SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available

twener writes "The SUSE 9.1 FTP version is now available on SUSE's ftp mirrors for free installation via FTP/HTTP (installation instruction). It's almost identical to SUSE 9.1 Professional except some few packages which are missing due to licence reasons. Also don't miss "SUSE 9.1: The Complete Review" recently published by DesktopOS.com."

Re:Suse is not free

[Anonymous Coward]

why is it unusable? There is a boot.iso, burn it, boot it, install from ftp. If you want to have everything on you local disc, mirror the whole tree and install then.

btw: YaST2 is GPL now ...

Re:Suse is not free

[RayAlmostAnonymous]

Novell GPL-ed Yast2, so SuSE is free now. The packages that are missing from the FTP install are things like a database package and some other app. Nothing you cannot do without.

Re:Suse is not free

[MoonFog]

I did that on SuSE 9.0, downloaded the entire tree and mirrored it on one machine. It worked great! It's still not the same as downloading the .iso files, burn them and boot up. The entire tree was somewhere close to 9 gb, while the iso files are often only 3 cd's.
It does work rather well though, so if you have a fast connection and don't mind waiting a bit for it, downloading the tree is an excellent way of getting SuSE.

Re:Suse is not free

[pmjordan]

Even before Yast2 got GPLed, they supplied the binaries with the FTP version. You can, and always have been able to, install the FTP version fine. In fact, I've been doing so with every version since SuSE 8.1. (I bought some earlier versions)

The only difference to the commercial version is that the FTP version doesn't include proprietary software that they can't redistribute via FTP for free for licensing reasons. They do have licenses for some proprietary software, such as Acrobat Reader, Opera, etc.

Know the facts before you criticise/troll.

Re:ok..

[ValourX]

According to the company, it's:

SOO-suh

-Jem

Re:Suse is not free

[pmjordan]

They do, especially with the Professional Edition.
Personal Edition is a bit dumbed-down (not even kernel source packages, useless if you need proprietary video drivers!) but still has some books, which are more entry-level aimed. Pair Personal Edition with the FTP version though and you're all set.

I'll spring for the full media

[krygny]

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to purchase the full media. For ~$90, The documentation alone is worth that. It's a bargain in itself, plus the satisfaction of supporting the community.

I installed this yesterday

[danormsby]

I installed this yesterday. Took around 4 hours on my home 1MBit to upgrade from SuSE 9.0 using the mirror.ac.uk mirror.

Tip! Get the IP address of the ftp server before attempting the install! DNS isn't picked up on the SuSE boot/install CD.

Re:[Q] rsync mirrors?

[nouser]

An excellent public rsync mirror:
rsync://rsync.mirror.ac.uk/ftp.suse.com/p ub/suse/i 386/9.1/

My SuSE 9.1 experiences so far

[arcade]

First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution. Furthermore, I use the packaged version, not the FTP version.

However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.

In short, it quite simply sucked.

I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, which also turned out the be correct. As a good user, I have /home on its own partition, so a fresh reinstall are a piece of cake without touching my actual data.

The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way, and worked as it should at once. With one exception.

That xception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited /etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.

In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.

LINUX IS *NOT* BLOATED ...

[torpor]

... you Anonymous Logic-Impaired moron.

All those other CD's are extra CD's containing tons of free software that you can use on your newly installed Linux system.

When was the last time you got 9gigs worth of free software with your operating system? No, don't answer that, I don't want to know ... and no, MSDN & Office "updates" don't count ...

I've got a Linux setup that is only 1.4 megs worth of Linux, kernel, apps and libs. Everything beyond that is add-ons ... That is no bloat.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:My SuSE 9.1 experiences so far

[really?]

Nah, you just got lucky on the install.
I have installed 9.1 on a couple _IDENTICAL_ machines, and made the same choices. The installs were different, for example, in one of them the sound was not working. Reinstalling fixed the sound though.
Also, I installed the Amd64 version on a Gigabyte board. Had to do it twice - also a fresh install both times - and although I selected all the packages both times the results were different. In addiction the first time sound was not working.
Having said all that, it still remains my favourite distribution, and I will continue to use it on my desktop - freeBSD and, sometimes, netBSD on the servers though.

Just did an apt-get dist-upgrade

[Erik Hensema]

Using apt4rpm I just completed a dist-upgrade. I have had a few major problems:

• The shadow package is now called 'pwdutils'. This confuses apt a lot
• During the installation of the 'devs' rpm (containing /dev) apt segfaulted. I'm not sure if this was caused by the installation of devs or due to a corrupted rpm database. A 'rpm --rebuilddb' fixed it for me
• The (unofficial!) KDE 3.2 packages in the Suse 9.0 repository have identical version numbers as the Suse 9.1 rpms, it seems. However, the dependencies differ. You'll have to remove KDE and reinstall

My overall impression of the distro so far is that it's suse 9.0, but slightly better.

SuSE 9.1 performance

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched to SuSE 9.0 when RedHat anounced the end of their desktop products as we'd all come to know them, and it instantly became my favorite distribution. YaST is awesome and performance was good.

So I was excited to try 9.1. I borrowed the full 9.1 Pro CD set from someone at work to try. I installed it on a couple of Pentium 4 machines with Nvidia cards. While installtion was flawless on both, the performance was terrible. X takes forever to start, KDE takes a long time to initialize, and forget starting YaST - I can go for coffe while it loads. Even installing and running Unreal Tournament 2004 was painful because of some changes SuSE made to the way they mount removable media. Starting UT2004 is slow too. Since I dual boot, slow startup times are an issue.

Before anyone says the obvious, yes - DMA is enabled and one of the systems is using fast U160 SCSI drives so there's just no excuse for the poor performance.

Since Mandrake 10.0 is available for download, I tried installing it. I was hesitant, but it installed flawlessly on my system with the SCSI drives. I'm spoiled and used to the bazillion applications that SuSE installs, but no biggie.

Mandrake 10 performance is what I expect from a P4 system : fast, responsive, snappy.

No offense to the SuSE team intended, but they need to get their act together a little better. There's just no excuse for the poor performance of SuSE in my opinion - and yes, I have just as many services running in Mandrake as SuSE.

I'll keep using Mandrake for now and try SuSE again when 9.2 comes out.

I'm sure glad I didn't pay for 9.1, I would have been really p*ssed.

Re:ok..

[tedric]

I don't know if Linus would pronounce SuSE correctly, but you could listen to the press conference Novell and SuSE held, where I think Richard Seibt (former CEO of SuSE) pronounces SuSE several times:

press conference: [novell.com] Novell to Acquire SUSE LINUX

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:My SuSE 9.1 experiences so far

[wiresquire]

However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.

I've upgraded my machines from 8.2 to 9.0, then from 9.0 to 9.1. Both upgrades worked well. Both times my machines were fully up to date with latest patches before upgrading and I don't go pulling the latest kernels or X or whatever. Well,there are a couple of apps (mplayer, wine) that I grab directly, but if that's the case I don't use RPMs and I expect to recompile and reinstall them. After all, what's the point of using a distro if you're going to hack it yourself?

One area that has peeved me off is that I couldn't even boot from the 9.0 and 9.1 CDs/DVD. But I came across a really useful trick. You can boot the old 8.2 cd, and when you get to the Install options screen, you switch the CD/DVD to the later CD/DVD.Hit the Upgrade and away you go!

Re:Suse is not free

[maxwell demon]

Ah, and on this 1 CD, you get the operating system, several complete office suites, several browsers, mail readers, news readers, a web server, a mail server, a news server, a database, compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Java, Ada, Pascal, Common Lisp, and the complete set of development tools for that (debugger, profiler, IDE, ...), a raytracer (Povray), several graphics programs (including Gimp), several players for sound and video, sound editing software, video editing software, a complete TeX/LaTeX-system, and in addition the sourcecode for all of that. And certainly lots of things I didn't mention.

Now you may say that you don't need all of that. True, but then you don't need to download all of those 9GB.

Re:Lets see you do that for hundreds of systems

[fsmunoz]

I'm not questioning your choice, but I actually deploy Debian at work for the same reasons you give. I've setup a FAI install server so new machines are installed over the network. I've got a apt-proxy that contains the official debs and the ones I make and that are specific to my company usage. That way each install I make immediatly has access or already has installed (depending on the machine profile that was installed) to the tools and configurations specific to the company, ranging from the Kerberos and LDAP configuration files to Debian packages that contain locally tweaked tools (Tivoli Endpoints, backup daemons, etc.)

If you don't use it you might want to give cfengine a look... it's great to administer a large number of machines since it automates and allows easy deployment on just about anything (be it GNU/Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc).

Re:SuSE 9.1 performance

[GlowStars]

I've tried both 9.0 and 9.1 on my FSC Scaleo 600 Athlon64 and overall 9.1 feels faster.

So much for YAST

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Where the hell's the GUI for changing your wireless settings? Even Fedora has that. I changed it the old fashioned way through conf files and iwconfig but after all of this hype and paying my money for it, I'm a little surprised about this lacking tool.

Re:Can anybody help me fix my SuSE 9.1 sound probl

[5etanta]

The sound failure is due to the kdemultimedia mixer app. So when you install "all KDE" you break the sound.

Suse have posted a fix on their support page ( search under sound). I'd say its a bit of a poor show, but otherwise it seems OK.

Its poor form that they havent fixed this yet in the updates!

Setanta

Re:SuSE

[kavau]

Everyone's individual mileage varies, of course, but I am running SuSE 9.0 with apt4rpm installed on top of it, and it simply works like a charm. I don't ever use YAST anymore to upgrade my system. There are lots of inofficial apt repositories [linux01.gwdg.de] available, many of them maintained by SuSE employees. Only very occasionally I run across an application that's not included in some apt repository.

Re:ok..

[kavau]

Besides being an acronym for "Software und System-Entwicklung" (Software and System Development), "Suse" is also a personal name in German (short form of "Susanne"). So the correct pronunciation would actually be "ZOO-zuh". But I guess "SOO-suh" is the official line... ;-)

Re:Upgrade or Full Version?

[lostmymirth]

The upgrade version is the EXACT same software. The only difference is the upgrade version does not come with a new set of manuals.

Re:So much for YAST

[theblkadder]

You can change your wireless settings through YaST. Network Devices -> Network Cards

Re:I'll spring for the full media

[waveclaw]

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to purchase the full media.

I did purchase the full version. And I got a notice that CDs of SuSE 9.1 Professional is on back order.

I was hoping to download the FTP version to pre-load my test system since the CD's won't arrive for who knows how long [1].

Thank's to slashdot, now the CD's may arrive before I can get any iso's downloaded[2].

1. I could have ordered the on-line donwload only, but I like being able to install new software on machines while they are offline. (Doing IT with M$ products has taught me this is a very important thing to do in far too many cases.)

2. When a server dies in a slashdotting, does it make a sound? Or does it implode into nothingness forevermore? Thank you slashdot.

Re:Lets see you do that for hundreds of systems

[rainer_d]

Oh, DO elaborate, please.

As I understand it, security-fixes are backported to releases ("stable") only. And releases take a lot of time from release to release.
Reading http://www.debian.org/releases/index.en.html [debian.org] confirms this: there is no support for the testing-branch and no official security-fixes will come through.
Additional problems arise, when one needs features/packages that aren't even available in "testing" but only in "sid", as it happens with some open-source projects with lot's of dependencies. Then you'll end-up running a mixture of both which will pretty much hose the system sooner or later.
I wouldn't say Debian is a bad system, it just happens to have some features that may make it simply inconvenient or impossible for some use(r)s.

Now, granted, there are advantages in this methodology - the system behaves (in theory) exactly the same before and after the update, very desireable in certain environments - but on the other hand, it's a real pain to get other Open-Source software to work together with this system because most other projects assume that you are running the latest and the greatest and _they_ don't backport.

With FreeBSD, I get a 90-95% chance that a program in the ports-tree actually works first try and due to the fact that all the 11000+ ports are in most cases only some minor-versions behind their upstream parent (if at all), I stand a pretty good chance that even projects with lot's of dependencies compile and work pretty much out of the box.

Rainer

Forgive me if I'm repeating...

[MC Negro]

I'm a loyal SuSE user (since 7.0), and was extremely excited when I read about 9.1 being released. I'm a frequent reader/poster on the SuSE Linux English discussion group [SLE], and from what I'm hearing, there's not much incentive to choose 9.1 over 8.2/9.0. Far more complaints than praises, and the trolling has been atrocious. So here's what I've heard about 9.1 (note that I haven't actually tried upgrading/installing 9.1 on my current machine yet. I'm quite content with 9.0 :-) --

• As expected, the 2.6 kernel is the default. Apparently, this is the source of many of the complaints with 9.1. Lots of complaints about hardware compatibility (especially USB and USB 2.0) that were not existent in recent releases.
• Similar to previous, but some hardware support is missing. A lot of complaints about some missing RAID drivers, NIC drivers and video card drivers. Additionally, some complaints about missing ACPI and APM module sources missing seem to pop up fairly frequently.
• Like Fedora and Mandrake [slashdot.org], SuSE 9.1 doesn't seem too fond of dual-booting.
• One of the touted benefits of 9.1 was tighter hardware integration and process scheduling with the new 2.6 kernel. As pointed out by a poster in a previous article [slashdot.org], most of these features have been backported to the 2.4 kernel and come standard with a 9.0 install (including the new 2.6 scheduler)
• No improvements in Wi-Fi integration. One of the things that has frustrated me to no end with SuSE 9.0 is its lack of support for Wi-Fi profiles. Kwifimanager and YaST -> Network Device are plenty sufficient if you simply use one AP, but as soon as you wander over to a different hotspot, be prepared to reconfigure your WLAN card. This gets especially frustrating when you roam between WEP-encrypted APs and non-encrypted APs. Again, no improvement in 9.1.
• Other problems are longer boot times and X seg faults, both of which I've witnessed with fresh 9.1 installs.

It seems 9.1 needs to go back in the oven for a few more minutes. It's basically 9.0 with problems. This is revealed upon further inspecting the 9.1 box and finding the product slogan : "It may be buggy as Hell, but DAMN if we don't support the 2% of the Linux user-base who use AMD64_x86"

As always, YMMV.

It's terribly buggy

[ChiralSoftware]

I just installed it, and it is the buggiest Linux release I have used in a long, long time. I love the features, like automatic spell-checking as I type this in Konqueror, cool eye-candy stuff in KDE, Linux 2.6.4, etc, etc, but it is truly full of bugs. YaST doesn't start up the user admin module. I created a user using adduser, and that user can't log in because of some IPC bug. During installation, I installed it in just the plain old way and it gave error messages. This is truly beta-test software; it should never have made it through the release processes. I would have rather waited a couple more months for something that isn't full of bugs. I think I'm going to have to re-install it now just to figure out how to get basic stuff like adding users to work. It's a mess.