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?"
I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Evan
They're *REQUIRED* to Provide GPL'd Kernel Sources (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I seriously didnt like Suse (Score:3, Insightful)
For Desktop or a Server OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks to a hard drive failure the last Suse machine I had was put to rest as debian replaced it.
Re:Contempt (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I can almost like XP, so long as I can switch the interface back to "Classic Mode" it's fairly usable. But if I don't like the way MS' designers decided that people should use computers, I'm out of luck for changing it. With Linux, I can do a lot at the command line, where I'm comfortable (if not talented), and when running KDE (which is most of the time), I can configure it to do a lot of stuff that I can't do (or it costs money to add the software for) on Windows.
And, as far as the "just works" part, so do a lot of Linux distros. Pick any one of the major distros and you've got a fully-confgured, ready to run system about twenty minutes after starting your installation. The basic software is good (Open Office, Mozilla, Evolution, etc.), and a user that just wants to get by with whatever they're handed is not left wanting for much. And, mind you, I don't say that derisively. With any modern OS (okay, the major three: Windows, MacOS, Linux), the basic distro includes enough software for most users. On Windows you should really add MS Works and on MacOS add AppleWorks and the iLife packages, but without ranging too far or spending an exhorbitant amount of money, lots of functionality is at hand.
But for me, supporting freedom in an OS is important. Microsoft would go a long way toward dowsing the fire of contempt that's burning at their door if they released their core OS (without any add-ons like Paint or Wordpad or any of the myriad extras they put into their distro) as Open Source and sold what are now XP Home, Pro and Server as commercialized add-on packages with support options.
But that's just me. I'm really looking forward to what Novell is going to do once they've integrated SUSE, Ximian and their previous software (NetWare, NDS, GroupWise, etc) into one software line.
Well... there's the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
SuSE 9.1 Personal [thejemreport.com]
SuSE 9.1 Professional for x86 and AMD64 [thejemreport.com]
-JemIntensely Disliked SUSE 9.1 (Score:4, Insightful)
First I thought to really test the system so I installed it with XFS formatted LVM partitions (these were all options given by YaST). The installer looked great and it seemed to work like a treat....until it came to the reboot where I got a "Kernel Panic: no root device". To cut a long story short I tracked it down to the boot image disk not having 'libc' installed in the correct directory so that 'insmod' could not run to insert the required modules.
At this point I was not impressed since this is a fairly major bug to have escaped notice making me wonder how rigourous their testing was but, hey, I'm a generous guy, the installer looked really cool and the install options were somewhat on the bleeding edge. So I fixed my ramdisk image and emailed their support address with a description of the exact problem......time went by with no response. So I emailed them again....and again....and again....still no response, in fact I'm still waiting for any acknowledgement of the email let alone a fix! (and no, my email does work - I did test that!)
To add further irritation the machine crashed after a few months of uptime...and when it came backup something had magically re-broken the ram disk. I tried to track this down through crontab and the rc scripts but no luck (possibly partly due to my unfamiliarity with the SUSE setup). Now I just have a cron entry that copies the fixed image back every hour....not a really sensible or reliable solution!
When Fedora Core 2 comes out this week I'm dumping SUSE. It's the only time I've ever paid for a Linux distribution and, while my experience was still way better than I've had with Windows and by no means horrific, for a Linux distribution I would rank it as my worst experience yet by far. To contrast that I've found Fedora far more like the "old" RedHat in terms of support, stability and longevity....not quite what the original RedHat press releases implied.
Re:Intensely Disliked SUSE 9.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe you.
SuSE 9.1 came out much less than a month ago.
So unless you were in the beta (in which case bugs are to be expected), you are talking out of your ass.
Perhaps you mean SuSE 9.0
Which was kinda of buggy---- But I use it on 4-5 machines.
Re:More polished? (Score:0, Insightful)
I did notice speed improvement - I have installed Gentoo on my old Sony laptop - P III 450 Mhz - had before Mandrake there which was slooow. Good but sloow. Booting, starting programs,etc. So I decied to install Gentoo - have 1 on my workstation already.
In 3 hours I installed Gentoot and my whole system is at least 30% faster - this is what I am noticing.
I did stage 3 installation - so no compiling - in case you'd be unifformed, you can install Gentoo without compiling anything.
I am just so pissed off by the weeenies with statements like that: "You have Gentoo? How is KDE? Oh.. still compiling? Gentoo sux...".
Yeah, true, it takes some time to compile KDE on my notebook, but guess what? After 24 hours the latest version is released, I have fresh and brand new KDE while the weenies still wait till _their_best_distro_in_the_world will release new packages or some dude will produce packages and put them somewhere on the web.
No thanks I preffer to know binaries I am running.
"Nobody notices a speed improvement when running Gentoo.". Btw: how do you know what everybody notices? I suggest you think before you post. There should be another button for you available next to Submit and Preview, which says: Think Before Post.
Re:Suse x64 and 3ware RAID (Score:5, Insightful)
You are talking out of your ass.
Drumroll....Point by Point:
We can all agree that windows always does work better. I use only linux (aside from at school) so don't start flaming me, but as far as I can tell. Windows actually is much more easy to use,install, customize, and all around run.
You haven't said anything yet
Don't talk to me about the millions, exageration, of patches you have to download in order to make it remotely stable. Last time I installed RedHat 9 it told me to download 90+ patches within "up2date", which is not very different.
You best be patching Windows. It takes less than 5 minutes for your box to be compromised. A brand new windows box put on the internet will start rebooting every sixty seconds without security precautions. This won't happen to you in linux. Additionally, the box is plenty stable, without a single patch. The only except to this that I can remember is the recent Mandrake debacle that screwed up some CDrom drives. The patches are generally security updates, or new features, or driver updates, from people like Nvidia.
And tell me, honestly, with all truth. When just starting out, as a newbie Linuxer, what one was it easiest to install java on? Windows or Linux? (and get it working in Mozilla).
Substantially easier in SuSE Linux. Why? Because it comes pre-installed. In Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany, etc. .
I hate it when people talk about how Linuz is SO MUCH FUCKING SUPERIOR to Windows. No, for a regular
Nonsense. My pre-setup SuSE boxes are substantially easier for my parents and sisters to use than the Windows crap laying around here.
They are amazed that my boxes rarely (hardware problems sometimes, like defective ram) crash, never require anti-virus vigilance, and have SO MUCH fucking software built in.
Linux boxes, when properly configured, come far close to computing 'appliances' than Windows boxes. Their behavior is far, far more regular.
Windows boxes, on the other hand (although things have substantially improved since the Win95 days) are far more erratic.
Windows XP still tends to get stale. Things slow down over time. Stuff gets corrupt.
God help you if you get a nefarious virus.
Especially if you don't have access to a broadband connection.
Just my two cents, or in conversion to CAN. that would be about 3.14 cents.
Another Troll Bites the Dust
Re:Contempt (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Some people like configuring and building things from scratch, Linux gives them that power.
2) No artificially forced hardware upgrades. Linux can still run on a 486 with 32MB of Ram and make it usefull again, will XP?
3) Linux is being constantly improved on a daily basis. The next version of Windows won't be out till 2006. Maybe.
4) Linux doesn't monitor your internet activity and report back to it's creators without your knowledge as a standard practice.
5) Linux is being developed by people who love computers and programming, always eager to find new solutions to your problems. Windows is being developed by people who love your money and want to find new ways to seperate you from it.
6) Linux is packaged and sold by dozens of companies willing to cater to any market and customize their software as necessary. Windows is sold by one corporation unwilling to change except for its largest customers. Your needs are immaterial to them.
7) When you develop software for Linux the market is open to competition. When you develop software for Windows you're constantly looking over your shoulder for Microsoft to decide your enough of a threat that they need to crush you.
8) Linux gives the user unlimited options to configure their system as they wish. Microsoft grudgingly gives limited ability to customize it's software and ties many of it tools to each other in convoluted knots meant to keep the user from straying to other vendors.
9) Linux adheres to open, published standards whenever possible ensuring that your data is easily transportable to other programs or operating systems. Microsoft 'improves' published standards with proprietary unpublished changes that lock you into their software and make moving to other vendors or OSes a logistics nightmare.
10) Linux doesn't make bold advertising campaigns about the new features that will be in it's next release, force VARs and developers to start training and preparing for those new features so that they can be ready to market and then slowly whittle down or outright dump those features because they have become unfeasable/obsolete/unprofitable as the release date gets pushed farther and farther back.
Re:More polished? - Gentoo hype (Score:2, Insightful)
It's tiresome how these same folks keep evangelising their dubious performance claims ad nauseum.
I decided to check the facts about source based distro's rather than take others word for it.
Next to a default install of Suze 9.0 Pro, Fedora C1 & Mandrake 9.1 I installed & configured Lunar, Onebase, Sourcemage, Linux from scratch (LFS) & Gentoo.
For comparison I also installed Slackware which is a binary based distro but can be compiled if desired.
INSTALLATION
My impression was that Lunar & Sourcemage had simple effective ncurses installers. Onebase had a crude installer but it worked. In all cases there was ample opportunity to geek around in the install if you must, but not required.
LFS & Gentoo were simmillar in forcing you to do everything tediously (& error prone) by hand requiring encyclopaedic knowledge at times.
Slackware had simple effective ncurses installer.
CONFIGURATION
All the source based Distro's took _a_bloody_long_time_ to compile & configure everything needed to obtain a working desktop PC with a simmillar level of functionality to binary distro's. This process was complicated by bugs & documentation errors in the software tools of all 4 of the sourcebased distro's.
Slackware booted to a working desktop PC immediately after install but some configuration details required inquiry on the Slackware forums to rectify. The fixes were very simple once known.
PERFORMANCE
All of the distro's including Slackware booted more quickly than Suze, Fedora & Mandrake due to far fewer services starting.
The default KDE desktop seemed to come up far quicker than Suze inparticular.
Once started there was _no_perceptible_difference_ in speed of operation of the PC.
Day to day maintenance of the source based distro's was significantly more time consuming due to compile times & immaturity of the code.
SUMMARY
Of all the distro's Slackware stood out as at least as fast as a compiled source based distro's in operation without the massive overhead of compiling & the benefit if being a much more mature Linux. The other binary distro's were polished but obtainibg & installing new software in the rpm format was a constant source of frustration. Gentoo in particular seemed to be a poor choice due to it's virtually non existant installer or configuration tools & negligible performance benefit.
[Gentoo zealots may now censor my post, thank you]
Re:More polished? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I've run it longer on Gentoo, and more frequently (no more dual boot) than I did on any previous Linux distribution, probably because:
2. I've learned more about Linux than I did on any of the previous distributions.
So, maybe it isn't faster, but I am, and steadier. That's the advantage I've found--I'm better able to figure out why things don't work--& everywhere, always, something doesn't work in this world (former mechanic).
Makes me happy.
Re:More polished? (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat and all the other big three distros basically compile their code with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686. Which optimizes for i686 without breaking any non-i686 CPUs. I have seen tons of Gentoo guys screaming about options such as -O3 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer. -O3 can actually cause _slower_ code from over optimizing. It creates much larger executable then -O2. I have done the work from building my own Linux distros to see what is the overall best Linux system. Gentoo does not guarantee anything.
It is actually funny to hear all these Gentoo zealots talking about how their systems are sooo, uber fast now because they sat through a few hours of compilations. Yet they forget that a company like Red Hat has about 5 or 6 of the _top_ kernel developers working for them such as Alan Cox, while Gentoo has zero. I personally will place my trust in these top kernel developers to deliver the best overall Linux system to me then the Gentoo crowd and all their unsubstantiated claims that I have personally tried to verify and found no such evidence.
Let the flamebait mods begin!
For me, the technical interface needs work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Debian's installer (which appears to be textual, although in a lot of languages that look like they're using the right glyphs) is still not very good. Fedora Core's installer was a breeze to deal with (the graphics for things really do make things easier to handle and navigate). Not only was Debian's installer still asking questions it didn't really need to ask (my hostname? I know what this means, but this is far too technical and not completely necessary since my DHCP server dictates my hostname, also other GNU/Linux installers don't do this) but the disk partitioner isn't as nice as the Red Hat/Fedora Core's partitioning interface.
The showstopper for me was the dodgy networking interface software--the installer appears to proceed along two stages: the stage where you boot off the CD, and the stage after the minimal system has installed and the rest of the system is downloaded from Debian servers on the Internet. The first stage appeared to go well, identifying my wireless and wired networking hardware.
The second stage did not recognize my networking hardware and then the installer asked me if I wanted to configure PPP. There was no apparent way to tell it that I wanted it to use the same interface it had just used before rebooting and to go get Debian packages using that interface. I don't need PPP at all. I'm sure if I really cared more about this issue I could have done something to fix this and keep installing, but I wanted to go through this as a novice might, not as a longtime Unix user with some years of experience using the Linux kernal.
Given this constraint, I figured I had wiped a hard drive for nothing. I reinstalled Fedora Core 1, updated it, and then kept using the machine. FC1 doesn't identify my hardware correctly (kudzu thinks I am removing and reinstalling my wireless device), the network configuration profiles don't work correctly (I can't use the GUI to remove profiles or make a profile for an unencrypted wireless network connection and also have one with a WEP key), and the USB hotplug support is lacking (USB hard drive, USB key, and Griffin iMic support are not really working smoothly enough for novices to use). However the vast majority of the system works well enough for me to do a lot of real work. Other things that don't work well are things that will not work well in other distributions too (/dev device labels are a sign of a programmer's interface, not a user's interface -- use device brand names instead so I see "iMic" never
Re:Intensely Disliked SUSE 9.1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suse: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:suse 9.1 iso downloads here (read: informative) (Score:1, Insightful)