A Closer Look at SUSE 10 269
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"
Re:Which distro to recommend ? (Score:1, Informative)
suse 10 install (Score:1, Informative)
I will still stick with kubuntu on my main machine...but only because I really like apt and am lazy and don't feel like messing w/ my radeon again...but it will stay on my test machine... Highly recommended first distro..easy..installer a bit better than ubuntu's but that's because it is graphical and the installer help is actually helpful makes it very easy to cut the windows cord..
Re:Which distro to recommend ? (Score:4, Informative)
Then, if they are Win PowerUsers (aka don't sweat poking
If they are simple users (no experience in unix or DOS doesn't make that so, but if they've never used a cmdline it gets tough) the first thing to ask is, honestly, do THEY want to learn Linux or do YOU want them too (I've myself been guilty of that)? If it's actually them you should probably install the LiveCD they had to play with, so they're not confused by another change so soon. And make damn sure they come to you before trying to install some software (people get nervous breakdowns when first encountering the "Linux way")
Re:Which distro to recommend ? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Suse 10 Rocks! (Score:4, Informative)
Novell has made some interesting changes in distribution and development since our last review of SUSE Linux
I plugged Suse 10 Eval into my Sony portable and damm, the wireless 54G with my D-Link G650 shone bright! Noisy too, the sound card worked like a charm. Plugged in the WEP key for the G650 and on the air I was.
This is a smooth install for average users.... developers will have to head back and load gcc and stuff but what a hoot. Get to use Evolution with PGP, will not need 63 patch bundles and installs quickly. Office (openoffice) tools are included, but a few were missing on the intial install but were on the CD.
Now off to get MythTV....
Another review & a guide on DVD playback (Score:1, Informative)
Getting DVD, MP3, and WMV playback on SUSE 10 OSS [thejemreport.com].
Another SUSE 10 review [thejemreport.com].
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)
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
Upgrading was a pain and other issues (Score:5, Informative)
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
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
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"hands down" and a real question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)
If not, I recommend it. They've worked hard (meaning with third parties) on wireless support.
Just installed SuSE10 last night (Score:5, Informative)
- 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.
wireless usb (Score:3, Informative)
For example, I bought one of these,
http://newsite.pagecomputers.com/store/Product_ac
The rt2x00 web site said that the drivers would soon be integrated into every kernel release, so it may be in Suse 10 already. Check subdirectories of
Re:geek sweat (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:2, Informative)
I used SuSE 9.0, and I have to agree with you: It is a very polished distro. I'd go so far as to say that the hardware support was better than on Windows... For some things; it was easier for me to get up and running with a Phillips Webcam in SuSE than under XP. The YaST package manager was nice too, but after trying Gentoo I think portage tops it, though not if you're new to Linux like I was when I was trying SuSE. It wasn't my first distro, but I tried it after RedHat.
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I just installed 10 (Score:3, Informative)
Installed the Suse 10 eval DVD iso I downloaded and burned on my 9.3 box.
Install went smooth, no problems. Fast too. Much less than the predicted 1.5 hours.
Everything was detected properly. Only complaint I have, and this isn't a Suse or Linux complaint, I have an Epson GT-10000 scanner and it uses evil proprietary 32bit ONLY drivers. Ruh roh.. So now I am stuck using the sucky iscan program.
Oh joy. Also, I can't seem to find a copy of tleds that works on 64bit. Ugh, I depend on it heavily.
Outside of that, everything is hunkydory. It really smokes. Once I discovered it was automatically throttling the system down and I forced it to run in high performance mode it's nice.
The install was so simple even a windows user could handle it.
OTOH, I've installed XP and as I recall, you have to do countless reboots and download a gob of patches and reboot after each patch is installed.
Drivers are fun too on M$.. I've played the game so don't try your Jedi mind tricks on me. I quit M$ because of the constant HELL and the constant bleeding to death through my wallet.
I put a patch on the hemmorage to stop the bleeding. The patch is called LINUX..
Insert disc. Wipe drives. Install Linux. Don't look back..
BTW, I've switched totally to Linux back around Suse 8.2 but dabbled with it for years. I have a factory original Redhat 3.0 CDROM.. (I also still have a factory original IBM DOS 1.0 package. yay..)
Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:1, Informative)
Firefox and Googlebar issues (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just installed SuSE10 last night (Score:3, Informative)
apt-get is available for SuSE, complete with corresponding (RPM) repositories. Although not officially supported, apt-get is even available on your CD. For more info (including repositories), e.g. look here [linux01.gwdg.de]. So the packages listed by the parent posters probably are indeed packages for SuSE 10.
Antialiasing??? (Score:3, Informative)
Five tricks:
1) Use gnome. (Sure a KDE guy may give you similar reciepes, nevertheless)
2) Use "bitstream vera sans" for GUI and "bistream vera sans mono" for terminals.
3) Use proper DPI value at "Details..." at gnome-font-properties dialog
4) Enable Subpixel LCD at LCD displays, also there.
5) Enable "RenderAccel" option at xorg.conf if you are using nvidia card with nvidia drivers (just for performance issues)
My fonts look better than my wife's XP.
Random thoughts on SUSE 10 (Score:4, Informative)
Over all I like SUSE 10. It works fine, but I still don't think it is ready for a novice user. GNOME is a mess and there are rough / jagged edges around configuration and multimedia which would easily catch out a novice. As a power desktop it seems to be a very nice environment.
Re:I liked Open SuSE (with a few cons) (Score:2, Informative)
try Ctrl + Alt +F...
Re:A question for the Suse-useies (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you can, easily. The one thing that'll throw you off: Even if you select "Everything" during the install, it won't install a lot of the dev libraries. No worries. They're on the DVD. You just have to either go back and install them after the fact, or during initial install, after checking "Everything", go into each individual group and make sure everything is checked off.
Re:SuSE is great but... (Score:2, Informative)
More than likely, your laptop has an ATI video card. ATI has linux drivers out here for their video cards but the newer ones just are worthless. I recomend you use a tool called Google, and search for forums... heck, I found a whole website dedicated to my laptop!
Re:"hands down" and a real question (Score:3, Informative)
If that happens, run "KAppFinder". It looks for all the applications on your system that aren't in your KDE menu and provides an easy way to add them.