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SuSE Businesses Operating Systems Software Linux

SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available 215

Posted by timothy from the teutonic-download dept.
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."
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SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available More

SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available

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  • ok.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2004 @07:53AM (#9349544)
    so is it Suse, silent 'e'? Or SusEE or SusAY? or what??
    • well, its originally a german company. Don't know if the name is supposed to be pronounced english, but in german it would be with soft S (you don't have that sound in english i believe, just imagine a stereotypical nazi-german saying 'this').
      The 'e' is not silent, pronounced like the e in 'the'.

      So all in all it would be ThuThe, with the ths misspronounced german-style.

      • Re:ok.. (Score:2, Funny)

        by torpor ( 458 )

        Well, I live in Germany, and I've heard Germans say it the same way they say the German word for 'sweet' ... which phonetically sounds like "zoo-seh"...

        Maybe we should get Linus to record how he says it for us ...
        • sorry, but...

          1. the word for 'sweet' is 'süß', female form 'süße', which is probably the form you're talking about. You pronounce it z-ü-s-e, and the umlaut ü is somewhere in between u and e. In SuSE, however, you have an 'u', so this pronounced like ooh. Very different indeed.

          2. The letter ß translates to an unvoiced S, which is different from the two voiced S in the pronounciation of SuSE.

          I would pronounce SuSE like this:

          z-ooh-z-a

          (with stress on first syllable and t

        • Re:ok.. (Score:2, Informative)

          by tedric ( 8215 )
          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

    • Re:ok.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by DarkProphet ( 114727 ) <chadwick_nofx@hotma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:09AM (#9349579)
      I've always pronounced it "Sooze", as in like what the RIAA does to unwary teenagers ;-)

    • Re:ok.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by ValourX ( 677178 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:12AM (#9349588) Homepage
      According to the company, it's:

      SOO-suh

      -Jem

    • Re:ok.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by kavau ( 554682 )
      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... ;-)

  • SuSE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by clymere ( 605769 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:13AM (#9349593) Homepage
    That would explain why last week i downloaded their FTP install boot disk and was unable to get it to work.

    In the meantime I've installed Slackware instead...and much more atisfied with that then I was with SuSE 8.2.

    My experience so far has been that RPM-based distros like SuSE and Red Hat that attempt to simplify dependency problems with propreitary upgrade tools inevitably just end up causing me much more frustration. SuSE had NO provision for getting software other than what was in the version I'd installed(8.2) and wouldn't even install apt4rpm due to dependency hell. I've found installing and upgrading new software in Slackware a 1000x simpler than any RPM.

    I will attest to Yast being a nice tool, that was easy to use, and did a pretty good job of detecting my hardware. But the complications in upgrading individual packages in a registered copy of their distro proved too frustrating to justify sticking with it.

    I would only reccomend SuSE to a newbie who has no desire for messing around with things once its installed, and just wants it to work reasonably well from the beginning.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:58AM (#9349724)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Lets see you do that for hundreds of systems (Score:5, Interesting)

      by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @09:26AM (#9349842) Homepage Journal
      I work for the Fulton school of engineering at Arizona State University. There are several hundred Linux systems here, and I support almost all of them in one way or another. I've had people try to tell me that we should be using Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Sometimes this advice is based upon some genuine technical reason but all too often it is based upon ideology, especially where Debian is concerned. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to use a distro just because it follows the FSF/GNU flavor of political correctness. The day the unix world chooses ideology over technology is the day we are doomed.

      The distributions we encourage our customers to use are Redhat/Fedora because this distro family is easy to support. Those other distros may or may not have real (technical) advantages over Redhat, but none of them scale as well as Redhat does. SuSE may scale equally well but due to Redhat's popularity we simply haven't had much call to try and work on SuSE systems. If Fedora proves to be unstable we may switch to SuSE, especially if it becomes more popular than Fedora.

      The reason why we push Redhat/Fedora and not some other distro is because we don't want to have to install packages by hand or compile stuff from source all the time. Hand installs and compiles are great when you've got one system to support, but that just doesn't work when you're trying to support several hundred systems.

      We have to look at what is the best solution for ALL of the systems at the same time, not just what solution would work best for one particular system.

      Lee
      • you make some very good points. I thought i was pretty specific in saying that Slackware was good "for me" and that Suse and Red Hat were not good "for me." If i was in charge of a large environment like that, i would certainly feel more pressure towards an RPM based distro, and honestly if it was a large school or business picking up the tab i'd probably even be inclined towards RH Enterprise. For my own personal workstation I find Slackware to be much more flexible AND usable than these others. For th
      • FWIW, I'm a Fedora refugee. I switched from it mostly because I didn't want to have to rely on the community to provide patches when FC1 got phased out. Nor did I want to go to FC2. And let's be straight, FC1 is an awesome OS. Very well done. I just didn't want to mess with reinstalling often, nor dealing with suspect support of FC1.

        I'm very happy with SuSE 9.1 now after an initial hiccup that turned out to be hardware related.
      • 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 an
      • Funny, I never realized that Debian required you to install packages by hand. Hell, that whole apt thing, with great tools such as apt-get, aptitude, synaptic... what the hell, lets just install crap by hand.
      • The reason why we push Redhat/Fedora and not some other distro is because we don't want to have to install packages by hand or compile stuff from source all the time. Hand installs and compiles are great when you've got one system to support, but that just doesn't work when you're trying to support several hundred systems.

        Well, this argumentation is the reason I'd choose FreeBSD.
        Now that there are binary-updates, it would be even easier to maintain.
        All the software (KDE, GNOME etc.) only needs to be in

      • You can set up local repositories, install from packages (emerge --usepkg), etc.

        FreeBSD is similar..binary updates available.

        The reason WE stick with Red Hat is because of a few Red Hat fanboys that are just scared shitless of doing anything the non-Red Hat way, and because of vendor support (although that is seriously lacking these days too...damn you Dell)

    • Re:SuSE (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mz2 ( 770412 )

      That's a bit trollish. SUSE's own binary repository plus the contrib repo is vast, it's really hard to find packages that aren't included. And there are other unofficial repositories if you're not happy with SUSE's.

      Besides, by principle, I can't really see anything wrong with providing automatically dependency-aware installation tool with RPMs? That'not even any RH & SUSE specific approach. Especially when the one in SuSE works so well, I don't really see any reason to mock RPM-based packaging systems.

      • SUSE's own binary repository plus the contrib repo is vast, it's really hard to find packages that aren't included.
        Where is SUSE's own repository? I installed SuSE 9.1 Personal last night on a machine to see if I liked it, and although the install went really smoothly, I can't for the life of me figure out what repository to point YaST at in order to install other software. Maybe I'm stupid, but Googling didn't help, and I couldn't find it by surfing SuSE's web site.

        It was also a little bizarre to instal

    • I have SuSE 9.1. Yes, many packages are out there on the distro disks that I use but I have upgraded many just by using YaST to remove the SuSE package and then installed the updated package. No big deal. It is just as easy as doing an uninstall/install package in Whinedo$e. The process is just as easy as you want to make it. I can think of worse things that this...fixing a messed-up registry.

    • Re:SuSE (Score:3, Informative)

      by kavau ( 554682 )
      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.

  • Slashdotted Already (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here is a Google mirror cache [google.com]

  • I'll spring for the full media (Score:5, Informative)

    by krygny ( 473134 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:30AM (#9349642)
    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.

    • Re:I'll spring for the full media (Score:4, Informative)

      by waveclaw ( 43274 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:49PM (#9352025) Homepage Journal
      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.

  • I installed this yesterday (Score:5, Informative)

    by danormsby ( 529805 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:32AM (#9349646) Homepage
    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.

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

      Bizarrely, this isn't true. It turns out that if you type in an ordinary hostname (i.e. mirror.ac.uk) into the field where it says "IP Address (0.0.0.0)", it works just fine. I have no idea why they decided to label the field that way; it drove me nuts at first until I just said "what the hell" and typed in the hostname.

  • My SuSE 9.1 experiences so far (Score:5, Informative)

    by arcade ( 16638 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:48AM (#9349694) Homepage
    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.
    • 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 s
    • 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

  • Just did an apt-get dist-upgrade (Score:3, Informative)

    by Erik Hensema ( 12898 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @09:40AM (#9349922) Homepage

    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.

  • Bah, all I want is the installer kernel to be able to grok my SATA RAID set, without having to resort to custom boot disks, or God forbid, using Debian or Gentoo. When will a mainstream, it-just-works distro support these disk controllers?
    • Gothmolly wrote:

      Bah, all I want is the installer kernel to be able to grok my SATA RAID set, without having to resort to custom boot disks, or God forbid, using Debian or Gentoo. When will a mainstream, it-just-works distro support these disk controllers?

      Linux block device support depends on which particular SATA chipset you have -- you didn't identify yours -- and on what version of installation kernel the Linux distribution uses.

      Why? Because some some chipsets (3Ware 8xxx, Adaptec AAR 24x0, LSI

  • I've been running 9.1 for a couple of weeks now on my 800mhz P3 notebook from KDS. I went ahead and bout the CDs because I'm stuck on dialup at the moment.

    I like.

    Boot time is a little bit slower than 8.2, but that's probably because I haven't gone through at disabled all the unneeded services yet.

    There was an extremely minor irritation with X not recognizing my monitor geometry, so that I got an annoying popup every time KDE started up. Still looked fine. Anyway, I set the physical dimensions in SaX, and

    • Boot time is a little bit slower than 8.2,


      On my laptop (p3-600), SuSE 9.1 takes over a minute to get to a command prompt. Arch takes 20 seconds. That's with minimum services running. Just what is SuSE spending all that time doing?.

  • SuSE 9.1 performance (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2004 @10:54AM (#9350347)
    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.
    • I've tried both 9.0 and 9.1 on my FSC Scaleo 600 Athlon64 and overall 9.1 feels faster.
    • Same results here on Athlon XP systems. Suse was bogged down in a big way, Mandrake 10 seems crisper and more responsive. I would have to say that Suse needs some better kernel optimizations. I didn't do a kernel recompile on either installation, maybe I will do that before nuking the Suse partition.
    • RedHat anounced the end of their desktop products as we'd all come to know them

      Red Hat never did that. They've always had a desktop product - after Red Hat 9, there was EL3 Workstation (if you paid for support before, you can continue now) and Fedora Core 1 (if you prefer to support things yourself, that's fine too).

  • Anyone have a torrent for this?

    (for the few who don't know, the more people downloading something via bittorrent [bitconjurer.org], the faster everyone's download occurs, as it's distributed downloading, unlike ftp... which hammers the servers)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've gotten into using bittorrent for files lately, and let me tell you.. nothing is easier than finding an open tracker and getting the files that you need.

        As well, it can handle multiple files in multiple directories, not just one file per torrent.

        So this would be a perfect application. I know that when I read this article on slashdot, the first thing that I did is read through the comments to see if anybody posted a .torrent. Sadly, none yet.

  • Worst version ever (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pottymouth ( 61296 )

    I've been using various Linux distros since 1995 and I've never encountered such a buggy release!

    Most of it could be blamed on KDE 3.2.1 but that IS the most common Suse window manager. Between not being able to log out without locking up the X-Server (and no, cntl+alt BS doesn't recover a console so you have to reset or log in remotely) and the DHCP client refusing to allow KDE to load I think I've effectively demonstrated why we wouldn't want to use Linux at my company. I've been trying to get managemen
  • I'm currently a SuSE user and am looking at upgrading. I could get the upgrade version for 9.1 but there is a convenience factor for reinstalls for the full version. Anyone know if I can use the full version for upgrades? (SusE web site isn't clear on the matter)
    • The upgrade version is the EXACT same software. The only difference is the upgrade version does not come with a new set of manuals.
    • The only difference between the two is that the full version includes the manuals. You can do a fresh install or update from either version. The upgrade version is definitely cheaper, but there were also a lot of nice updates to the manuals in this newer version. Also, IIRC the free installation support may be different between the two versions.
  • I have an onboard intel 810 AC97 sound card. Installed SuSE 9.1 via ISO. I started with a basic install, and everything worked fine with sound. Then I went to install the rest of the packages on the 5 CD's. After this... Sound was gone. The funny thing is that the sound card is still detected and it's module is loaded. Also, the mixer works, because I can turn up the microphone and get feedback. But NO SOUND other than that.

    I spent hours trying to probe sound modules, reconfigure ALSA, reload my so
    • 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
  • 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.
  • 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 k

  • It's terribly buggy (Score:4, Informative)

    by ChiralSoftware ( 743411 ) <info@chiralsoftware.net> on Monday June 07, 2004 @12:46AM (#9354366) Homepage
    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.

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