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SuSE Businesses

SuSE 6.0 First Complete Look 125

Posted by CmdrTaco from the distribution-wars dept.
Matt writes "Much hype has followed the release of latest version of SuSE (6.0), and judging by the review over at Ars Technica of this hot distribution the hype is well justified. While packing a big bang, SuSE incorporates tools like YaST, SaX, KDE, StarOffice 5.0, and so forth to get users of any experience level up on their feet and running productively. As a long time user of RedHat I find SuSE to be a worthy competitor, as well as a strong indication that distributions as a whole are continuing to do positive things to stimulate the growth of the desktop OS user base for Linux. Definitely a worthy read, check it out!" CowboyNeal swears by SuSE. I'm itching for a new Debian CD.
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SuSE 6.0 First Complete Look More

SuSE 6.0 First Complete Look

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  • Nothing beats SuSE!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    BTW, SuSE does ship with GNOME, as well as KDE, WindowMaker, Afterstep, Bowman, Icewm, Enlightenment, Blackbox, fvwm2, fvwm, fvwm95, qvwm, a mac-alike, CDEsim (I think there are a couple more, but I never use them)
    It also comes with almost anything you could download on the web (except WP8 :-( unfortunately)
    SuSE's most endearing feature is it's SuSEconfig script that inserts and removes programs to/from your menus when you install or uninstall with YaST. (in about half of the window managers)
    Not only that, everything works in SuSE!! I have used Caldera, RedHat, Debian, Slakware, TurboLinux, LinuxPro and SuSE, and SuSE wins, period.

  • Not for 'ordinary' users (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As a web admin, Debian may be as good as SuSE for you, but as a normal user SuSE beats anything else hands down.

    Especially the average RedHat user would be much happier with SuSE...
  • While we are busily dissecting distributions based on technical merit (and I agree, SuSE 6.0 measures up quite well on technical merits), there are other issues that must be taken into account. The one I'm going to mention right now is this: How well does the distribution meet the goals of the Open Source movement?

    Red Hat passes -- they release everything as Open Source, and the only proprietary software is segregated elsewhere.

    Debian passes, by definition almost.

    Mandrake is a revision of Red Hat Linux that includes the QT library as a standard system library. The GNU General Public License allows linking GPL'ed software against standard system libraries. Thus KDE itself is not a problem, but the "old" QT license does present a license, since it is not Open Source. Thus Mandrake does flunk the Open Source "purity test", even though they do not violate the GNU General Public License. The "new" QT license, which does not apply to current versions of QT but, rather, to the next version of QT, will solve that problem.

    Pacific Hi-Tech has some other problems. I have a copy of their latest boxed set and it includes programs that violate intellectual property rights if shipped as Open Source products in the United States -- 'ssh' and 'pgp'. I have recieved no response from their sales director about whether they have properly licensed these programs from the appropriate property right owners.

    Caldera is not particularly interested in passing any "purity test". They have quite a bit of proprietary software mixed in with the Open Source software on their CD. Still, they do release much of the software that they write themselves as Open Source (if you connect to the Internet via PPP, much of the PPP code in the kernel is courtesy of Caldera, and the entire COAS project is apparently GPL).

    SuSE tries to hold themselves out as being Open Source friendly, and has made many important contributions to the XFree86 project. However, they do not appear to be willing to release the YaST tool, a fundamental part of their install process, as GPL'ed software. Instead, they release it on a license that prohibits commercial redistribution (other than by SuSE).

    Those are the distributions that I have installed recently or otherwise have first-hand knowledge about. Anybody have info on other distributions and and how they support the Open Source concept?

    -- Eric
  • Choice is good. And just as you choose your distribution based on technical merit, others choose theirs based on other criteria, such as support, ease of obtaining, or adherence to Open Source principles.

    -- Eric
  • Another thing that many look at, when purchasing a distribution, is the scope and usefulness of a company's Internet presence.

    Internet presence is comprised of a number of things: FTP site, mailing lists or publically-exported news groups, mirrors, and web site.

    Turbolinux:
    http://www.turbolinux.com gets you to PHT's web site for TurboLinux. This is a rather bare-bones web site that has few links to the Linux community or even to the Linux Documentation Project. PHT was advertising for an "Evangelist" whose responsibility it will be to improve the web site, so hopefully that'll help.
    Their FTP site is a mess. TurboLinux is there, as is a number of contributed Japanes RPM's, but otherwise there is nothing to attract the discerning hacker to PhT's FTP site.
    PHT currently has no mailing lists (at least, none that are mentioned on their web site). They have a single newsgroup, which apparently is only accessible via DejaNews.
    --------------------------------------------
    Caldera Systems Inc.:
    http://www.calderasystems.com

    Web site: Caldera has long had one of the better Linux distribution web sites. Their new web site does not have the wide variety of links to the Linux community that the old one had, but still is chock-full of information. The only complaint I've heard is that Caldera is slow to update their web site when security fixes and such come out.
    Ftp site: Caldera's FTP site is not as comprehensive as that of some vendors, but has all of the essentials in a well-organized manner, including a small but available "contrib" section. Caldera also mirrors a number of other sites, such as the Sunsite archives. Their Caldera OpenLinux Lite (OpenLinux minus proprietary software) is available for free download.
    Mailing lists: Caldera has an extensive set of mailing lists, upon which their employees regularly participate.

    -------------------------------------
    Red Hat Software
    http://www.redhat.com

    Web site: Red Hat, like Caldera, has always had an information-filled web site. Their web site tends to be a bit less organized than Caldera's, with confusing menu bars (some actions are on left, some actions are on top), but with a bit more information. They also have a large selection of 3rd party links like Caldera used to have.
    Red Hat has recently decided that their web site is a "portal". As far as I can tell, this just means that their web site is slower than it used to be because it pulls in some headlines from slashdot and freshmeat.
    FTP site: Red Hat has reorganized their FTP site within the past six months into a group of FTP sites. It is very difficult to get into Red Hat's FTP sites any time after 12pm Eastern Time, but Red Hat does have a large group of mirrors. Red Hat has the largest selection of contributed software in binary format of all the commercial vendors, but many of the RPM's are of dubious quality (unless I know the person who packaged the RPM, I usually rebuild them from the ".srpm").
    Mailing lists: Red Hat has an extensive set of mailing lists. Volume on these lists is so huge that Red Hat employees rarely monitor or participate in them. I can't blame them, it's almost a full-time job just to read them, much less participate in them. Still, the volume means that almost any question is swiftly answered by five or six different people.

    ----------
    Debian GNU/Linux

    Web Site: http://www.debian.org
    Debian's web site ranks with Red Hat and Caldera's. They have an excellent bug tracking system, a reasonable amount of documentation, and other things of that nature. The documentation section is not as extensive as that of Redhat or Caldera, unfortunately, though the Debian Documentation Project is attempting to remedy that. Their links section also does not attempt to be as comprehensive as Red Hat's, but does give a good selection of sites like the LDP HOWTO's etc.
    Mailing lists: Debian has a HUGE number of mailing lists. Often any given mailing list is monitored by the developer responsible for that particular area of Debian development.
    Ftp site: It is a bit disorganized, but all of the right bits are there. Debian has one of the largest collections of contributed software on the net (a few less than Red Hat, but theirs are high quality and generally work, unlike random stuff downloaded from contrib.redhat.com). Their FTP site is currently on the verge of being overloaded -- as of 1pm Eastern it had 179 out of 180 users.

    ---------
    Mandrake Linux
    Web site: http://www.linux-mandrake.com
    Their web site is nothing to write home about. The best that can be said is that it has all the right bits, and appropriately punts to Red Hat's web site where their own leaves off.
    Mailing lists: Mandrake has two mailing lists, one for "newbies" and one for "experts".
    FTP site: Unknown. The general public does not have access to the Mandrake FTP site. There are, however, a large number of mirrors and an excellent page telling whether a given mirror is in "sync" with the master FTP site. They also direct you to the appropriate Red Hat FTP sites for contributed software.

    ------
    SuSE Linux
    Web: http://www.suse.com
    There have been many complaints about the SuSE USA web site, i.e., that it does not contain as much content as the German or British versions, that it is usually out of date, etc. Clicking on the "Europe" web site will generally get you more/ better information. The only thing on the USA web site that's anything other than pure "web brochure" is their Knowledge Base page. The USA site doesn't even have a link to updates/security alerts, unlike the European web site.
    Generally, SuSE's web site is brochure-ware, whether U.S. or European. It is not the comprehensive set of resources that typify the Caldera, Red Hat, or Debian web sites.
    Mailing lists: SuSE has an active English-language mailing list, as well as an English-language announce list. SuSE employees regularly monitor and participate in these lists.
    FTP site: Their U.S. FTP site has very poor connectivity. At 1:40pm EST I am getting 50% packet loss. This is not unusual. Their FTP site has the SuSE Linux distribution, but they just recently added a "contrib" section. There are very few files in the "contrib" section ( 1 (one) file as of 3-10-99 1:44pm EST).

    Conclusions:
    Caldera, Redhat, and Debian pretty much come up a tie at the top on the Internet presence scale. Mandrake comes in below them because so much of Mandrake is just links to Red Hat's site. SuSE and PHT have disappointing web and FTP sites, and PHT lacks even a mailing list for support.

    -- Eric
  • Agree about the small 'contrib' section. I should have noted that there wasn't much need for a 'contrib' section with 5 stuffed CD's worth of stuff. On the other hand, a 'contrib' section is a great place to dump stuff that's too new to go into the distribution but that is in heavy demand, such as GNOME 1.0 and KDE 1.1.


    Regarding the hardcore information online in German, unfortunately I have never studied any Germanic languages (I can piece out French, Spanish, and Italian, to a certain extent, but German is a different beast altogether). For English speakers, you must admit that the online information is rather sparse except for their "Knowledge Base" (which IS useful, of course). And the inexplicable difference between the U.S. English site and the European English site (the U.S. site doesn't even have a URL for errata and update announcements) further renders their web site presence rather negligible for non-German speakers.


    I have not made any comment about SuSE technical support, except to state that their people do closely monitor the support mailing list and participate heavily. Support is one of SuSE's strong points, but the subject of the message was Internet presence, not support.


    I continue to hold that SuSE's Internet presence under-represents the technical quality of their distribution.


    -- Eric

  • The license on YAST is an issue, and is an important issue hindering the acceptance of SuSE Linux within the United States. Within the United States the primary sales force for Linux are "hackers", i.e., highly technical users who are highly sympathetic to the Free Software movement and highly suspicious of proprietary software. Because Microsoft has so heavily tainted their perception of proprietary software, even relatively innocuous licenses like the one on YAST come in for scrutiny and suspician.

    In Europe, there seem to be two imperatives operating: 1) Technical superiority is the #1 priority, and 2) Avoiding non-European software is the #2 priority. The Free Software movement does not appear to have made many inroads into Europe, unlike in the United States, and thus adherence to the principals of the Free Software movement does not appear to be an issue for European adopters of Linux, who appear to be adopting it for other reasons (technical and patriotic -- i.e., it's technically superior, and it's not made by some multi-billion-dollar American company).

    -- Eric
  • Posted by jdmssmkr:

    Hehehe ... nice one :-)
  • I've got a SuSE subscription, so I got 6.0, but the release that I'm really waiting for is 6.1, which will have the 2.2.x kernel and KDE 1.1, and should be out in late April or May (my estimate, BTW).

    TedC

  • what exactly is that?

    SuSE automatically sends you the new versions when they come out. It's cheaper ($35 vs $50) and you can cancel anytime. Not a bad deal.

    BTW, I assume 6.1 will have GNOME, since SuSE tends to throw in every window manager and desktop in existance. It will be nice to have a stable, tested distro with both KDE and GNOME.

    TedC

  • :-)
  • I'm a rh user, but this review really piqued my interest in Suse. RH 6.0 will have to be damn good to compete with this distro. I may order both, just to see - one on my work machine, the other on my home box.
  • You know, for the longest time I've had a nagging question about Slashdot. Why is it that a site devoted to the manager hating free floating hacker produces so many posts that look like email from a four year old boss throwing a temper tantrum?

    (Do this... Do that... what your doing is crap... you can't use that product... etc.)




    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
  • just because it says "eval" - it doesn't expire or break after a certain time frame Damn, I chucked mine when I saw that.
  • Go tell that to the cuys at www.cheapbytes.com, who have been selling them for many months.

    SuSE doesn't mark what's non-free?
    When you select a package, it will display a description that includes the license. It will even show popups in some cases!

    You are just parroting something you heard somewhere else.
  • I have a Red Hat 4.2 system here that does the same thing.

    In fact, if I remember right, the FHS *requires* the booting kernel to be in /boot.

    Other than that, isn't it a bit paranoid that because their choice of LILO configuration doesn't match yours they are "forcing" you to something?
  • So, now we know the *real* reason for the failure of NeXTStep!!!!

    BTW: my guess is that SuSE used to be S.u.S.E, and in german the nouns *must* be capitalized.

  • Try! (Score:1)

    by Roberto ( 1777 )
    Get those $1 CDs from cheapbytes and lo and behold! YaST is in all of them.

    Gee, wonder how that happened.

    Please go and check the YaST license.
  • ...why are you commenting on it???

    :-)
  • As far as I know, it's mostly written by Jacques Gelinas.
  • You can put the kernel wherever you want. The matter is tell lilo about it. The best choice is to use yast for this task.
    Regards
    Tobias

  • Be *VERY* careful with Staroffice 5.0(1) (Score:3)

    by Candy ( 2257 ) on Wednesday March 10, 1999 @06:43AM (#1987622) Homepage
    Ok, soffice 5.0(1) is nice an has a high potential for getting a impressive Office app some day, but so far somebody should teach them how to deal with pointers, exceptions and memory allocations.
    Soffice crashed my whole system more than once by uncontrolled memory allocation / memory leaks. I suffered severe data losses, as it messed up my filesystem. Make sure xosview is always running while soffice is.
    You should try creating a text with more that 5 pages, chapter numbering and some pictures in it. You will experience twice as many crashes as pages are in you text. The best thing is some behavior I call it the "Crazy Cow Mode". When soffice plunges into this mode you will experience the strangest things. From pictures vanishing after clicking on them to text boxes having a undeterminable size. Only a soffice restart can help here
    Jeez, it is not usable.
    Best Regards Tobias
  • Before you people go outright bashing SuSE for shipping KDE, if read the article, they also ship with GNOME. Anyway, not gonna feed the troll anymore...

    I found the article to be pretty insightful. As a user who loves playing with the different distros and whose current box has packages dating back to RedHat 4.1 (or so) I gotta say this makes me consider using SuSE instead of RH 6.0 when it comes out to redo that system. In any case, I suppose I'll wait for the RH 6.0 review before I make my decision. The article was fair and even handed and highlighted a lot of the excellent things about SuSE that no one else has, like Star Office and Mesa (with 3dfx support).

    Anyway, looks like it will give RH 6.0 a good run for its money.
  • I bet all you guys who start screaming immediately "SuSE doesnt ship with Gnome!" after someone says "SuSE ships with KDE", are the same people who answer every question being asked with the usual "RTFM".

    Seriously... SuSE released their 6.0 just a few days before the first 2.2.0pre kernels came out. I find this practice not very professional. They should have been waiting a few weeks for 2.2.0 to appear. So we have a new distro relase number with an old-fashioned, yet rock steady kernel.

    The bad thing(tm)? SuSE claim their distro is 2.2-ready, but they dont have a clue on how to get 2.2.x to work. "If you want to print, use 2.0.36", they say on their site.

    Im printing with SuSE and 2.2.3. Strange, huh? ;-)

    And, another bad thing(tm): Beginning with 6.0, they put the kernel image into some /boot filesystem, which seems quite non-standard to me.
  • I consider the /boot issue mentionend in my earlier post even worse. They are trying to tie users to their own distributed kernels.

    Untar a stock kernel, compile. The machine will come up with the original SuSE kernel.

    If it wasnt for the great localization support, I would have already turned my back on SuSE.
  • Mandrake Power Pack or SuSE?
    Mandrake Power Pack or SuSE?
    aargghhhh!@*&*^##%.

    I can't make up my mind.

  • Red Hat is listed as a sponsor on the Linuxconf Web site [compiled.com], but there's nothing I saw in my quick look to indicate that it's a Red Hat project.

  • KDE is coming along nicely now, I wish the devlopers would clean up some of the file ops, like finish a working Explorer clone that has smb capability

    I'm not sure it's the job of a file manager to have SMB capability, at least if your OS's kernel has an SMB client pluggable file system, as Linux does; does the KDE file manager have NFS capability, or does it just treat an NFS-mounted file system the same way it treats a local file system? If the latter, than you presumably get your SMB capability from "smbfs", unless you want to get at, say, NT server capabilities (e.g., viewing and modifying ACLs) that you (currently, at least) can't get at through the kernel's file system API.

  • First, he said nothing about races. He did treat Europe unfairly, but that's not a racial issue.

    Second, the original poster complained about the poor priorities of European buisnessmen. You turn around and call all Americans (singling out Slashdot readers) bigots and racists. I would say the latter is much more discriminatory and sterotyping than the first.
  • So what? Most of the foreign language distros (Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian etc, etc) are based on Redhat. Considering that China has a population of about 1.3 billion, I'd say that's a MUCH larger market for Redhat than your small europe.
  • > After a year or so, 2 (two) CEO's they have still
    > to make any impact on the US market. The SuSE
    > distro is released in GERMAN first, by an
    > anal-retentive bunch of Europeans who have (yet
    > again) failed to understand the importance of North America.

    What's your point? North America is more important than anything else? Now, YOU get emacs, bash andsoforth running with german umlauts, 8bit charset and stuff. I'd like to see RH or any other us-distro shipping databases of typical german providers so you just choose one and PPP works. Now, you go and get ISDN stuff working fine...


    get the point?

    regards
    kampi
  • No... SuSE uses RPM for its package management. YaST is a general configuration tool for various aspects of system management... one of which is a menu-driven front-end to the RPM system to make it a little easier to install and remove packages, but still using the RPM system underneath. It's similar to the relationship between glint and rpm on RedHat systems if you're familiar with those.
  • >I wish *nix developers would learn from the Win >developers that you need to just make a big >tarball or archive of some kind with ALL the >necessary shit in it so I can just install it and >run it.

    0. Become a Visual C++ developer annoyed by bugs
    1. Go to microsoft.com
    2. Find the Visual Studio 97 Service Pack
    3. Wonder why they offer VB-only and VB+all
    Service packs only...

    "Most customers use more than one product, so it's
    easier for them." -urgh

  • The only place I know that has cheap SuSE 6.0 CDs ($1.95) is at Linux Central

    http://linuxcentral.com/products/lccd/suse-6.0-g pl/

    I took awhile for the cheap, english version CD to come to market.

    --Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!
  • Seriously... SuSE released their 6.0 just a few days before the first 2.2.0pre kernels came out. I find this practice not very professional. They should have been waiting a few weeks for 2.2.0 to appear. So we have a new distro relase number with an old-fashioned, yet rock steady kernel.

    On my SuSE CD's there's an option to select between 2.0.36 and 2.2.0.pre-something. They had waited for a while, but it was uncertain if 2.2.0 would ever officially come out, so they just went for it. I'm running 2.2.3 on my suse 6.0 box right now, and everything works beautifully. 223 compiled nicely with egcs (which also came with SuSE 6.0, finally), all I had to do is download the kernel source. That's not too much work. :)

    BTW: Gosh damn that's a beautiful install. I'd reccmend everyone that likes linux check it out, if for no other reason than to see one possible good direction distribs could take.

    --Danny, ex-slackware user
  • Hi,

    you're a misinformed troll and bad at that, I might add.

    The handbook of every Suse distribution since I started using it (somewhere around 4.x) had a nice and well worded foreword that explained quite exactly what Linux is about and how the community works.

    In this foreword, they also encourage you to give away or copy the CD and that you do not need to buy a second CD to install the distribution on a second computer.

    They do not allow you to make your own commercial distribution and include yast with it, though. But does Redhat allow other commercial distributors to include some of their enhancements (e.g. xconfigurator or whatever it was called)?
  • I just hate this "we Americans" / "we Europeans" crap.

    In discussions with a lot of fellow (German) Linux users, the origin of a software's author never was an issue that made us not to choose it. Never.

    Of course, German Linux users like the fact that there are a lot of German developers contributing to KDE. This is some silly pride thing, but nothing more than that.
  • Because if you had used it, you would know that Gnome is indeed included. It may be a slightly older version, but who can expect to keep up with dynamic production on a static distribution?

    I have used Debian, Caldera, and Redhat, but now use Suse exclusively, because IMHO, it has the best, most flexible install, and administration of any of the others.


    I would guess that if you HAVE tried suse, you did the streamlined install, which does not, if I recall correctly, install gnome.


    --Jason Bell
  • In case you may not know, Suse is a german distribution. ;)


    I have not had luck using YAST to configure a PPP setup, but I prefer to roll my own scripts anyway, so it was not a big deal for me.




    --Jason Bell
  • Linuxconf is a Redhat program, so I'm sure they may have restrictions prohibiting it from being included in other distributions. It is available for download though, and will work on Suse.

    As for YAST messing up your configurations.....Yast is the only configuration tool that I know of that is not all or nothing. You can either turn the whole thing off, or tell it specific configurations that you do not want it to modify, and it will leave them untouched.


    --Jason Bell

  • You are wrong. Why are you giving english words for a German distribution?

    SuSe is mixed capitalization, because it is an Acronym for "Gesellschaft für Software- und Systementwicklung mbH" which roughly translates to (You were close though) "Company for Software- and System-Development"

    This was taken from the Suse FAQ (english version) found at The Suse FAQ Page. [suse.com]

    Your meaning does make sense, if Suse were an english speaking company....


    --Jason Bell

  • I agree totally!!!!!!!

  • you can download it off the web....
  • XF86Config is very very old....

    XF86Setup has been out for a while and it is better than XF86Config.. I can't wait to get hot sax :-)
  • most distros have a /boot directory now.. RH 5.1 did when I tried it.. Slackware has it.. they may or may not put the zImag efile there (vmlinuz) but they have it.. slackware put the vmlinuz file in the / wheil RH 5.1 I was never sure where make install put it.. didn't care either as long as I could boot :-)
  • IBM is supposed to be distribution independant.. or so they say..

    SuSE is released first in german cause it is made in Germany .. they probably need transulators, and help transulating ..

    RH is not ALL THAT.. it is usually bleeding edge, which sometime meanse things don't work... (glint sucks)

    I must have missed Dell buying into Redhat. I thought that they were going to distribute linux, adn were working with Redhat....
  • hmm you can download yast off there cite put it on cd and sell it.. yes you can it is being done...

    by several distributors... duh... go to ftp.suse.org/pub
  • Well, SuSE is in Germany very popular, but I don't like it.
    It's a good idea to hide system administration behind an easy interface, expecially for new users. But yast demands to be exclusive, it doesn't cooperate with other tools or manually edited config files. The complete configuration is stored in one file, /etc/rc.config and everything is regenerated from there. Poor one who edited something manually. OK, you get a warning if some files had been touched manually and you can disable rc.config, but I think that this is not the right way.
    There are other tools which do that job better. My favourite is smit for AIX. The interface just collects the data an passes it to a command line driven program and documents that in a logfile. So you have hidden everything below a nice interface, documented the changes and you can see what happens.
    There are some other points I dislike with SuSE Linux (not only since 6.0, which is already available in germany for some time), for example the braindead command completion in tcsh. Ever used that with "cp fubar.c fubar.c.bak"? But I think YaST is a good example how you get patronized by SuSE.
  • Yes and no.

    YaST uses a text file with variables. But YaST creates the configuration files in /etc. I'm not that deep in this topic, but AFAIK you don't get a warning everytime an edited file will be overwritten. So you can deceide: you use YaST for everything or you disable it.

    As you said, AIX has a binary object repository, but that is only used for AIX specific things like device configuration or package management. Almost everything else is done as usual with text files in /etc. And these text files are edited, not rewritten or yet created from some kind of database.

    But - independently from using text or binary files - AIX has a complete set of homogeneous command line utilities for almost every administration task. And these utilities change existing text files, they don't overwrite them. Beside that, the set is much more complete than YaST is.

    Okay, so you have a set of command line utilities with smit glueing everything together vs. a menu driven binary. I prefer the first approach. IBM did that years ago and it is still a very good concept.
  • For me it works just fine. I'm using smit since 1994 and AIX 3.2.5 and didn't run into trouble.
    Modifying text files thought to be edited by humans with a stupid program isn't harmless. I remember problems with sam under HP-UX years ago. But that is nothing compared with the fun I had with SuSE Linux. :-(
  • SuSE, RedHat, Debian, Slackware are all great distro's. I use dedicated systems for each. But it's a pity that the others like DLD (Deutsche Linux Distribution, www.delix.de), Turbo Linux (Pacific HighTech, www.pht.com) get less attention. The earlier Power Linux of LST software GmbH (already bougth by Caldera) was an early distro with very simple installation and management system called LISA. And German distro's in general are dealing very good with ISDN and ISP related matters.

    And I don't know why my previous comment was send as AC, but that's not true.
  • Shove it up and keep in mind Linus Torvalds is Finnish, if you know who he is and where Finland is. Talking about morons...
  • I've got it running on a xeon dual processor IBM Zpro Intellistation in the lab and it looks great. SuSE includes gnome, but I haven't been able to get it to work, so I found out there's a site all SuSE users should check out: (all are mirrors of the same page) http://gnome.linuxbe.org/ http://www.tu-harburg.de/skf/Pub/ifmpc118.ifm.uni- hamburg.de/gnome.html http://ifmpc118.ifm.uni-hamburg.de/gnome.html very slow) Anyway, don't install gnome from the 6.0 distribution. Even after downloading all the latest gnome crap, I still haven't got it working, it seems to need so much add'l crap just to get it going. I wish *nix developers would learn from the Win developers that you need to just make a big tarball or archive of some kind with ALL the necessary shit in it so I can just install it and run it. Keep working fellas, you'll learn. But SuSE 6.0 is great and worth every dime! SuSE 6.0 is a major improvement over their previous releases, and is a 'must read' for any serious Linux nut. I think it's much better than Red Hype and includes several databases (Informix, Adabas, MySQL, Sybase, and several others, along with a couple of other window managers, like ICE - very simple but nice, as well as FVWM95, FVWM, and KDE. KDE is coming along nicely now, I wish the devlopers would clean up some of the file ops, like finish a working Explorer clone that has smb capability so I can dump my Win desktops completely.
  • They moved the kernel into /boot, a logical move. /boot is a standard directory on all distributions You can boot a kernel from anywhere you want to, so if you simply must have the kernel sitting in the root directory, you can tell LILO to find it there. That will keep you Windows converts from panicing when you don't see any files sitting in the root directory. I have the same xeon dual machine running 2.2.2, and will be compiling 2.2.3 today. So quit whining, download the kernel and start compiling. ;)
  • Not true. In IBM's announcement of support for Linux they specifically made mention of the fact that they are supporting ALL of the major distro's to avoid favoritisms. And you clowns who keep saying "just everyone roll over and let Red Hype have all the pie" are annoying. You haven't really thought that through and are just spewing. You really don't want to think. You're happy that someone is succeeding, and that they are good at marketing, but just because a company is successful at marketing, doesn't mean they have good products. (Sounds familiar doesn't it ...aka Windows) SuSE is a very cool distribution, and they have done a good job. If someone points me to a better distribution, I will definitely check it out. Remember gang, for the price of these distributions, you can afford to buy several. Go buy one of each and then form an opinion. $50 and less for each. In fact, you can get Evalution (Lite) versions of SuSE for *FREE* for the asking. They have a single CD "lite" release that is great for building simple servers with, and just because it says "eval" - it doesn't expire or break after a certain time frame.

  • In Redhat terms (which seems the common lingo
    here) YaST combines the abilities of glint and
    linuxconf, so it allows you to install/delete
    packages (rpms) as well as configures your system

    Once you try it you find that it does all this
    very well.

  • Once again the image perceived by the rest of the world of the 'average american' has been confirmed :)

    See how easy it is to get people fired up?

    Anyway...Irrelevant? Where have we heard this kind of reasoning before? So what about the millions of people who're using windows? We might as well giv up then, and all install NT on our servers, right?

    Not to defend SuSe here, I'm using Slackware...But I always was under the impression that the general idea here was: I _do_ have a choice!

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