Suse 9.1 Reviews? 406
Bruha asks: "There have been several reviews of SuSE 9.1 lately in the online press. However I'd like to hear what the buying public has to say about Novell's first release of SuSE since buying the company. I'm currently typing this article from SuSE 9.1 x86_64 and I have to say past a few quirks I'm really starting to love this distro and admire how polished it has become since 8.2 my last SuSE purchase. What are other's opinions of the software after trying it out and what problems and new things have you discovered? And if you're sticking with it after a move from another distro why did you decide to stick?"
Suse x64 and 3ware RAID (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful if you're going to put an Escalade 850x RAID card into an AMD 64 box and run SUSE linux on it. I've been having hell trying to get it to work with 9.0. The vendor is sending 9.1 around on Monday (so this story came a couple of days early for me
The hardware is fine (works great in Windows), but the entire system can hang in 5 minutes once it's had Suse 9.0 installed on it. For some reason, the windows drivers are a lot better as well - the peak read and write speeds are higher
Just a cautionary tale - I'll be as happy as anyone if 9.1 fixes it though
Simon
I just went from 9.0 to 9.1 (Score:5, Informative)
I do wish, however, that there were an app like Sonar or Cubase (and no, I haven't and won't consider running those under Wine.
So Far so good. (Score:2, Informative)
Both Gome2.4 and KDE3.2 work very well.
I've had some issues with my Haupauge card though.
The 2.6 kernel seems to be working fine.
I can see myself using this quite a bit.
Hardware (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:4, Informative)
and it' s the kernel version downloaded via YOU.
It's been a while, but for comparison ... (Score:5, Informative)
- Beautiful boot screen and polished feel.
- Easy installation from freely available CD-ROM images.
- Automatic hardware detection via kudzu, at install time and when adding new devices.
- Updates released regularly with the Fedora Legacy Project [fedoralegacy.org] providing updates for older distributions.
- Many pre-built RPM packages are available on-line from projects such as Samba and otherwise.
- Many great console & X11-based applications included by default.
- Files and configurations are in logical places.
How does SuSE compare on some of these points? If I recall correctly, their installer made me select my network card myself, whereas Fedora did it on its own without me having to open up my machine.Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that the source for all the things on side 1 of the DVD is on side 2 as well...
As for 'real package management', I think (and I've only just started to use YaST today!) it's great. No problems with package management...
Simon
It's good.... (Score:5, Informative)
As a longtime redhat guy, I've found the new distribution for me.
jeff
Wrong crowd... (Score:2, Informative)
And you're asking Slashdot?
Seriously, my only experience with Suse was my attempt to install it. Failure! It wouldn't recognize half of my hardware, including my network card. So I couldn't install it via the network install (which seemed to be the only way I was allowed to do it). I gave up and installed Mandrake in record time - it recognized everything right away and has worked beautifully.
And people claim Linux is easy to install/use/learn. If Suse is representative of Linux, we're in trouble. Mandrake and Knoppix are what I use to show off Linux.
Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:3, Informative)
Yes they do. Sure, it might not be installed by default, but it's right there on the CD. Yes, if you want to do crazy stuff, go with Gentoo - nothing is more flexible. If you want a solid desktop distro, SuSE and Mandrake work quite well.
Glorious (Score:5, Informative)
Everything works. That pretty much sums it up. Printing, seeing the network, burning CDs, listening to an NPR stream. Perfect. No extra configuration, aside from downloading lame and the full MPlayer from Packman (both of which SUSE can't distribute).
--
Evan
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
suse 9.1 iso downloads here (read: informative) (Score:5, Informative)
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-cd-dvd-w
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-a
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86_64-a
ed2k://|file|suse-linux-professional-9.1-x86-i386
and more..
watch out for the spaces in the urls that get added by slashdot
Since 6.1 (Score:5, Informative)
The main sticking point for me was at that time it was the only distro that could recognise and auto-configure 2 seperate video cards for multi-head X right out of the box. It follows standard (mostly) structure so other software is easy to compile. It seems like there is the Redhat way and the Common way. I would by far recommend SuSE for newbies as the YaST tool (install/admin) is very, very easy to use. Network browsing is impressive to have working right out of the box.
I'm having allot of fun!
Re:More polished? (Score:3, Informative)
Yast has allot more ability to configure network services in 9.x
You don't think there is much difference between a 2.4 kernel and a 2.6 kernel?
KDE from 3.1 to 3.2 is dramatically better/faster. Has tighter integration with PIM/kmail.
from LILO to Grub.
Now, it would be true however, that your 56k modem still isn't any faster.....
Re:Suse x64 and 3ware RAID (Score:5, Informative)
you will pry debian out of my cold dead hands .... (Score:2, Informative)
i bought suse, i like it, but nothing is as slick as apt, or as refreshing as not having to worry about yast overwriting your manualy configured settings.
oh and don't get me started on rpm, rpm just has to go.
Jem Matzan Reviewed SUSE (Score:4, Informative)
SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal Edition Review [thejemreport.com]
SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional x86/AMD64 [thejemreport.com]
Jem has lots of great info at his site.
Re:More polished? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hardware (Score:3, Informative)
On the Nvidia card, after an on-line update, you should see a recommended update (not checked) to download the nvida drivers. If you don't have the source installed you will see an nvidia.install.log in
Re:Nooberly (Score:2, Informative)
think I found a few forums talking about the same problem, and one of them seemed to solve it, but with strange methods that were beyond my ken.
Oh yeah, you mean the one where you click on the "Install Nvidia Drivers" checkbox in yast, right? yeah, that's really strange, I decided to click on that thingie, and then I had accelerated 3D next time I logged in.
I suppose I should actually bother to learn Linux, but everytime I open the console I black out, and wake up five hours later choking on my own tongue. Is that normal for a first time user?
Probably not - sounds like you need to stick to the GUI
Re:ATI Radeon 9xxx with accelerated 3D support ? (Score:1, Informative)
SUSE 9.1 on a large machine (Score:2, Informative)
SUSE 9.1 works great on this. I installed it on 250G RAID0 off the megaraid controller.... however, I have had a few X lockups... probably due to the nvidia drivers (running with the latest) or XFree86.
In general, it's a minor upgrade (despite the move to the 2.6 kernel) from 9.0. Anyone who has 9.0 and it satisfied with 9.0, won't gain too much with 9.1 (unless you want to go thru a few annoyances with 2.6.. like SCSI device abstraction abstracting your LVM devices a 2nd time!!).
IMHO, 9.0 users can live without it. 8.2 users might want to consider the upgrade. Anyone using SUSE before 8.2 should definitely consider the upgrade. I'll probably stick it out with my more predictable 9.0 and leave 9.1 for just testing.
Re:Wonderful article... (Score:3, Informative)
Try APIC & ACPI =off (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's been a while, but for comparison ... (Score:5, Informative)
Beautiful boot screen and polished feel.
SUSE has a nice soothing look, rounded curves, synced Qt, GTK and framebuffer looks. Theres a simple progressbar with a "Press F2 for details", and even the detail view of boot is on a subtle pattered background and rounded corner view. Very nice.
Easy installation from freely available CD-ROM images.
SUSE has a downloadable Live CD (like Knoppix) or a FTP install disk. In the case of the latter, you download packages on demand rather than downloading all the packages. Considering the professional version weighs in at 8 CDs and 4 DVDs, there's a damn good reason (actually, 2 double sided DVDs, one side is 64bit, the other is 32bit).
The professional edition comes with quite a bit of commercial software. A DVD video editor, SQL Anywhere Studio, etc. That version is not downloadable, of course. That's pretty much the difference between personal and pro.
Automatic hardware detection via kudzu, at install time and when adding new devices.
SUSE uses yast, which does the same thing. I recently swapped a hard drive from a dead laptop into a completely different brand, and upon bootup, it found everything from the correct video and sound settings to the modem and network.
One nice thing is that yast embeds in the KDE Control Center and has a standalone X and curses version... all with the exact same menu and interface layout. If KDE+X or just X is available, it uses it, if not, it runs just fine. Handy when you're using the same tool to poke around your desktop in the Control Center and then later to work on a server.
Updates released regularly with the Fedora Legacy Project [fedoralegacy.org] providing updates for older distributions.
I'm not sure how EOL works. I was running 8.2 (still am, on the non-dev servers), and online_update works just fine.
Many pre-built RPM packages are available on-line from projects such as Samba and otherwise.
SUSE uses rpm.
Many great console & X11-based applications included by default.
Ditto. I've been using the professional version since I moved from Red Hat (server) and Mandrake (desktop), and I've set everything up for a workgroup, web and mail servers, my system and a fileserver right from the packages available on the disks. With two exceptions. lame and MPlayer are missing and not complete (respectively). You get a warning when running the latter, telling you about that, and when you run anything that wants lame, they've patched it so it tells you about Qgg and explains that, due to patent reasons, they can't include lame. And they give you the URL for "more information"... which is where you can download it. I used Packman for rpms for both. All codecs for MPlayer and a nice working lame. I note that the SUSE notices silently disappear after lame is installed. Slick, and a nice solution for a frustrating situation.
Files and configurations are in logical places.
SUSE was the first LSB certified distro. I've been using *nix for a little over two decades now. It feels perfectly fine. YMMV, but I'd imagine that RH is LSB by now.
--
Evan
Re:you will pry debian out of my cold dead hands . (Score:3, Informative)
First of all: rpm is both a format an a tool. Both are fine. The format used in debian is deb and the tool used in debian is dpkg. Both are fine too.
Suse's apt-get equivalent is yast. But if you don't like yast, just install apt [sf.net].
Second: yast md5sums all your configfiles and refuses to overwrite any modified files:
So what's your problem with suse again?
Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:2, Informative)
Hope that helps.
Switched from redhat/fedora (Score:3, Informative)
I liked fedora core 1, it works pretty well for me and runs my apps, but I was keeping my eye on the market and looking at alternatives as usual. This week I switched my work desktop from redhat/fedora core 1 to Suse 9.1 - I'm impressed by the fact that everything "just works" with suse, and that it comes with absolutely everything but the kitchen sink. I installed the nvidia drivers with one click in the yast menu, and will be installing ut2004 after finals...
I'd tried mandrake numerous times over the years, and it always seemed "cute but flaky", whereas suse is more along the lines of "cute and solid".
Re:Intensely Disliked SUSE 9.1 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Contempt (Score:3, Informative)
We have nothing but good to say about RedHat, especially when it comes to running Oracle on RHEL. Oracle performs so much better on RHEL than other distributions it's not even funny.
Re:For Desktop or a Server OS? (Score:3, Informative)
As for additional servers, they have plenty enough now.
SuSE 9.1: good experience, unproven kernel (Score:3, Informative)
I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to configure my laptop's wireless card (D-Link DWL-650) in SuSE than it had been under Redhat 9. The graphical boot is beautiful and the default configuration is sleek and easy to use. I won't get into the whole default Gnome versus default KDE issue except to say that I liked the look of their default desktop better than the default desktop look of Fedora.
I upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1 three days ago and so far my only complaint is that my Cisco VPN client refuses to build under it. I've tried and tried, along with several other SuSE users in my office, to get the client to build under the default 2.6 kernel with no luck. Googling for help returns only a few references to discussion groups in German that say (roughly translated) "konfoundit! Cisco VPN clienten builden broken! Sheizer!"
I attribute the incompatibiltiy of Cisco's VPN client with SuSE 9.1 to SuSE's need to be on the bleeding edge. They're (arguably) the first big distro to release a version with 2.6 as the default and they've done an admirable job. Unfortunately, Cisco isn't going to get their ass in gear and support 2.6 until almost EVERYONE is using 2.6 as their default kernel. Oh, well.
If anyone has found or knows of a way to get the Cisco VPN client to build on SuSE 9.1, please post.
Suse 9.1 Personal - a review (Score:3, Informative)
BACKGROUND
A little perspective: I was Apple from the ][ up to a PowerMac. Then I was Windows up until 98. I've been using linux, primarily Redhat, for over 5 years. I have a server running Redhat 9.0, and a desktop that's been running Redhat 7 -> 9.0. I switched to linux for three reasons: 1) it's significantly cheaper to build a machine and install linux (in terms of $, but not time); 2) although I've foobarred the OS more than once, it literally has crashed about 10 times in 5 years, and I've *never* lost my data; and 3) open source development is a fundamentally more sound way of development *for some things*, including the operating system, so I support it by using it.
My choice, money no object, would probably be a G5 tower. Mac has done great things towards making the computer easy to use as a tool right out of the box. But for the reasons above, my considerations were limited to linux. Since Redhat stopped it's support, I decided to consider my options before jumping directly to Fedora. To give away the punch line, I chose Suse 9.1 as my new Desktop. Read on for more details.
DESKTOP, NOT A SERVER
I want a server that I can configure by hand, that has a minimum of software (No X), with uptime that averages around 45 days. Redhat's done a nice job of providing that. Combined with Bastille and a few other things, I've been very happy.
But I use my Desktop computer on a day-to-day basis, and above all else, I just want it to work. I don't want it to crash, and I don't want to lose data, and I'm happy to upgrade regularly for my own benefit, but I don't want it to be difficult or slow me down. I'd like the installation of new software to be be relatively easy (though I don't mind compiling that wondrous open source software when need be).
First, I looked at what several new distros provided. Now, you can upgrade any system all day long, but out of the box (or off the disc), Suse has the newest kernel, the newest KDE, the newest Gimp, the newest mozilla. By "newest," I mean relative to the other distros I checked out, and thus closest to what I could download the source for if I were the gentoo sort.
INSTALLATION RESULTS
Redhat 9.1 (for comparison), the installer crashed repeatedly when I attemped anything other than a stock install. And, they've ceased support.
Fedora is running much older package versions than are available on the web (the 2.4 kernel? helllllloooooo). I decided against it just based on this. Also, I was particularly interested in switching to an "over the counter," distro. My logic is this: If they're spending the money to box it and put it in stores, they're also spending the money (presumably) to make it relatively easy to use.
After ultimately finding the correct command line voodoo to get Knoppix to boot on my machine (already a bad taste in my mouth), I got it installed (once I found the command line instructions for how to do that - grrrr), the installation itself was painless - a giant copy, and then a reboot. At which point, my screen resolutions were wrong, my screen driver was wrong, I was utterly unable to convince the OS that my wireless card existed, let alone get it configured, and -oh- -my- -god- - WHAT is up with that start menu? Don't tell Eric Raymond about Knoppix, or his recent review of CUPS will seem but a pale and pleasant discourse.
Mandrake is a close second to Suse, but it's still running older versions than Suse makes available. Further, I know Mandrake is back from the brink, but it still concerns me that support could evaporate, and I wanted a distro that was likely to last a while. I suspect Novell will work to see that happen with Suse for some time to come.
Suse 9.1 Personal installed pretty easily. The installation appeared to be a Curses interface, which didn't seem very pretty, but it worked. Having had a framebuffer problem during initial boot, it may be that there's a nicer installation inter
Re:Snuze: (Score:3, Informative)
It's very very good (Score:5, Informative)
Having tried a lot of different distributions in the past, I expected that I would need to help him out, or that there would at least be some sort of trouble with hardware detection or a bug of some kind.
Wrong.
I believe SUSE will be the distro that brings Linux to the masses. It is easier to install than Windows. OTOH, if you know what you are doing, there are options to finetune it exactly the way you want.
Install went perfectly. The bootsplash screen and progress bar look great. There is none of this confusing text that people always comment on with Linux distros.
Things that take a long time to set up on Debian, such as java and realplayer plugins work out of the box with SUSE.
The SaX2 screen config program works amazingly well, letting you position the desktop on your screen just the right way. It autodetected my dad's monitor and videocard with no problem.
The only difficulty was that he wanted to listen to preview files from a website that sells classical music (classicalarchives.com). The format is
I have installed a lot of different distributions and this had to have been the easiest. We haven't run into a single bug yet.
If I had to recommend a distribution to someone who had never used Linux before, who didn't want to take the time necessary to understand and learn about their system which is necessary with Debian... I would recommend SUSE 9.1 without hesitation.
Unable to install due to XFS bug (Score:5, Informative)
The 32bit sides of the DVDs are not readable in my machines, but the 64bit sides are. Does me no good, my systems are 32bit. A big part of the reason I wanted the boxed Professional version is for the DVDs, and now I find them useless.
So, I still have the CDs. I booted up and attempted to upgrade my system. No go. None of the partitions on any of my drives are identified. It shows "unknown" for every partition. Even if I manually select my root partition, it fails to mount it. Keep in mind this machine was set up from scratch with 9.0 and works just fine.
I checked SuSE support, and it turns out that there is a bug in the SuSE kernel that prevents it from mounting XFS partitions. Amazing, all that testing and nobody tried to use XFS. There is a driver hotfix released as a workaround, but it can't handle root on XFS. Guess what, my root (and others) are all XFS.
This means I can only install 9.1 if I'm willing to throw away my entire config and start over with a fresh install. Unacceptable. At the very least I'd like to be able to download a replacement CD1 ISO that fixes the problem. It's ridiculous to keep shipping a broken product that can't be installed as an upgrade by an otherwise satisfied customer.
So here I sit, with 2 unreadable DVDs and 5 CDs that I can't install because apparently nobody ever tested a perfectly normal and supported configuration as an upgrade path. Sigh.
Re:Good; Some Pkgs Not Recog'd Initially in YaST (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More polished? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, I'm now using Grub as it doesn't have to be reinstalled every kernel update, and LILO started giving me this error about the Extended Bios Data Area that I could never get rid of, so I had to switch or not boot my computer.
My 2 cents as a dedicated SuSE user. (Score:3, Informative)
The specs of my hardware at home are rather common: nForce2 chipsets, some old Intel chipsets, some generic noname nVidia GeForces and some old S3 PCI cards to accomodate other monitors, a pile of generic 8139 ethernet cards, a D-Link ADSL modem, and the aforementioned TFT monitors, together with a Canon flatbed scanner and an inkjet printer. I have never had any problems installing the hardware, although I had to use a commercial driver [turboprint.de] to make my cheap printer work. In SuSE 9.1 installation of several monitors with SaX went absolutely smoothly and if I weren't so picky about DPI settings and such, I could have just used the default XF86Config it made during the installation. NVidia drivers were downloaded by the YaST Online Update application and installed in the background so that I didn't even notice the fact until I ran an OpenGL screensaver and it was really fast!
The installation went smoothly as well. First of all, I am Russian, and I am oh-so-pleased to see my native language back again in YaST since it was missing in 9.0 due to some glitch. What's even better is that now SuSE ships with decent Unicode TrueType fonts with Cyrillics glyphs, so you don't have to stare at ugly bitmap fonts during the installationg, and, again, if one is not very picky, he or she would perfectly go with these bundled fonts without any need to install standard fonts from Microsoft Windows.
And now for the surprising facts I have discovered so far. Maybe I wasn't reading reviews too carefully, but the default locale is now UTF8. We all remember how bad UTF8 was implemented in RedHat 8.0, and it never became better in RedHat 9.0. It mostly likely won't make any difference for people who don't use Cyrillic characters, but here (in Soviet Russia
Fellow font maniacs, beware! If you try to build the latest Freetype (currently 2.1.8) [freetype.org], which you most likely will want to do, at least for the sake of turning the bytecode interpreter on -- DO NOT DO IT. GTK1 and other applications using bitmap fonts will crash your X after this! I've investigated the matter and solved the problem. For the curious I can e-mail an explanation, but to cut a long story short now, the steps to take to make sure your fonts look pretty and no applications crash X, do the following:
After that you should have no problems and crashes. I know that's by far not an elegant solution and will greatly appreciate other suggestions!
Samba 3 on a SuSE 8.2 box and Samba 3 on a SuSE 9.1 box export file ownership and permission data! I don't know why this works and I
Quite nice. (Score:2, Informative)
ndiswrapper is included and after a few lines of setup and 3 lines at startup I can get my wireless G card on my laptop up and running.
No GNOME 2.6 and no packages yet, which dissapointed me, but I'll live. GNOME 2.4 is still a step up from the 2.2 version on SuSE 9. I use the new KDE on my servers and it seems to get a nice speed boost from the new kernel. All in all a fine desktop experience.
I've tried serveral distros lately since abandoning Red Hat and after a few bad Fedora experiences and SuSE seems to strike the right balance of everything for me. Even my wife is running SuSE now with no problems and she doesn't even know how to login to a computer. (Yes, I'm an IT professional and yes, it's shameful.)
I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) good Mono experience with SuSE. I figure since it's been thrown into the Novell bag with Ximian they should be supporting it a bit better than other distros. So far that's been true with the Red Carpet support for SuSE 9, and the 9.1 Red Carpet rpms waiting for something on their ftp. I've installed them and they run fine. I'm not sure why they aren't listed on the install page yet. All of the channels aren't set up yet but the mono and SuSE 9.1 channels are up and running.
So all in all I'm quite pleased. I'm glad I paid for the pro version they definately deserve my cash for this release.
Suse 9.1 problems (Score:2, Informative)
First, I had to recompile my kernel. Every time I rebooted the machine, I would have to unplug my keyboard and then plug it back in to have SuSE recognize it. There were NO warning messages...no nothing. A recompile of the kernel tho (their kernel source...not the kernel source from www.kernel.org) and everything was working fine.
Then, I used the packman rpms for xine-lib etc...and used their source rpm for kaffeine. A WORD OF CAUTION: If you recompile the kaffeine source rpm from packman..and it keeps bombing at at an update system files macro, then you need the SuSE rpm update-system-files. You can get it through yast...it's on the disks. The packman srpm left it out of the requirements by error.
But, that's ALL I had to do...just those couple of things and I now have a wonderful SuSE desktop. I ran Redhat Linux for 6 years...and back then, I didn't like SuSE. But, after redhat tanked and I gave suse another try (after first trying debian, mandrake, and gentoo)...I love it. SuSE is twice the distribution debian and gentoo even dream about being. For me, it's on par with the now defunct Redhat Linux and I see no reason to switch ever again.
Here are the specs for the box it's running on:
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard
Athlon XP 2600+ cpu
2 256 Meg Ram chips working in dual channel for 512 megs
Samsung 52x24x52 cdwriter with 16x dvd
160 Gig SATA drive
Nvidia GeForceFX 5700 video