A Closer Look at SUSE 10

SilentBob4 writes to tell us that MadPenguin is running a review of the recently released SUSE 10.0. From the review: "Novell has made some interesting changes in distribution and development since our last review of SUSE Linux. Many say it's for the better and I'd say I'm inclined to go with that theory. To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd see the day SUSE opened up it's doors to the community to help expand and concert development efforts, but here we are in a world where SUSE is open and still making geeks sweat every time a new release comes out"

Comments

Excusee-my-SuSE

[syntap]

SuSE 9.3 was the distro that finally got me seriously considering cutting the Windows cord, and 10 handed me the scissors. It's such a great, complete distro that's easy to install and maintain, easy to customize. It's the most polished distro I have used. Between SuSE 10 and Ubuntu the reasons for sticking with Windows and its licensing/upgrading hell are slim. Yeah I'll still need Windows for some things (mostly PHB stuff) but SuSE is my new default boot.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[Cenuij]

You know what? Suse is the distro that actually did make me cut the windows cord. The only thing i missed for a while was playing some games, but since I discovered cedega that's a no brainer now too. Windows free and proud.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[MiKM]

I've never understood what "just works" means. From my experience, every operating system (Windows, Mac, *nix) always has some problem/missing feature that needs a workaround.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[heinousjay]

Have some of this Koolaid. Why, it's Aqua flavor, of course.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[gmuslera]

If performance issues worries you, maybe you would want to try SUPER (SUSE Performance Enhanced Release). Is one of the nice things of being open, that people start to build around it new approachs.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ekhm, it appears we have another someone who is clueless about how physical RAM is being allocated nowadays.

See, what you saw was actually pretty good. If you pay for RAM, it'd better be always utilized to the fullest extent by the OS. Instead of being 'empty', your RAM was put to some use and acted as a disk cache. It's a totally weird misconception that free RAM is good. It's not good. It's your investment being used to heat up your room and for no other reason. Think about it. That'd be a pretty expensive heater you've got there.

Cheers, Kuba

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[IANAAC]

Have you used Yast2 and looked at the supplementary wireless drivers available?

If not, I recommend it. They've worked hard (meaning with third parties) on wireless support.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[swillden]

SUSE's configuration for performace simply sucks, it kept leaking memory and using all the RAM all the time.

Hmm. You say it "leaked" memory, but what you described doesn't sound like leakage at all.

Just opening and closing programs would increase the RAM usage, damn it even just moving a window would use up more RAM. That is just half of it, the system monitor would also indicate that disk cache was using half the RAM all the time.

Only half? A perfectly ideal operating system would use all of your system's RAM all of the time. The RAM not being actively used by running programs should ideally all be used to store stuff from your hard drive that you're going to need shortly so that it's quick to access it when you need it. Unfortunately, in the real world your OS has no way of knowing what data you will need ten seconds from now, so it has to fall back on just keeping in memory the stuff that you already needed, on the theory that if you needed it once, there's a good chance you'll need it again. After all, it costs nothing to keep that stuff in memory. If some program actually needs the memory, then the OS will simply "evict" the cached data to make room. This eviction process takes negligible time and requires no disk interaction so there's really no downside to it.

For example, my laptop has 1.5GiB of RAM, of which only about 100MiB is currently unused. The disk cache is presently consuming nearly 1.2GiB of RAM, all data that I've touched recently, I'm sure. I would be concerned if my disk cache *weren't* that large after my machine has been up for a few days, because it would indicate that the OS wasn't properly taking advantage of my system RAM. This is running Debian, BTW.

still SUSE would eat RAM little by little until a reboot was necesary.

So what you're saying is that just as the system really got around to making maximum use of your RAM to optimize system performance, you forced it to discard all of that information :-)

I am now a Ubuntu user and the performace out of the box is great.

Now this I find very odd. SuSE and Ubuntu both use very very similar kernel versions, and it's the kernel that does things like disk caching, so I find it difficult to believe that you'd see greatly different performance. Perhaps it's KDE vs GNOME? KDE may have more libraries that would tend to get cached, but I don't think the difference would be huge.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[some guy I know]

At present, if she prints to the HP LJ4 she gets the square of the number of copies she requests

The workaround is easy: request the square root of the number of copies that she actually needs.
For example, if she wants 5 copies, she should request 2.2360679775 copies.
Simple, no?

Why do people always review the install?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people always review the install? I mean seriously, who gives a shit. I haven't heard anyone complaining about an install since 2000, and even in 1998 it really wasn't that hard with some documentation scribbled on a napkin. There's even a howto for installing linux on the carcass of a dead badger.

Microsoft isn't pushing their OS for its easy install. You never hear about OS X's install.

Why is linux judged by it's ease of install!? Who gives a flying rats ass. Does it work after it's installed? Probably not every well.

Re:Why do people always review the install?

[saskboy]

I don't see how this got an insightful moderation, since it's just a troll.

How many people you know have bought a computer with Linux pre-installed, or comes with Linux recovery CDs? Macs come with OS-X already on it, so people don't tend to install it. If a Linux distro doesn't have a friendly install process, then its not going to be accepted by the masses. It's nothing personal against Linux, it's just a fact of the market place, and getting Linux's foot in the computer door.

Re:Why do people always review the install?

[i_should_be_working]

His point was that since every distro has a very easy install these days (with the exception of some distros that aren't meant for noobs) there's no point in talking about the install in a review. It's a waste of space and time.

For distros like SUSE, Mandriva etc. the only thing that needs to be said about the install is 'it's easy'.

Way too many reviews talk about the install way too much and then don't spend enough space talking about how it is to actually use the distro.

What a media-rich Distro Review

[BlueRayMan]

http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse10/siia/s use10install.html

I've never seen a Flash movie of a Linux distro install before! Nice.

I tested the boot.iso on an XP box, until it failed to detect that I was using a MN-510 (a usb wireless networking adapter made by Microsoft.)

So thumb's up on this review -- but the distro is not a smashing success, because it fails to properly embrace the MS switcher. The test is not can we install it--it's "can the previous generation..."

Hardware support

[applecrumble]

I always find it unfair when Linux distros are labelled poor because they don't support somebody's hardware, like their wireless card not working. The Linux developers would happily develop drivers for software if they were given the hardware specs to do so, but that isn't the case and drivers must be created with little help from the manufacturer. For example, I'm sure Novell would love to have native drivers for every wireless card out there, but if the companies won't co-operate, the best they can do is the ugly hack of using the win32 driver wrapped in an emulation layer. It's similar to complaining about why you can't play Playstation 2 games on Xbox hardware; the latter was never designed to work on the former and Microsoft wouldn't offer any help to get it working, but that doesn't mean Playstation 2 games are rubbish.

geek sweat

[BushCheney08]

...but here we are in a world where SUSE is open and still making geeks sweat every time a new release comes out

I'm fairly certain the geeks would still be sweating regardless of whether a new version of SuSE came out...

And totally unrelated, how cool would it have been if Digital Research had owned SuSE at one point? I would have loved to have a machine running DR-SuSE sitting around the office.

Re:Which distro to recommend ?

[Malor]

Tell them to try LiveCDs first, just to tinker. They let you play with Linux with zero commitment. Just be sure to explain that a 'real' install will be a lot faster, because it runs from the hard drive.

When you're ready for a hard drive install, I've been recommending Mandrake/Mandriva for new users for several years now. I started using it in the 8.X series, and after a short readjustment period, it was a total Windows replacement for me. I felt a lot MORE productive on Mandrake than on Windows, once I'd figured it out. It had some rough edges, but overall worked very, very well.

I've used a lot of Linux desktops over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat up to the 7.X series, Slackware, SLS), and I've always thought Mandrake was the best. (though Ubuntu is pretty nice too... you might want to try both.)

I don't have any experience with Suse, because for a long time you had to pay to get the best install options. The free version was purposely awkward to install, so I never bothered with it. Suse's loss, too... I liked Mandrake and I've sent them, geeze, three or four hundred bucks by now, probably. I just didn't want to pay BEFORE seeing the product. Now that they're more GPL-ish, they may be a very good spot for new users to tinker. I'll download and play with this one and see what's up with it.

For your friends, though, definitely start them on LiveCDs. They're easy to use, cheap to download and burn, and if they aren't impressed, all they have to do is shut down and eject the CD.

Upgrading was a pain and other issues

[AaronW]

I ran into several issues when I upgraded from 9.3 to 10 last weekend.

In some ways I think SuSE 10 is worse than 9.3... I ran into a number of issues, usually with YaST.

First of all, the SCSI device list changed and it would not mount my RAID drives... a quick edit of /etc/fstab fixed that, but YaST was useless. What I hate is that the new YaST install would not allow me to go in and fix it during the upgrade process. I believe I was able to edit this in previous versions.

Second, the YaST printer tool refused to work properly... it would just hang every time I tried to run it, as did lpoptions and just consume the CPU. I finally managed to get that working after manually deleting a number of configuration files and rebooting. For the life of me I still can't figure out why rebooting worked.

Third, I ran into more YaST problems with my sound card. YaST somehow got corrupted and would not allow me to edit or delete my sound card settings to reconfigure it. After deleting a bunch of configuration files and reinstalling I got that working.

Fourth, Like 9.3, SuSE does not work with my TV capture card... it used to work with the 8.2 and I think 9.0 and worked, though without sound, in 9.3. It's a Pinnacle PCTV Studio PRO capture card based off of a standard BTTV chip.

And last but not least, SuSE no longer includes a DVD with all of the source RPMs. This wouldn't be so bad, but I've spent the last two days trying to download the Xorg source RPM from their incredibly slow FTP site so I can apply a patch to it to use my Logitech MX1000 mouse properly... I applied the patch to previous versions to enable the Linux event mechanism from a Gentoo patch I found. This is what really pisses me off. Also, it looks like all of the DVD and CD ISOs are mirrored, but not the source files.

I still have a ways to go to see how the upgrade went, but this is my first impression. Oh, and during the upgrade it barfed on the quicktime library include files... renaming and moving /usr/include/quicktime fixed that.

I've upgraded a few other machines which have much simpler installs that went a lot better, but still not without a couple of incidents.

Part of the problem with YaST is just trying to figure out which files each part of YaST is trying to use and is barfing on.

All in all, so far I think SuSE 10 is a little less reliable than 9.3... I was hoping it would be better because I really need to upgrade my home server which has been running over 2 years without a reboot running SuSE Professional 8.2, which as far as I can tell is their best release to date in terms of stability. Sadly, SuSE has pulled all of their patches and is no longer supporting this version, or if they are I certainly cannot afford it for a home machine.

Hopefully for 10.1 they'll have things better stabilized as well as have support for S.M.A.R.T. for SATA, which is another thing I want for when I rebuild my server.

Some things worked quite well, but there is still a long way to go.

-Aaron

Using openSUSE 10 @ Home

[mymaxx]

I have tried several distros: Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva and Ubuntu to name a few. So far, openSUSE 10 is the first to support both my Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 B/G wireless card with WPA support. All I had to do was download the firmware from the Intel site and use SUSE's wizards to get WPA configured.

Just installed SuSE10 last night

[Billly Gates]

Pro:
- Very easy to use.
- Great distro for geeks who want to work in linux and not on linux spending a weekend or two to set everything up.
- Its a more professionally and less buggy compared to past versions of the distro and Novell brings a corporate appeal.
- SuSE10 automatically mounts windows paritions by default and sets up icons to the drives automatically no matter which wm you use. Great way to save time
- SuSE10 devfs automatically mounts devices and creates desktop shortcuts to the device such as my ipod-mini. No need to do it manually and adding a shortcut errr link

Cons:
- SuSE intentionally crippled its media player citing patent concerns on some codecs
- Nvidia can be added but the drivers are known to not be as stable as the windows versions. Bad if you are a cad user
- Software such as XFCE4 and other classics have been removed from the software repository. This means you have to install it yourself.
- Buggy still but alot better. I can't log into another other wm but gnome. If I create another user account I can do it with that account. Just not the one I setup. GDM/KDM will always pick gnome no matter which wm I select. Also my MS scrolling mouse which worked in previous versions of SuSE no longer works.
- KDM/GDM is hiddin and automatic logins are the default. This drove me absolutely mad as I like to log into different wm's. GDM configuration was removed from the gnome menu's. After pulling my hair out for 15 minutes I found it under the add user in yast??
- Yast is still slow as always.

So its a mix for me. I am keeping netbsd for serious work and SuSE in the meanwhile to do my regular work in since I dont have a good 2-3 weeks to configure NetBSD for my tastes.

And if you get even CLOSER...

[Junior J. Junior III]

It all starts looking like a bunch of 1s and 0s.

Easier to redistribute as well

[Anonymous Bullard]

SUPER sounds like a grand idea to spread the SUSE community wider outside corporate confines.

1-CD Installs (performance-patched with Minimal, KDE and GNOME-centric sets) in particular are very welcome as the official SUSE and SUSE-OSS DVDs or 5-CD sets are on the heavy side and most users don't need anywhere near the full set of packages included there. The 1-CD Install set, as Ubuntu has already shown, keeps the user experience simple (while allowing for future expansion) and lowers the barrier for user-to-user proliferation of the distro.

The growing community around the OSS distro versions also helps Novell/SUSE to grow the momentum and mindshare of their commercial and supported releases. It'll be easier for Novell/SUSE to sell systems and support to businesses and other institutions when there may already be people around who are familiar and comfortable with their widely available free-for-all offerings. It'll also encourage third parties to pay more attention to making SUSE compatible packages.

I hope they'll get around to creating the planned liveCD version of SUPER as well, as an easily redistributable alternative to the current liveDVD offering.

FWIW, since Ubuntu stormed the scene I've mainly promoted it to people interested in trying out Linux, but for the technically-inept I've still recommended a SUSE box. These new OSS versions, and in particular the planned liveCD version, would dramatically lower the barrier of trying SUSE out but I'd still recommend a box set for the inexperienced users due to their better QA, less breakage and availability of official support.