use Windows server, or even check the network rather than temporarily replace the OS?

Even the link is bogus.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[minus_273]

"You must be new here"

you are joking right? take a look at my uid number, then take a look at yours. I dont think you know what slashdot was like before all of the political moderators(trolls) arrived.

Re:Thinking of Switching your Enterprise To SuSE?

[Glamdrlng]

take a look at my uid number, then take a look at yours

Fair enough. But if you've been around so long, how can you not recognize a post containing copied-and-pasted text plus a link as being void of any conversational value? As for my memories of slashdot, when I went from lurking to posting there were trolls, but not many. Since then they've set up their own websites, and they've gotten better at disguising troll posts as ordinary posts. Maybe there's some kind of connection between spammers, virii, and trolls?

At any rate the grandparent post may or may not have been a troll. The only person who knows that is the poster. But imo, it's as much a mistake to attack moderators without evaluating the post's merit as it is to mod the post down without doing the same. I disagree with posting / modding solely according to groupthink, but I'm equally opposed to posting/modding according to antigroupthink (if that's a word!)

Gnome 2.6?

[cuerty]

and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments
What about 2.8?

Re:Gnome 2.6?

[destiney]

The review (that you didn't read) clearly states that since Gnome 2.8 was only released in September that it was not included due to time constraints.

Re:Gnome 2.6?

[cuerty]

I really don't care, I build it from source :D

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the first complete Linux package to harness both the improved Linux kernel 2.6 and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments.

What are they talking about? What company is sending out these press releases again?

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it is the only one that has a 2.6 kernel that doesn't leave your box open to attack? You need 2.6.8 or later, as IP Tables in earlier versions is broken. Better yet, only use an OS that has pf ported to it if you are going to expose your box to the Internet.

I don't do Linux, so I wouldn't know which distros have it.

Update version at Amazon for $55 free shipping

[UnderAttack]

I wasn't able to find the update version at Suse.com. However, it looks like Amazon.com got it (with free 'super saver' shipping):

Suse Linux Professional 9.2 Upgrade Strong Encryption 128 Bit

Re:Update version at Amazon for $55 free shipping

[purplebear]

I thought it was just early when I received an e-mail yesterday stating it had been released and pointing me to the SuSE store. They only show 9.1.
Since it still only shows 9.1, it looks like someone at Digital River is slacking.

Also notice that Amazon says you get a $35 discount. The show the retail price of the full version for the upgrade, then show the actual price of the upgrade as their discounted price.

Re:Update version at Amazon for $55 free shipping

[engywook]

I have full version 9.1. Saving $30+ sounds pretty good. What do I give up by buying the Upgrade version? In other words, what are the differences between full and upgrade versions? Thanks!

Re:Update version at Amazon for $55 free shipping

[purplebear]

From past experience the upgrade version is only media. No manuals and no installation support. But, it's not like someone that has been using SuSE for any time really needs those things anyway.

What about the Professional CD's?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe information wants to be free.

That's a big download

[RealAlaskan]

That live DVD is 1.3GBytes. SuSE is smart: they don't host it, they just have a bunch of links to mirrors. Maybe the SuSE site won't go down. The mirrors might be in trouble...

So, nobody use the mirror I'm downloading from for about an hour and a half, so I have a chance to get done.

Re:That's a big download

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because downloading a single 1.3GB file is so much more strain than downloading 3 or 4 700MB cd ISOs...

Re:That's a big download

[sleazyrider]

Heh, I'm at roughly 50% downloaded and it's rockin' along at 3Mbps. I can live with that. Another half hour to go......

Re:That's a big download

[dtfinch]

Bittorrent is the smart way to go.

Re:That's a big download

[vasqzr]

Bittorrent IS the way to go.

Downloading recent Linux releases was HELL the traditonal ways.

I downloaded the 2GB+ release of Fedora Core in a little over an hour and a half. Bittorrent on a broadband connection. I even left it open for a couple days and let others download about 15GB worth of it.

Are the fonts any better?

[bogaboga]

Slashdotters, I have always used the free downloaded version and have fond the fonts not that crisp and clear. Installing M$ fonts made several KDE apps unstable. Anyone know whether the fonts in SuSE 9.1/9.2 are any better?

Re:Are the fonts any better?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Despite my other problems with SuSe 9.1 Pro, I have been quite happy with the fonts provided. They're quite nice. My eyes aren't that great, so I'm picky about that...

Re:Are the fonts any better?

[sundru]

I've used suse9.1 for quite a while now and have no complaints about the fonts, my only grumble would be mozilla seems to use it own fonts which look crude. But am sure there must be a way to make it use suse fonts.

Re:Are the fonts any better?

[LnxAddct]

You lucky fool... font's are your biggest problem with SuSE? Heh I couldn't keep it on my laptop, just too many problems. I personally think that my laptop is pretty standard hardware, knoppix can install on it fine and Fedora runs wonderfully, SuSE just isn't an option for me right now.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Are the fonts any better?

[Waffle Iron]

AFAIKT, SuSE used to ship with the patented Freetype bytecode interpreter turned on. A couple of releases ago, the fonts suddenly looked worse because they turned it off. (At least this seems to be what happened when I did some searching on the subject.)

However, if you read a few HOWTOs, you can install the source RPM, change a #define to turn it back on, recompile and reinstall. I think it's a big improvement, but people seem to have varying opinions on whether the patented or non-patented hinting looks better.

Personally, I prefer MS Verdana over any of the fonts supplied with SuSE (although the Bitsream fonts are a close second). Luckily, Microsoft was generous enough to release their fonts with a perpetual free redistribution license, so getting them is no problem. SuSE also includes an RPM that automatically downloads the MS fonts (the license doesn't allow actual bundling with the OS). I've never experienced any instability caused by the fonts.

They changed name

[RPoet]

The distro is called SUSE, not SuSE. It happened like a year ago, you'd think people catch up :)

Re:They changed name

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd think people catch up :)

I avoid this SuSE/SUSE problem by sticking with Caldera Linux.

what did you say? That one's name changed too? Neverming, then.

Re:They changed name

[4of12]

It happened like a year ago, you'd think people catch up

Especially so glaring a name change.

Kind of like the FirePhoenixBirdFoxzilla browser I'm using....

Re:They changed name

[Elektroschock]

You said " The distro is called SUSE, not SuSE.", I am afraid your're wrong

SuSe = System und Softwareentwicklung

in English: System and Software development

Re:They changed name

[inc_x]

The distro is called "SUSE LINUX" as you can see on http://www.suse.de/en/company/press/press_releases /archive04/index.html

Re:They changed name

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSe = System und Softwareentwicklung


True, nevertheless the abreviation was SuSE. 'Software' and 'Entwicklung' are both nouns, that's why they are both capitalized in the abreviation. Pretty much like it's "TÜV" and not "TÜv" for the "Technischer Überwachungsverein".

Re:They changed name

[un1xl0ser]

This belongs here:

SuSE Logo (Score:1)
by seiotek (521782) Alter Relationship on Friday October 29, @01:17PM (#10664656)
Hey when are you guys gonna change the SuSE Logo? http://www.suse.com/images/suse.png

"Keep on Tuxin"

Re:They changed name

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like the FirePhoenixBirdFoxzilla browser I'm using....

*Ahem* Get with the times. The preferred name is 'Thunderfox'.

Re:They changed name

[wolfdvh]

SuSe = System und Softwareentwicklung

Very close, except Software and Entwicklung are two separate words. That is why the E is also uppercase.

SuSE = System und Software Entwicklung

Re:They changed name

[McNihil]

hm..... That would be Süse to be VERY nitpicky.

try for yourself - download here

[Anonymous Coward]

ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.2-cd-dvd-wi th-md5sum-informations.txt|3580|B7D3B78022BA0F7E10 F78A622830F804|h=TA4EN5LDDZI5JCR2F3EGGGHTZBU73PJ2| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -x8 6-i386-cd1-of-cd5.iso|680470528|529BB31D4D3C0B1726 D001E49B55CEC2|h=VCYUWEDDDQT3M3YPOXZE5PUFUVLQKQNO| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -x8 6-i386-cd2-of-cd5.iso|680206336|7B8BC4989E2D3C19FC F8BDB8E1BC1EEE|h=DQTZ6T3IDRSTGACOWVTMTEUZCOQHPYTW| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -x8 6-i386-cd3-of-cd5.iso|682151936|C2AF5B0865DF1D632D 71208D1E26A54B|h=LU5HW7B32HORTATL72EIR3EBTTOXBPTH| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -x8 6-i386-cd4-of-cd5.iso|679241728|8B56EE175E45D961E1 658B3E9826C75D|h=7ZEDZ73R5GIM5IKBH6IHKS4WJZIR7PUO| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -x8 6-i386-cd5-of-cd5.iso|677640192|F0B9753272D5CCBC01 4CF0E851938B13|h=OGBF5MBDJQDDWK7SDNKPTM4WJ57UIGZX| /
ed2k://|file|novell-suse-linux-professional-9.2 -co mplete-emule-hashes.txt|55722|CBA840924ADE8EF87E8C BB9D9F58F653|h=IGCCD6WRRUXTZ6HEWQMWD4XCNKFJTRBO|/

beware of the slashdot spaces.

also be sure to try out the suse livecd/livedvd from some of the mirrors:

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/live_e val_int.html

Re:try for yourself - download here

[un1xl0ser]

Why use edonkey instead of bit-torrent?

Just in time for Dell

[macaulay805]

Just in time for Dell to start supporting this!

DVD???

[Omniscientist]

So you can download this for free of course, but its a DVD image? meaning those of us without dvd burners (i'm assuming alot of us don't own those) are forced into buying this if we want to try it out?

Re:DVD???

[pomakis]

So you can download this for free of course, but its a DVD image? meaning those of us without dvd burners (i'm assuming alot of us don't own those) are forced into buying this if we want to try it out?

Since you can buy a DVD burner for less than the cost of the SuSE DVDs ($89.95), this sounds like a great justification for you to buy a DVD burner.

Re:DVD???

[dema]

I'm not 100% sure how SuSE Pro works (is it even available for a free?). But with regards to the Live version, you can download the full live DVD images, or you can download a DVD image of SuSE GNOME or SuSE KDE. Each of which is less than 700MB.

Re:DVD???

[mobets]

The DVD that is avaliable is just the demo. It does not usualy come with an installer. This lets you boot off the DVD and play with it for a bit before you decide to go out and buy it. Also lets you run linux on anybody's computer kinda like Knoppix.

Re:DVD???

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Doesn't SUSE allow network installs?

Re:DVD???

[G00F]

They have in the past, but the network installs are available much much later.

Re:DVD???

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, before you go pissing and moaning perhaps you should do some investigating. If you view the tlm-project site you will see the following.

Name Torrent Size Seeders Leechers Completed Transferred
Suse 9.2 Live (DVD Edition) DL 1.27 GB 74 131 1092 1.35 TB
Suse 9.2 Live (KDE Edition) DL 676.39 MB 31 44 1070 706.77 GB
Suse 9.2 Live (Gnome Edition) DL 679.28 MB 13 27 401 266.00 GB

Re:DVD???

[stevemm81]

Well, you could use one of those DVD emulator programs (http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Original-CD-CDRW-D VD-Emulator/3000-2646-10321215.html) and rip the entire thing to your hard drive, then install from there. I'm not sure of the details, but I'm sure it would be possible.

Re:DVD???

[general_boy]

They have live CDs of 9.2 available too, one each for KDE and Gnome. I'm downloading the KDE live CD now.

Re:DVD???

[EvilAlien]

... so download one of the cd-rom images for the LiveCD or wait for the FTP install stuff to be available in a short while. RTFA.

Re:DVD???

[Botty]

Not quite a scientific study/analysys, but the total transferred amounts say something. Look at the KDE vs. Gnome download totals. Hmmm...........

Re:DVD???

[Lord_Raptor]

The boxed version comes with both DVDs and CDs. 5 CD's and 2 DVDs. Also, it's an image, can't you just loop it in & mount it, similar to what you can do with CD images. Granted you still need the disk space though. And a system already set up.

Re:DVD???

[MrTheBunny]

To answer your question, I don't have a DVD burner (it's on my chrismas list) but was able to install SUSE on my box : I downloaded and installed SUSE 9.2 Personal Edition a few weeks ago, it's a single CD image. After installing it I went into YAST and added a installation reference to one of the SUSE FTP sites. I was then able to download the kernel source (I needed it to install 3d acceleration on my ATI...) So you don't need the DVD. I also remember trying the 9.0 pro version that came on CDs (4 or 7 of them I think, not sure).

Re:DVD???

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, wait for the Personal version ISO!!! It's only a single CD and has everything you could possibly want. ANything else is just a quick & selective download away.

honestly, why does everybody seem to think that we need 11 window managers and 40 text editors? Try Personal when it's available!!!!

Re:DVD???

[Anonymous Coward]

You and me buddy.
I'm still on floppy, won't get a cd-burner until everyone agrees on the color of cdrs!

Re:DVD???

[Anonymous Coward]

You will need 2 computers.

Use the DVD Drive emulator, windows version if there is no Linux one, and install an FTP server on one computer that will act as a source for your computer that will boot using the Floppy that you will create and then pick FTP install.

Good luck !

Distro with 2.8?

[idonotexist]

What distribution would you say has/maintains the latest GNOME packages, without building from source?

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu. I just installed it and removed the whole of Gnome 2.8.1 to install KDE :)

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[dweezil-n0xad]

doesn't Ubuntu Linux use gnome 2.8?

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[LnxAddct]

Um... Fedora Core 2 has had the 2.6 kernel and 2.6 Gnome for many months. Fedora Core 3 being released on November 8th will have kernel 2.6.9 (which will be great for my laptop) , Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3, as well as many other really cool features like SELinux. Yoper has had the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.3. Many other distros have these things also. SUSE is a bit behind times.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropline for Slackware[dropline.net]

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch Linux has it, also it has kernel 2.6.9

try it!

Re:Distro with 2.8?

[Anonymous Coward]

From Thailand, LinuxTLE 5.5.92 features Linux kernel 2.6.9, GCC 3.4.2, X.Org 6.8.1, GNOME 2.8.1, KDE 3.3.1 and Firefox 0.10.1. Download CD1, CD2 and CD3 or download the DVD.

great for laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been running it since RC3, and they have really focused on laptops in this release. It installed smoothly on my HP nc6000, and everything works - including build-in bluetooth and wireless.

Nice job SuSE developers!

Re:great for laptops

[purplebear]

Which wireless adapter do you have in your HP? Mine has one of those dang Broadcom adapters. It's the only hardware on this system not directly supported. I could use the Linuxant driver loader, but I would really like to have a fully 64-bit OS for my 64-bit proc. The Linuxant loader uses the Windows driver which is only 32-bit.
At this point I can only guess 32-bit driver loaded through/with Linuxant driver loaded will not load in a 64-bit kernel.

Re:great for laptops

[Sc00ter]

I agree, my nx9010 has the same problem with the Broadcom adapter :( Everything else works just fine.

Re:great for laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

It has some Atheros chipset. I don't remember the exact name, and I left the laptop at the office. I can post a reply here on monday, if I remember to do so.

Re:great for laptops

[Lord_Raptor]

Friend at work had a new Sony Vaio, and the SUSE distro was the only one of the 4 tried that would support the (fairly) new hardware out of the box.

Re:great for laptops

[spoonyfork]

I'll have to give 9.2 a try. I had a difficult time getting SuSE 9.1 to install on my old Dell Inspiron 3500. I had to install in text mode then run sax2 from within the console mode installer to configure the LCD and touchpad to work with X. In contrast, SuSE 9.0 installed without issue on the same Inspiron. However I've never gotten the NeoMagic soundcard to work in either version. :(

Re:great for laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

It is identified as "Compaq AR5212 802.11abg NIC" in YaST.

What the hell?

[scribblej]

Reently I had to decide on a linux platform for my company. In evaluating the possibilities, I was seeking a distro that had both a lot of readily-available support, and the benefits of F/OSS.

Suse and Redhat, while perfect on the former count, DO NOT OFFER THE FULL BENEFITS OF F/OSS SOFTWARE.

Both RH and Suse offer certain configurations of their software which you cannot get without paying. I don't have anything against paying someone for software I use, if it's also available for free. But I do have a problem with software that you can't even look at unless you pay.

"Many eyes make bugs shallow." The more a peice of software costs, the less people will see it and contribute to it. The fewer bugs will exits in the end -- the better the software will be.

So I picked Debian. And I dig it.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't have anything against paying someone for software I use, if it's also available for free"

What color is the sky in your world?

Re:What the hell?

[scribblej]

Depends on the time of day. I'm afraid you missed my point. If you must pay for access to the software, then that's a barrier to many *other* cheapskates (besides me, though I also love a bargain).

Those *other* cheapskates eyes will no longer even have a *chance* to see the code for the additional software Suse and Redhat suggest putting in all *ENTERPRISE* level deployments.

Maybe I don't "get" the Linux Philosophy, but to me, using proprietary software that just anyone can't have a look at is NOT meeting the Ideals that Slashdot brought me up to believe were Good and Right.

That's all I'm saying.

Re:What the hell?

[thepoch]

FUD!

Suse and Redhat, while perfect on the former count, DO NOT OFFER THE FULL BENEFITS OF F/OSS SOFTWARE.

While I have no experience with SUSE, I would like to note that RedHat do offer source-only rpms of their "Enterprise" products from their ftp site. This has even created a spinoff called White Box Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.com). The only hindrance was the required removal of Red Hat trademarks. Other than that, everything else is GPL'd and freely available.

And if you really want free as in beer, get Fedora. It might seem "unstable" to a lot of folks, but it's been working wonders in our office ever since FC1.

Do you really understand that F/OSS stands for "Free" as in Freedom/"Open Source Software".

Re:What the hell?

[Alan Cox]

You can download all the source rpms for the Red Hat RHEL packages if you want to. (or save yourself the hassle and grab Whitebox who've already rebuilt it).

Re:What the hell?

[bcs_metacon.ca]

You should give Fedora Core a whirl. It's composed entirely of F/OSS software (nothing else makes it in to the Core distro, although non-F/OSS stuff can be added from 3rd party repositories), and is a technology preview of what will eventually make it into RHEL. We use Fedora on our desktops so we can get to know what will be coming down the pike for our servers which all run RHEL.

Re:What the hell?

[thepoch]

Tip... read up on: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html to "get" the "Linux Philosophy" you talk about.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you're a bit of a retard and I wouldn't employ you. Ideals? Please...

You use the best tool for the job at the right price. What OSS brings us is choice. Paying for software is not evil.

What buying "enterprise" versions -really- brings you, is that sometimes all-important bit of paper that people who like support contracts can cuddle like a security blanket. Maybe they have made extra tools too. Why is it wrong to expect payment for this? The core dist is available on the ftp sites a few weeks after release so you don't even have to pay for the pro version.

At $90 however for a company, perhaps buying one copy isn't that extravagant.

Re:What the hell?

[scribblej]

What buying "enterprise" versions -really- brings you, is that sometimes all-important bit of paper that people who like support contracts can cuddle like a security blanket.
----

I agree that I'm an Idealistic Moron. There's no doubt of that in my mind. But as I said, I settled on Debian. Debian has plenty of large companies that offer support packages, thus providing that all-important peice of paper... and I don't have to give up my ideals to use it.

You've got soemthing of a false dichotomy there. It's not a matter of: either I can have my ideals or I can have a nice fat support contract. Sometimes I can have both. That's what Debian got for me.

Now, reading some of the replies to my original post, it seems I may have been a bit hasty to claim that the proprietary software Suse and Redhat provide isn't available to non-paying people. I'll have to look into it again... it's possible as an Idealistic Moron that I just missed where those things are made availaible.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reasoning doesn't make sense. Why don't offer full benifits of f/oss? SUSE 9.1 is available in FTP servers for FTP install, there is also an official ISO, it's just one CD but it's enough since everything else can be installed via YAST. Sources are provided. Yes there are a couple closed source applications provided too (which you don't have to install).

"Both RH and Suse offer certain configurations of their software which you cannot get without paying"

Eh! What is this?? Can you get anymore vague?? Lol and even vague it seems like your just saying, they also have stuff you got to pay for, how is that bad? And this is marked 5 Insightful,come on!!

Re:What the hell?

[fiddlesticks]

> I don't have anything against paying someone for
> software I use, if it's also available for free

Most people don't think like that.

Re:What the hell?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

They are still in compliance with GPL. The GPL does not require that binaries be provided at no cost, and IIRC it does not require the distribution of source code to people that have not paid for it.

You can get White Box too.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want Red Hat binaries for free; get Fedora Core.

You want Red Hat "corporate products" for free; download the SRPMs and compile them yourself.

Who said that you must get all GPLed binaries for free?

And who the hell modded you "Insightful"?

Re:What the hell?

[Martin Blank]

CentOS by cAos has done the same thing, and also has a distro based on RH7.3.

Re:What the hell?

[crush]

Both RH and Suse offer certain configurations of their software which you cannot get without paying. I don't have anything against paying someone for software I use, if it's also available for free. But I do have a problem with software that you can't even look at unless you pay.

Some specifics would be useful in evaluating your strongly stated claim that Red Hat and SuSE have software that "you can't even look at unless you pay". As far as I'm aware this is completely untrue. All of Red Hat and SuSE's software is offered under FL/OSS licenses and can be downloaded from their servers. This extends all the way up to the top of the line offerings from Red Hat's "Enterprise" and "Advanced Server" ranges which include stuff like Piranha and the Satellite update system. What they don't offer are binaries of this software. You have you use your shallow bug-eyes to read the code and figure out how to compile and install it.

As for wanting your software configured for you for free: hire a systems administrator or do it yourself. No one's under any obligation to configure your systems for you or to play your games for you.

Re:What the hell?

[Pros_n_Cons]

Yes Red Hat is propriatary according to:
Whitebox
SCI-Linux
CentOS
Lineox
Taolinux
Those are the RHEL builds feel free to ask Mandrake, or RedFlag, or Fedora how propriatary other builds are.
Can I have more FUD please? mmmmm thank you.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, RedHat IS completely Open Source, but how about SUSE? Does anyone know free copycats of it, or does SUSE keep some essential components under proprietary licenses so that no-one can copy them?

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird little sense of entitlement you have. Linux vendors have always used a two-edged logic for why you would want to buy their product: support and ease. Nobody at RH or Novell is going to tell you that you can't build your own stuff from source. On some of the trickier configurations you may well spend a week re-deriving the same solution that RH or Novell are selling.

Long ago I was a deb user (0.96 or so up to about 2.0) and the package management was light years beyond the competition. The competition has gotten better at packaging while debian has followed their "release when ready" mantra is now really old. Debian is great if you want a linux that feels like 1996.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE used to have a proprietary component, Yast, the installer. It should be GPL now. So if you avoid external proprietary closed-source software (nvidea drivers, commercial programs), you can have a 100% open source SuSE.
RedHat has been open source for a long time, if not from the start.
Never mind that both companies pay programmers to work on open source project such as the linux kernel, KDE, gnome...

Re:What the hell?

[Aldric]

The only proprietry software in SUSE (9.1 at least, not got 9.2 yet) is a few packages made by other companies that Novell have simply bundled with the professional version. Don't like them? Then don't use them! The only thing that's SUSE specific is YaST which Novell have already open sourced - bitch at the people that make your distro if you want YaST.

SUSE 9.2 Personal?

[Dante Shamest]

Does anybody know if they're going to release a Personal version for download, just like they did for 9.1? Also, is it actually necessary to purchase 9.2, or could I just download the new RPMs for my 9.1?

Re:SUSE 9.2 Personal?

[c_spencer100]

Be leary of SuSE Personal verions. I bought a boxed set of SuSE Personal (8.2 I think). Now I can try to understand them not being shipped with developer apps such as KDevelop, Anjuta and such - but they aren't even shipping them with the devel packages. If you ever want to build anything from source, that becomes quite the problem. Don't get me wrong, you can download them off of the suse ftp, but that's no picnic either. You can easily get caught in a loop of looking for one package after another until you have all the files you need. Just my 2 cents...

Re:SUSE 9.2 Personal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have suse 9.1 installed by way of ftp. I do believe they will release a free public ftp install of 9.2, as they have this posted :
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/README.txt

Fri Oct 22 16:36:50 MEST 2004 - draht

Dear visitor of ftp.suse.com or one of its mirrors,

this is the directory in which the SUSE LINUX 9.2 product packages
can be found.

As of now, end of October 2004, only the source RPM packages for the
product are being made available. The remaining binary packages for
the SUSE LINUX 9.2 ftp version are being worked on and will be made
available in this directory at a later time.

Thanks,
ftpadmin@suse.com.

no personal any more

[Anonymous Coward]

there is no more personal build for 9.2 and above.

but u can try the live dvd media

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/live_e val_int.html

Re:no personal any more

[np_bernstein]

I've heard that the personal version is now going to be free[1]. If this is the case, then it may be that isos will be released at the same time it's available by ftp to the general public. Which is generally $RELEASE_DATE+2Months, iric.

[1] I forget where the heck I read this, so don't bother to ask.

First? Complete Linux Package?

[lousyd]

It is the first complete Linux package to harness both the improved Linux kernel 2.6 and the recently enhanced GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.3 user desktop environments.

What are they talking about? I've been using those three packages, via my distribution, for at least several months now. What do they mean by "first complete Linux package"?

it helps sometimes...

[Run4yourlives]

to read the entire sentence.

Re:it helps sometimes...

[lousyd]

to read the entire sentence.

It's unfortunate I was modded troll, because I was really asking. I suppose I can see why somebody misinterpreted me, though.

So, what am I missing, Run4yourlives? I re-read the entire sentence, and it still doesn't make sense to me. They're saying SuSE is the first "complete linux package" to offer KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.6, and Linux 2.6. So, the question is: What do they mean by "complete linux package"? If they mean simply "distribution" then they're wrong; I've had these things in my distro for at least a month or two before this announcment. It's generally more useful to pre-judge in the positive direction, and I can't imagine that someone wanted to lie, so they must not mean simply "distribution". So what do they mean? That's my question. And I re-read the entire sentence.

suse has the live cd/dvd images also on their ftp

[Anonymous Coward]

suse smart? how do u figure?

suse first releases everything on their ftp.suse.com server, only after that, the bits and bytes spread out to the mirrors.

wake up fella.

Nobody cares

[Anonymous Coward]

As by now where more and more people jumping off to something else due to the huge usability mess certain people caused - who cares ?

Re:Nobody cares

[Rahga]

Apparently you do, Ali.

Ick.

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I've always run RedHat and Slackware at home. We've been using RedHat at work for years. But with the new RedHat price structure, I decided it was time to look around more. I bought SuSe 9.1 Professional and installed it at home. Between things I was reading on the net and the positive experience we had with two Penguin dual Opteron servers that came with SuSe EL 8 preinstalled, I was psyched.

What a nigtmare.

The graphical installer refused to recognize the S3 card; I had to use text install. When initially installed, I could only find KDE. I reinstalled per something I found on the net-- installing just Gnome, then adding KDE after configuration.

My directory is automounted from a RH8 system. I can't get KDE or Gnome to work properly, so I go back to ctwm. Eventually I get both Gnome and KDE working, but Gnome is never quite right now on either the RH8 or the SuSe9.1Pro system. Works fine for root, but not for other users. ( realize the Gnome issues may not be SuSe's fault, exactly, but they did choose the version to include on the CDs.)

Overall, most things are slower, from booting and shutdown to popping up a new window. Yast2, in particular, takes forever to initialize. Granted it does some things the RH config tools don't, and it's much more consistent, but it's definitely slower. Maybe I wouldn't notice this on a new, fast system, but on my 400MHz and 500MHz systems at home, there's a clear difference.

Yast2 does a bunch of cool stuff, but that makes some of the missing things even odder. Why, for instance, is there no entry for a Logitech PS2 Mouseman when configuring a mouse?

I'll grant you things look really nice in SuSe. But I prefer substance over appearance. In some cases it has the substance, in others it doesn't.

To top it all off, my emails to SuSe support went unanswered.

I'm almost certainly going to switch back to RedHat (or possibly some other distro) at home. And SuSe is not at the top of my list for consideration art work.

I know there are lots of happy SuSe customers. I was one based on the Penguins. But 9.1 left a bad taste in my mouth.

Does 9.2 resolve any of these issues? Not that I'm really considering tossing another $60 at SuSe to upgrade...

Re:Ick.

[Anonymous Coward]

got a better answer: don't use Gnome.

Re:Ick.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat's update broke gnome for users for me just the other day. I was already using all the K* tools as they are generally much higher quality anyway, but the redhat addons are slightly better integrated into gnome or I would not have been using it in the first place. So now it's happily over to KDE after gnome refuses to even work properly any more.

Re:Ick.

[winse]

if you didn't like 9.1 you won't like 9.2 at all. I had problems compiling mplayer right off the bat on 9.2 ( something wrong with prefetch.h in kernel source ) which i "fixed" , and then I couldn't get the power settings to play nice on my laptop. It seemed buggy so i went back to 9.1

Re:Ick.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of our admins swears by Suse, while the boxes I set up and don't let them touch run RH9 & RHE3. He's a pro unix guy with years of experience, I'm a knowlegeble hobbiest.

But somehow, my stuff always just works, while his is just never quite right. The boxes are doing similar things ... workstations, fileservers, etc.

Anyway, I haven't decided whether it's SuSe or his incompetence. I'm leaning toward the latter, but it's a data point.

Re:Ick.

[AaronW]

I too upgraded to SuSE 9.1 and had a lot of problems, many due to hardware compatibility issues with the 2.6 kernel. Some of the issues were fixed by the online updates, which includes a newer kernel.

I have been a long-time SuSE user and just ordered the 9.2 upgrade, which I expect to be better.

In my long time experience with SuSE, some versions are just not stable.

8.0 was great, 8.1 sucked, 8.2 and 9.0 were good, 9.1 not as good.

I have a SuSE 8.2 server that has been up 451 days without a reboot. I use it for file, NFS, web, FTP, ssh, DNS, imap, smtp, spam filter, and as a remote applications server for running Mozilla.

-Aaron

Suse Linux

[digitaltraveller]

Do the freely downloadable ISO images contain Suse's OpenExchange mail/groupware server?

The other ones seem to lack a bit of pizazz. The two major competitors seem to be the
BillWorkgroup (as in Gates) server and the unencumbered Netline version of OpenExchange which IIRC is derived from the Suse OPX codebase.

Everything else I looked at is crap. I checked out Communigate Pro (a commercial product) and though it looked mostly professional, it had a bunch of features that simply weren't available in Outlook. I'd consider tolerating that from a free software project but not a proprietary offering.

Re:Suse Linux

[goldorak_dan]

Not sure if this is what you mean, but check out
Scalix

Does it have....

[Anonymous Coward]

... centrino wireless networking drivers? ... NTFS drivers (read only ok) ... Mono/ASP.NET? ... an X config that supports 1920x1200 displays

I'd love to have a liveCD that has this so I could run my company's demos on my CEO's laptop without resorting to that other company's .net implementation.

Any other key features people waiting to see on a liveCD?

Re:Does it have....

[trtmrt]

> ... centrino wireless networking drivers?

This release of SuSE is supposed to have major improvements for laptop support and wireless, although I don't know anything specifically about the drivers you need.

> NTFS drivers (read only ok)

It has them.

> X config that supports 1920x1200 displays

On 9.1 this doesn't work out of the box but I recently set up a Dell laptop for a friend to work at that resolution after a short google.

Re:Does it have....

[cube_slave]

... centrino wireless networking drivers? ... NTFS drivers (read only ok) ... Mono/ASP.NET? ... an X config that supports 1920x1200 displays

According to the new features page it supports centrino and mono. NTFS (read only) was supported in 9.1. I'm not sure about the large display size. Did you have issues with that display setting in other versions/flavors?

Does anyone know the differences between the boxed retail version and th e ftp install version?

Re:Does it have....

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks!

Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[brandonp]

I've been looking at replacing our Microsoft Exchange Servers with Suse and Novell Groupwise. Has anyone had experience with this?

I'm needing software that encourages collaboration between our staff, but also allows integration with custom software through Open Standards. Will the most version of Groupwise allow this?

Is Groupwise an easy to administrate package?

---
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!

Re:Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[gregarican]

From what I had read on this, Microsoft Exchange Server is replaced with SUSE OpenExchange Server. It seems to be a good fit. That takes care of the server end. On the desktop end those shops still using Windows clients can continue running Microsoft Lookout as the messaging client. To the enduser everything is supposedly seamless.

Of course this is all based on research, not practical experience. I'd love to hear of some practical success stories making the switch.

Re:Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Kolab and Kontact. They're free.

Re:Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[Anonymous Coward]

We have just completed a conversion from MS Exchange to OpenExchange for a 120 user site and for the most part it's been a total success. We kept Outlook on the desktop during the server conversion and then have slowly coverted to Thunderbird over a couple of months (total PC support staff of 2 slows us down). The main complaints (from a small minority) was the lack of Tasks and a comprehensive contact mgr in Thunderbird. Hey, it's a FREE client! We're now looking into Groupwise to see if it makes sense to continue the migration over time.

Re:Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[Anonymous Coward]

Groupwise is stable and pretty easy to administrate.
You can set policy's for what you want to activate on the client side. As for integration with custom software; i dont know how this is dealt with on Groupwise for Linux. You should check out forge.novell.com and see what's available for developing to groupwise.

Re:Replacing Windows/Exchange with Suse/Groupwise

[Anonymous Coward]

The word is administer not administrate.

suse live cd/dvd images also on many http sites

[Anonymous Coward]

just some examples:

http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/Mirrors/ftp.suse. com/pub/suse/i386/live-cd-9.2/

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/i386/live-cd-9.2/

also check the general mirror list for the servers that serve bits with http.

http://www.suse.de/de/private/download/ftp/ausland .html

happy downloading

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[ultrabot]

I haven't been using the latest release, but I thought it had been updated?

No, as far as I know only Ubuntu has the new Gnome 2.8.

Re:Mmmmmm...

[mobets]

Didn't Novel or sombody buy suse... Wonder if that makes them an American distribution now? hmmmm...

FREE SUSE 9.2 LIVE CDs in parent post.

[suso]

Please mod up parent post.

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[Alan Cox]

Fedora Core 2 has had Gnome 2.6 for a good while now (and kernel 2.6). Ubuntu has 2.8, Fedora Core 3 release candidate has 2.8.

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[JarrodMJ]

Fedora Core 3 RC has Gnome 2.8 but only has KDE 3.2

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[Poetic Intensity]

Gentoo also has Gnome 2.8. It's in the unstable tree, but I've been using it for about 2 weeks without a problem.

DVD Player

[MacroMegaMan]

When will they come out with a SUSE distro that has a DVD player with it, such as PowerDVD? I'd love to use SUSE rather than Turbolinux for my new laptop.

Re:DVD Player

[pair-a-noyd]

Mplayer...
Totally free. Totally open source. Works great.
Plays everything I stick in it..

Re:DVD Player

[MacroMegaMan]

Yeah, I've seen that, it's a great utility, but I want something that the **AA will acknowledge as legal.

That's why I'm interested in LinDVD and PowerDVD.

Re:DVD Player

[pair-a-noyd]

but I want something that the **AA will acknowledge as legal.

Why? Do you work for them? Are you in fear of the movie police bursting in and arresting you for watching a DVD with a $$ program versus watching the same movie on the same computer and the same DVD drive but a FREE program instead??

Why do you have a burning desire to support these terrorists? Yes, the MPAA (and RIAA) is a terrorist organization. Most people here would agree with me on that. Do you have a guilt complex, do you feel bad that they aren't rich enough?
Do you feel it's your civic duty to use software that you have to BUY and that phones home and reports your viewing habits to this terrorist organization?

Do you just have too much money and feel "dirty" and feel that you can cleanse yourself by getting rid of that "dirty old money"??

If you say it's because you are watching movies at work, you should be fired. If you are watching movies at home, who's watching you watch movies??

Really...

Re:DVD Player

[natrius]

You've paid for the DVD. You've paid for the DVD drive. Yet for some reason you have a desire to pay extra to use those two things together. Chances are you've probably already paid extra to use the two together, but you only have the Windows software to do so since most retail DVD drives and new computers come with a DVD decoder. Don't beg the MPAA to make you pay again.

Re:DVD Player

[MacroMegaMan]

Becaue I want to cram it back in their faces when they attempt to come after me for an "illegal" video playback system.

That will *definately* give me $60 worth of satisfaction.

Re:DVD Player

[pair-a-noyd]

Becaue I want to cram it back in their faces when they attempt to come after me for an "illegal" video playback system.

Ok, but how are they going to know to come after you unless you volunteer the information to them?
Linux boxes using ANY of the currently available DVD players do NOT phone home.

On an M$ box, sure, you would need to worry about them spying on you but on a Linux box, that just ain't happening..

But I assure you, if you BUY a commercial Linux DVD playing program for your Linux box, it WILL phone home everytime you use it.

The beauty of Linux is that you do what ever you damn well please and NO ONE inhibits you, spies on you, limits you, owns your soul, or anything else.

It sounds to me like you are stuck in the M$ mindset. Are you new to Linux?

Most of us Linux zealots are M$ defectors because we are SICK AND TIRED of the heavy handed BS, the evil "licenses", the constant money pit, and the never ending battle for control of YOUR property.

My Linux box is 100% under MY control. I do with it as *I* please, when *I* please and however *I* please. No one else controls, limits, inhibits, restricts or manipulates ANYTHING on, in or to do with my Linux box. I watch ANY movie I want, any time I want, by any method I please.
If I want to stream a movie to a terminal in my kitchen and bedroom simultainously, then I do it. If I want to hack my player and make it region free, or remove the macrovision, or rip the DVD's to hard drive so I can have a vast library at my fingertips, I damn well do it.
And just for the record, I haven't watched a movie any newer than about 1975 in over 20 years and I listen to indie and classical music. So they can take that and stick it..

And if anyone THINKS they can tell me that I can't do these things, if they think they can tell me how I will or will not use my computer, they better bring a friggin SWAT TEAM because I don't bow to the god of Redmond and I don't worship at the alter of the MPAA or RIAA.

I'm militant about my freedom, I make it no secret that I back up my First Ammendment rights with my Second Ammendment rights..

Oh yeah, and $60 will buy you about 800 rounds of hollow point free speech enforcers..

Re:DVD Player

[marsonist]

The problem with mplayer is that it can sometimes be tough to find the dvdcsslibs and configure them properly... certainly enough to be a nuicense to those in the know, but enough to scare newbies away. Flawlessly functioning commercial alternatives exist, why not include them. I would find the extra couple $/ worth the price.

Re:DVD Player

[orcrist]

The problem with mplayer is that it can sometimes be tough to find the dvdcsslibs and configure them properly

I think you must be a little out of date. Mplayer already coms with css decoding built-in these days. The only extra stuff you need to download is if you want to watch stuff that needs win32 codecs.

-chris

Re:DVD Player

[pair-a-noyd]

Agreed, for the most part. It IS a pain for newbies to figure out.
Considering that Suse does NOT include mplayer.
Suse people have to go out and find it themselves and make it work. It ships with Mandrake (yuk) and probably just about every other distro but Suse chooses to not support and not supply mplayer.

For a newbie, they have no clue what apt-get, synaptic, packman, guru are.. These names, places, things mean nothing to them.

One thing everyone has to agree on, Linux people are brutal when it comes to helping newbies.
A typical newbie question.

Newbie: "Help! I can't watch a DVD movie on my new Linux computer, what do I do?"

Linux veteran: "RTFM! RTFM! God damn man, apt-get install mplayer-suite ! What's so friggin hard about that! God damn newbies....."

Really. Browse any number of the usenet groups or any of the many Linux forums.. You'll see it.
They have they attitude of "I figured it out by myself, let them figure it out too"

They play the "Tough Love" method. They believe that if they make the newbie learn it the hard way the newbie will learn the lesson better than if they GIVE them a simple, clear, detailed answer/fix.

Well, playing Sgt. Hardass MAY make for a few stronger troops but it totally drives the casual rubberneckers away. A few of the M$ people may hear all the noise and decide to take a look, they are met with instant hostility, not open arms. Yes, that's it, open source but not open arms..

So they recoil and continue to put up with the BSODS, spyware, viruses, etc. because it's what they are used to and because of the hostility of the Linux world.

I'm at 3 years as a full time Linux convert and I still have a LONG way to go. I totally abandoned M$ and converted because I had reached the snapping point, the point of no return.
People like myself, people already with some tech skills are the most likely converts.
But Joe Sixpack and Sally Soccer Mon aren't going to be converting anytime soon...

That's MY observation of the state of affairs of Linux..

John Said...

[Anonymous Coward]

"A live DVD image is also available on the SuSE website, for use by DVD."

And in the Book of Revelation....

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[sirReal.83.]

Such a lie. FC3 has had KDE 3.3.0 for a good while now. kdelibs is at 3.3.1, even.

Already in the mail....yes it is from Novell

[JarrodMJ]

"Your order from shopNovell has been shipped and your credit card has been charged. Please do not reply to this email. If you have a question regarding your order, please go to http://shop.novell.com/question and enter your question through our online interface." 9.1 was great but had wireless issues for me on an IBM T41p--hopefully this corrects those issues. The Live CD looked great too. Even has Novell next to the SuSE logo now.

Re:Mmmmmm...

[Andr0s]

Hmm.

I wasn't aware of that. By checking here, it'd indeed seem there's something of the sort goingon. But there is no mention of SUSE moving to States... so one could assume the programmers etc are still german?

In the end, who knows - after all, I don't think there are (m)any companies left out there which could be considered exclusively one-nation-owned?

SuSE

[Ambient_Developer]

I used to love SuSe the networking utilities that SuSe has are excellent, and I think YaSt is excellent for beginners that do not know anything about linux. I started off on SuSe (simply because it took up the most disks), and I eventually lost my love of YaSt (sometimes it has problems properly managing packages it seems). I would still use SuSe today it there were freely available ISO's on thier site (not live cd either). Last time I checked though the only way to get SuSe (free) is through a live FTP install, which I would rather not do. So I made the switch to mandrake, which seems also excellent.

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

well then ur a fucktard cuz you can get the iso here, here, and here. And if you'd like, you can even look at this HTML page on Suse's website which shows you the same links.

maybe you should become better informed before you start bitching about something that is clearly the result of your stupidity. loser.

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[JarrodMJ]

oops! My mistake---not intended to be a lie! Chill out

I got tired of upgrading SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of those people who installs stuff for free whenever possible.

So, I had SuSE 9.0 and SuSE 9.1 in the past installed from one of those public image CDs. My experience is that once you get SuSE installed, you keep updating the security fixes.

When you want to totally upgrade your system to
support newer hardware, you basically have to install/upgrade your system from scratch (such as
SuSE 9.0 -> SuSE 9.1) rather than just upgrade the
pieces you want (kernel, modules, etc.)

Technically you can upgrade the kernel from RPM but if something goes wrong, you really don't have any idea how to make it work afterwards. I was
looking into upgrading SuSE 9.1 kernel from 2.6.5 to 2.6.9 but several emails adviced me otherwise.

I switched to Gentoo. So far I am a very happy camper even though the initial installation was very frustrating and time consuming for all the devices. Now I no longer care if the next version
is 9.3 or 10.1 because I can get the latest and
greatest stuff anytime.

Again this view is from the home user perspective when I want my computer to support all the hardware I have. From corporate perspective I can see that IT Helpdesk will have much easier time supporting pre-packaged solutions such as SuSE 9.2.

Department of Redundancy Department

[oberondarksoul]

" A live DVD image is also available on the SuSE website, for use by DVD"

For use by DVD? Surely the phrase 'DVD image' take that into account...

Hmm. I think Ubuntu was first...

[Anonymous Coward]

with Kernel 2.6.8.1, GNOME 2.8 and more complete with Universe pacakages, I believe KDE 3.3 is also available in it, but I'm using GNOME.

My problem with SUSE

[AvantLegion]

I love SUSE for many great features, but I don't use it as my regular Linux OS. The main reason for this is that there is simply TOO much software that is NOT available through YAST/YOU. It seems that a lot of people use apt4rpm along with it, and track down a ton of 3rd party repositories, some of unknown origin (to me at least) and questionable veracity. Maybe I'm weird, but I hate being pointed to a repository with a domain name that I don't recognize, with no apparent ties to the distro project itself... just sorta *there*. Who's doing it? Why should I trust their packages?

I guess that's one reason I like Debian and Gentoo. If I need it, they've got it, and not in some package ghetto somewhere.

Plus, I think YAST is so handy, but useless in that I have to go to apt4rpm for so much software. It takes away one of the advantages to SUSE.

If I could access all the software I needed through YAST, and could do so with either repository efforts with ties to SUSE, or at least well-defined community project repositories (ie. not just an unlabeled "dump" site), then I could go back to sweet SUSE.

Maybe it's there, and I haven't looked close enough. Then call me an idiot and point me in the right direction.

Re:My problem with SUSE

[bcrowell]

If I could access all the software I needed through YAST, and could do so with either repository efforts with ties to SUSE, or at least well-defined community project repositories (ie. not just an unlabeled "dump" site), then I could go back to sweet SUSE.
Maybe it's there, and I haven't looked close enough. Then call me an idiot and point me in the right direction.
I tried SUSE this summer, and gave up on it for exactly the same reason. I asked around quite a bit, and no, there does not seem to be anything like a community software repository that would be comparable to what Debian, Gentoo, and FreeBSD have.

Re:My problem with SUSE

[MatthewB79]

there is simply TOO much software that is NOT available through YAST/YOU.

But I think it's important to appreciate that Suse has not made it impossible for you to use those YOU repositories for extra (and here's the clincher) UNSUPPORTED software.

I mean Novell/Suse is really in the business of selling support, both installation and ongoing for home users and enterprise. So they make a decision to provide (relatively inexpensive) support for a narrow field of selected applications available through YAST/YOU, rather than supporting anything anyone ever feels like installing from anywhere. This could put support costs through the roof.

I like Gentoo as much as anyone, but it doesn't make sense to compare Gentoo w/Portage to Suse w/YAST when Gentoo doesn't offer support contracts.

Re:My problem with SUSE

[AvantLegion]

>> But I think it's important to appreciate that Suse has not made it impossible for you to use those YOU repositories for extra (and here's the clincher) UNSUPPORTED software.

They haven't made it impossible. There's just nothing there for it.

>> I like Gentoo as much as anyone, but it doesn't make sense to compare Gentoo w/Portage to Suse w/YAST when Gentoo doesn't offer support contracts.

Sure it does. Nobody's saying SUSE needs to support everything under the sun. But it's important for some people to have easy access to certain software, even if it is unsupported.

I'm not saying I'm mad that it's not there by default. I'm saying that it's frustrating that there isn't even good community support filling that gap.

You can't ignore community support when talking about a distro. I appreciate SUSE as a ready-to-go business desktop solution. But I don't like the fact that it's LIMITED to that due to the lack of external community support.

Red Hat fosters community support through Fedora. Where's SUSE's efforts?

Re:My problem with SUSE

[G00F]

I've been a primary suse user for a while.

While Suse gets a lot of kodo's from me, you do have a point. One or two simple examples: K3b and gaim.

They do not offer updates for those(and many others). The sites that do are things like usr-local-bin or pacman. And for their rpms to work, you have to have the latest and greatest of everything all the time. If suse 9.2 came out, you have to have it, if an update to some random lib came out, you have to grab that too.

Then to top it off, it breaks "yast consistency" all the time. And then you end up with a foobard system that you spend even more time being frustrated.

And if you ever ask for help from SuSE's mailing list the nazis come out saying to write the program yourself, or use another distro, or quit trying to run the latest and greatest. There is nothing about wanting to be the leatest and greatest, just with gaim, you have to install it often to even remain compatible on various protocols. (and kopete or what ever is called was horribly ugly last I checked)

But then, why else would someone pay money on a distro, if it was more work than a free one. Many of the people on their mailings list don't seam to understand.

Go figure. They just need to standardize on a way to make one RPM work on all systems, using the lowest common libs posible, but maybe include support for the latest and greatest if the newer libs are available during install.

Re:My problem with SUSE

[anandrajan]

They do not offer updates for those(and many others). The sites that do are things like usr-local-bin or pacman. And for their rpms to work, you have to have the latest and greatest of everything all the time. If suse 9.2 came out, you have to have it, if an update to some random lib came out, you have to grab that too.

Then to top it off, it breaks "yast consistency" all the time. And then you end up with a foobard system that you spend even more time being frustrated.

I use SUSE 9.1 Pro at home and I have to agree with this. My experience was that if I used apt to upgrade packages from packman, usr-local-bin etc., they would invariably be broken. Audacity is a good example. I updated it using packman and it would crash all the time. I don't understand why the 3rd party RPMs on SUSE are so broken compared to 3rd party RPMS for other distros. [That last part has been my experience.]

Re:My problem with SUSE

[seguso]

Here's everything you need:

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.1-i386/

You can find the latest kde, mplayer, xine, libdvdcss, synaptic, etc.

Quick instructions:

First, install apt (which means installing three packages: lua, apt-libs and apt, if memory doesn't fail me. ). you can find these packages in the subdir suser-rbos.

Then, edit /etc/apt/sources.list according to the software you need.

Then apt-get update.

Now you can install every other packages like you would on debian.

For example, here's the line I usually add to sources.list:

rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/9.1-i386 suser-rbos packman-i686 packman base funktronics suser-scorot suser-tcousin suser-ollakka suser-oc2pus suser-jogley suser-gbv suse-people suser-guru suser-sbarnin rpmkeys ximian xorg wine

Why acrobat and not xpdf?

[Anonymous Coward]

acroBAT is AFAIK closed source while xpdf if open source. Why not support the free one, anybody can hack and improve???

SuSE queue

[Doc Ruby]

How about a Treo 650 "Outlook" clone client, using the PalmOne license of the MS Exchange sync protocol, syncing with GroupWise? Or even better, their free/OSS OpenExchange server? Cut out the middlewareman!

Since this is GPL stuff..

[d_jedi]

I should be able to download it for free from somewhere, right?

Re:Since this is GPL stuff..

[twener]

1) Not everything is under GPL (neither other Open Source licenses). SUSE includes software under proprietary licenses (which will be missing in the FTP version).
2) Sources where required are available at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/suse/src/
3) Read the GPL, it's not about giving you something for free.

Re:Since this is GPL stuff..

[d_jedi]

The GPL does essentially mean free, IMO:
1) One person buys software from vendor
2) Said customer puts program on website/BitTorrent/P2P for distribution (completely legal..) for free.

Unless I'm missing something..

SuSE Logo

[seiotek]

Hey when are you guys gonna change the SuSE Logo? http://www.suse.com/images/suse.png

SuSE 9.2 LiveDVD

[akulbe]

It was a disappointment. My idea was to try out 9.2 before buying the boxed set... because we're looking at offering it as the Linux solution to our customers. I'm not sure if the first problem I encountered is a licensing issue, or not... but when I booted the DVD on my desktop box at home, the modules wouldn't load for the Atheros-based wireless card. ath_pci.ko exists on the DVD, but it loads ath_hal.ko as well... which does NOT exist on the DVD. So... it will boot, and look pretty, but no networking is available. I thought I'd bring the LiveDVD to work and test it out on the ThinkPad laptops. A joke. When the LiveDVD would boot, it would get to the cloop part of the boot, and there were hex strings, scrolling the screen until I got an error message about no more memory being available. So it was of no use to me in either situation I tried it on. Big disappointment this time around... I wanted to check out the 9.2 boxed set, since one of the things mentioned in the release notes is improved wireless configuration tools. Wireless was the one and only issue I had with previous 8.x and 9.1 versions. All of this to say that it SUCKS that I can't even try it out. I'm going to see if I have any better luck with one of the LiveCD versions.

Re:SuSE 9.2 LiveDVD

[DavidH_Mphs]

works perfectly on my laptop. sony vaio p4m (power hog, no battery life). Agere wireless card.

Re:SuSE 9.2 LiveDVD

[m4gg0tbr41n]

As I recalled the module ath_pci.ko is closed source and binary only. That maybe the reason it's not on the DVD.

No mplayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Legal issues or lack of space?

Re:No mplayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you joking? Lack of space? Since when has SUSE cared about space!
Could be legal issues. Could be that SUSE hates multimedia. Could be that they don't even know it's not there.
Nobody really knows.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I JUST bought 9.1 last week!!!

[jerel]

Aaargh!! I JUST this week received in the mail my 9.1 CDs!! I sent an email to SUSE to see if they would offer me the 9.2 CDs for free. Other distros have done this. "If a new version comes out within 30 days of the version you just bought then you get the new one gratis." I hope they do that! Anybody know if they will?

Re:I JUST bought 9.1 last week!!!

[jojo1835]

I work for Novell, and in the past they have always been very good about taking care of customers that purchased a product that rev's less than 30 days later.

With that being said, SUSE Professional and Personal are not Enterprise software. They are hobbyist releases. If you want Enterprise software, you have to wait until Novell releases Novell Linux Desktop, which will be a corporate release based off the latest and greatest code. It's scheduled to ship early next year.

Good Luck!

have you seen those suse images on bittorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

where can i find em? woulda appreciate it.

the ed2k sources seem to be fine. any bt sources yet?

Re:have you seen those suse images on bittorrent?

[tannhaus]

You've actually been able to download it from ed2k? I am downloading around 10k/sec and I have enough bandwidth to do 400k/sec

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They dropped sparc support.

[BrookHarty]

Earlier this year, I switched to gentoo for sparc, as Suse dropped Sparc support. Shame, it was such an easy distro to use.

Amazon.ca doesn't have it...

[ArbitraryConstant]

But they suck anyway. I've had problems with 4 of the last 5 orders I placed with them. And with the exchange rate being what it is*, it's probably cheaper to order it from Amazon.com anyway. I guess Bush is good for something after all.

* USD$1.00 = CDN$0.821

site for boot iso

[Anonymous Coward]

The site I use has not been updated yet:

http://suse.osuosl.org/suse/i386/current/boot/

Re:Mmmmmm...

[Milo of Kroton]

Not all programmers. I work by SuSE and only few are from other countries. We however the Austrians have, and Switzerland. German speech make business easier.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Can SUSE 9.2 Pro Live DVD be used for full install

[Jettamann]

.. Or is the SUSE 9.2 Pro Live DVD only good for evaluation.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:How about never

[c_spencer100]

It's not about popularity, it's about Microsoft. To gain the right to ship OEM verions of Windows, most computer manufacturers had to sign a contract, part of which states that they can't ship any other OS with their hardware. At the time, Linux wasn't nearly as big as it is now, so companies didn't realize they were signing away their rights as much as they were. In fact, I think Dell is really screwed because I believe they also have such an agreement with Intel as well.

I thought the same thing, seems a bit too soon

[bogie]

Wasn't 9.1 only generally available 4-5 months ago in the US? Isn't this pushing it for an "enterprise distro"?

I just got my 9.1 evals like a month ago.

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we know you're not lying about it being a mistake?

XFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they manage to ship with a working install on XFS filesystem this time ?

ThinkPad 600e: close but no cee-gar...

[MsGeek]

My ThinkPad 600e is still nothing but trouble as far as sound goes. The only time sound worked was when the 4Front guys configured it for me using the payware OSS/Linux at SCALE2X last year, on a HD install of Knoppix. Even then, I had to su to root in a console and type in #soundon to get sound working. The attempts to add it to the init scripts all came up zeroes.

As is the classic gripe regarding Linux and weird hardware: "It works just fine under Windows!" (2K SP4 in my case) At least the video overlay for Xine has been untangled under its current Debian Sarge install.

Oh yeah, the Debian Sarge installer still doesn't leave you with a workable system. The basic-basics are there, but you have to apt-get/synaptic/aptitude for a great deal of the software that is normally a part of a good desktop install, (like Knoppix) and there is a lot of tuning needed to get it "just so."

Someone needs to fork Knoppix and create the perfect "install from Knoppix" script. The current script (I forget the name of it) is not very good, and knx-hdinstall doesn't allow partitioning. A Knoppix-based but Debian compliant distro, specifically for ThinkPads, would rock the house.

Aside from the sound blues, I love Linux on my ThinkPad 600e. I went from a 10GB HD to a 40GB HD recently, and I gave Linux the lion's share of the HD. 33GB as opposed to 7GB for Windows. I also have a Panasonic slot-loading Combo drive...the slot loading action gives the total package some added 1337-points. Always gets oohs and ahhs at the LUG. Can't wait to start burning CDs on this thing. w00t.

I'd totally dispense with the Windows partition, but the University I'm bound for specifically requests a machine running Windows, Office 2000 or XP, and SPSS as part of what I need to go. So meh, 7GBs out of 40 is devoted to the Dark Side. People with ThinkPad T42s have to deal with a recovery partition about that big, oh well. And 2K is not that bad when you compare it to XP. Or Windows(not for)ME.

Re:ThinkPad 600e: close but no cee-gar...

[Anonymous Coward]

Michelle,
I configured a Thinkpad 600E (SuSE 9.1 Personal, KDE 3.3, & WiFi) about a month ago for a friend. Getting audio to work took some digging: Google the SuSE forums for "Thinkpad 600e audio" for comprehensive directions. Tweaking to compensate for those tin can speakers took longer than getting the audio working.
The Kanotix and Mepis version of the Knoppix installers work fine if you really dislike opening a root terminal (Knoppix menu) and typing the new (since last year sometime)"knoppix-installer" command. You can use of of the two - I forget which right now - as a vanilla Sarge installer. The latest bug-hunter version of Kanotix 9A is designed to be distro updated. As always, YMMV and RTFM.
-Andy the Anonymous and Paranoid Coward

Re:ThinkPad 600e: close but no cee-gar...

[MsGeek]

knoppix-installer doesn't work right...I had to clean up after its messes a few times before just using knx-install. Of course, there may have been some improvements since last year.

BTW: you can bypass the "tin can" speakers with a set of headphones or computer speakers. Those little postage-stamp speakers aren't worth a damn. I like the sound with headphones the best.

This is why a canonical tld for LANs is needed...

[MsGeek]

I nominate .lan as the candidate. It's just three letters and it just makes sense. That's what I use here in my home, and that's what your pet MCSEs should use as well. The TLD .local was proposed, but voted down, way back in the day. ICANN should reserve .lan for Local Area Networks, just as there are reserved IP address ranges for local, NATted networks.

open source?

[samantha]

I just got 9.1 Professional. I noticed a peculiar thing. The only source is hidden a way on an unmarked DVD. The things there (a definite subset) that have source almost uniformly have the source of an older version than the version installed by 9.1. Am I missing something? If I am not then how exactly is this "open source"?

Re:open source?

[tannhaus]

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/src/

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/9.1/rpm/ sr c/

Not pre-shipped but...

[Knara]

I just got (yesterday) a Dell Inspiron 600m and installed SUSE 9.1 on it.

Believe it or not, the install worked better out of the box than installing XP Pro and using their shrinkwrapped driver CDs.

As far as I can tell, everything was detected automatically. I haven't played with it much yet, but nothing leaps out as broken or non-functional.

And for us techno-types, that's pretty nice.

Re:Not pre-shipped but...

[DesserttRatt]

I ran across the same situation. SuSe 9.1 on a Dell Inspiron 8500 EVERYTHING worked correctly from the start... Including the modem and the port replicator (neither of which worked correctly with WindowsXP which it was shipped with without a few frustrating hours of effort)

Ideal for developers???

[febuiles]

Ideal for developers??? I hope they have improved this version because the gift DVD (I wanted to try the distro) didn't had gcc or emacs, if that's what you call ideal for developers.... On the other side, it couldn't detect my 802.11 so screw it, tried Ubuntu and I'm pretty happy right now.

It shipped last week

[ChiralSoftware]

If you pre-ordered it directly from the Suse website, they shipped it late last Friday. I got mine on Tuesday. It looks like it's going to be a great system. 9.1 was already excellent. They do still need to smooth out the UI differences between Qt and non-Qt apps, so that, for example, OpenOffice will work the same way that everything else works. It looks like they are moving in that direction. I really think that KDE/Qt is far beyond Windows XP and is up there with Mac OS X, but the problem is that non-KDE apps break the seamless experience aspect of it. Have fun.

------------
Create a WAP server

"Expert Syndrome" maybe?

[Da VinMan]

I haven't tried SUSE yet, but I suspect your co-worker suffers from something I call "Expert Syndrome". Briefly, this is a situation where someone considers themselves an expert with something and they tinker with it all the way through its lifetime; from install to replacement. As a result, the system never gets a chance to operate within its default settings. Inevitably, it's always the default settings that provide the most reliable experience because those are the settings that the system will most commonly get QA'ed under.

I've seen this problem with programmers (Java and VB programmers), Linux users, Windows administrators, Windows "power users", XBOX owners (especially the ones that mod it), TiVo owners (especially the ones that hack it), and countless other variations. It seems that geeks in general are susceptible to this problem. I suppose it's just part of the cost of being curious.

I've pretty much given up on trying to help this category of "expert" though; even when I'm sure I know the problem's solution cold. Invariably, they do have enough knowledge to accomplish their aims most of the time. But, they don't have that last 10% or so of knowledge required to really know when to back off from an alteration that's causing problems. Consequently, they don't know when to ask for help either; so offering to help is pointless. And if they DO ask for help, I'll help them if I can, but the advice usually gets ignored about half the time without even trying out the idea.

Oy!

Re:Doesn't fedora have the new Gnome KDE and Kerne

[sirReal.83.]

er, sorry, i didn't mean to make that post sound angry - blame it on the Kaffeine ;)

xpdf can't get no respect

[Anonymous Coward]

It's quick, efficient, let's you do things you can't do with Acrobat reader, yet it's never the default.

The Gnome pdf viewer, based on xpdf, is fast and simple like xpdf, but it won't let you cut and paste.

People say that xpdf is ugly, that it doesn't fit the asthetic of the desktop.

Acrobat fits in? Acrobat is pretty?

No respect.

SLES source RPMs

[rsax]

So I've browsed the Red Hat FTP sites and they seem to have source RPM packages for each Red Hat Enterprise Linux release and its updates. My question is: isn't SUSE obligated to provide SRPMs of SUSE Linux Enterprise as well? Could someone please shed some light on this?

Thanks for the detailed criticism.

[Nailer]

Suse and Redhat, while perfect on the former count, DO NOT OFFER THE FULL BENEFITS OF F/OSS SOFTWARE.

OH NOES~!

Red Hat as a company does not believe in proprietary software.

Care to provide more detail? As all the software in RHEL and Fedora is Open Source, source packages for which are available from ftp.redhat.com. Hence distributions like Whitebox and CAOSity, which take those source packages and redistribute binaries for free.

Likewise for Red Hat GFS (which is Open Source because Red Hat brought the company and made it so, as they are doing with Netscape Directory Server).