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SuSE Businesses Operating Systems Software

A Closer Look at SUSE 10 269

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the long-way-from-netware dept.
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"
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A Closer Look at SUSE 10 More

A Closer Look at SUSE 10

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  • Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by syntap ( 242090 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:33PM (#13868061)
    SuSE 9.3 was the distro that finally got me seriously considering cutting the Windows cord, and 10 handed me the scissors. It's such a great, complete distro that's easy to install and maintain, easy to customize. It's the most polished distro I have used. Between SuSE 10 and Ubuntu the reasons for sticking with Windows and its licensing/upgrading hell are slim. Yeah I'll still need Windows for some things (mostly PHB stuff) but SuSE is my new default boot.

    • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hyu ( 763773 )
      That's funny. I had the same feelings about SuSE for quite some time. It's the only Linux system I'd run for more than a week without deleting. I had it as my exclusive system for a good month and a half with very pleasant results.

      This weekend I picked up a Mac, and all that has changed. Now I don't want to use Windows or Linux. Mac OS X is too good, too slick, and truly does just work.

      It's operating systems like OS X and SuSE that work intuitively to just about anyone willing to spend a small amount of

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MiKM ( 752717 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:50PM (#13868165)
        I've never understood what "just works" means. From my experience, every operating system (Windows, Mac, *nix) always has some problem/missing feature that needs a workaround.
      • I'd rather use OS X than SuSE, but I'd rather use SuSE than Windows.

        That's a reasonable hierarchy. At home, I'll use my 4 year old powerbook running 10.4 ahead of my shiny 6 month old Dell dual-booting XP-P and SuSE 9.2 anytime..as I am now. It Just Works and Does It Well.

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:3, Interesting)

        by swillden ( 191260 )

        Mac OS X is too good, too slick, and truly does just work.

        Unless you want to set up a raw print queue to a remote CUPS server.

        OTOH, it says something that that is currently my only beef with my wife's iBook. It's a big beef, from her point of view, though, since printing is rather important to her. At present, if she prints to the HP LJ4 she gets the square of the number of copies she requests, due to a weirdness in the gimp-print driver Apple provides for that printer. To print on the HP PhotoSmart

      • It's the only Linux system I'd run for more than a week without deleting.

        It seems like you havent tried out gentoo yet :)
        It takes over a week to get it just running with all the bells and whistles :p (portage my love...)

        Imho the biggest problem with "distro releases" is that they change stuff in incompatible ways. Thats why i fell love with gentoo. I dont have to upgrade to the next release to get the newest packages, they are always here with me (and they are newer than the ones that ubuntu/debian (and sus
        • It is ALWAYS going to be more satisfying to construct your operating environment from the ground up so you can understand every nuance, every feature, and ensure that it is fully optimized for your situation. However this is, for the most part, something only an IT geek will enjoy.

          Think of it this way: Car geeks are never satisfied with a stock car straight from the factory. They will always tweak it at the very least. They may even rebuild it from scratch. Most folks won't bother though, they just wan

    • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vandit2k6 ( 848077 )
      Yea SUSE 10 is great. The gui is really nice. But it still is not my default boot. One problem is that it doesn't like my wireless card on my laptop and for me thats more than important.

    • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cenuij ( 526885 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:48PM (#13868154)
      You know what? Suse is the distro that actually did make me cut the windows cord. The only thing i missed for a while was playing some games, but since I discovered cedega that's a no brainer now too. Windows free and proud.

    • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:3, Interesting)

      by smartsaga ( 804661 )
      I disagree on the polished side. Perhaps it IS the most polished distro you have ever used, but it has been my experience that while it is good it is not that good. Just as an exmaple, I installed SUSE 10 on my Athlon 3000+ with 768 DDR RAM with 120GB HD with 8MB buffer. SUSE's configuration for performace simply sucks, it kept leaking memory and using all the RAM all the time. Just opening and closing programs would increase the RAM usage, damn it even just moving a window would use up more RAM. That is ju

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)

        by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:32PM (#13868388) Homepage Journal
        If performance issues worries you, maybe you would want to try SUPER [opensuse.org] (SUSE Performance Enhanced Release). Is one of the nice things of being open, that people start to build around it new approachs.

        • Easier to redistribute as well (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Bullard ( 62082 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @05:17AM (#13870343) Homepage
          SUPER sounds like a grand idea to spread the SUSE community wider outside corporate confines.

          1-CD Installs [opensuse.org] (performance-patched with Minimal, KDE and GNOME-centric sets) in particular are very welcome as the official SUSE and SUSE-OSS DVDs or 5-CD sets are on the heavy side and most users don't need anywhere near the full set of packages included there. The 1-CD Install set, as Ubuntu has already shown, keeps the user experience simple (while allowing for future expansion) and lowers the barrier for user-to-user proliferation of the distro.

          The growing community around the OSS distro versions also helps Novell/SUSE to grow the momentum and mindshare of their commercial and supported releases. It'll be easier for Novell/SUSE to sell systems and support to businesses and other institutions when there may already be people around who are familiar and comfortable with their widely available free-for-all offerings. It'll also encourage third parties to pay more attention to making SUSE compatible packages.

          I hope they'll get around to creating the planned liveCD version of SUPER [opensuse.org] as well, as an easily redistributable alternative to the current liveDVD offering.

          FWIW, since Ubuntu stormed the scene I've mainly promoted it to people interested in trying out Linux, but for the technically-inept I've still recommended a SUSE box. These new OSS versions, and in particular the planned liveCD version, would dramatically lower the barrier of trying SUSE out but I'd still recommend a box set for the inexperienced users due to their better QA, less breakage and availability of official support.

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:32PM (#13868389)
        Ekhm, it appears we have another someone who is clueless about how physical RAM is being allocated nowadays.

        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

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jon-o ( 17981 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @09:06PM (#13868535) Homepage
        I wasn't too pleased with it either - haven't used the most recent version, but I spent a little bit of time with the evaluation version last year. Seemed there were a lot of nice ideas, but a lot seemed kinda half-assed. Lots of stuff that would work really nicely if you used it just like they wanted you to use it, but then didn't support anything more esoteric. And then if you tried to go outside of the "standard stuff", you find undocumented and unfinished scripts and the like. I found it rather annoying... especially since it seemed relatively impossible to get help on it other than through the paid support, which I didn't pay for, of course. But it's really not the sort of distro I'm interested in - I much prefer the flexibility and transparency of Debian (fully realizing that half the transparency is a result of my knowing better where to look, having used Debian for about 8 years now). SuSE just seemed to have too much "do it our way, or don't do it at all!" mentality about it. But maybe if I used it more, I'd change my mind.

      • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:5, Informative)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Monday October 24, 2005 @11:04PM (#13869128) Journal

        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.

    • Re:Excusee-my-SuSE (Score:2, Informative)

      by linuxpyro ( 680927 )

      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.

    • Mac OS 6.4 is the OS the let me cut the Windows cord. Oh, that's right, in 1987, PCs came with DOS. I never did dual boot my Mac, though I considered running 68k BSD.

      At first, my PC, a 386/33 running Linux kernel 0.97 - Slackware, was used for browsing the internet. When Open Office became available, I slowly moved everything I cared about from the Mac. I hardly ever boot the Mac anymore. There still is the project to convert all my old Word docs to RTF or some other open format.

  • Why do people always review the install? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:46PM (#13868141)
    Why do people always review the install? I mean seriously, who gives a shit. I haven't heard anyone complaining about an install since 2000, and even in 1998 it really wasn't that hard with some documentation scribbled on a napkin. There's even a howto for installing [strangehorizons.com] linux on the carcass of a dead badger.

    Microsoft isn't pushing their OS for its easy install. You never hear about OS X's install.

    Why is linux judged by it's ease of install!? Who gives a flying rats ass. Does it work after it's installed? Probably not every well.

    • Re:Why do people always review the install? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:55PM (#13868190) Homepage Journal
      I don't see how this got an insightful moderation, since it's just a troll.

      How many people you know have bought a computer with Linux pre-installed, or comes with Linux recovery CDs? Macs come with OS-X already on it, so people don't tend to install it. If a Linux distro doesn't have a friendly install process, then its not going to be accepted by the masses. It's nothing personal against Linux, it's just a fact of the market place, and getting Linux's foot in the computer door.

      • Re:Why do people always review the install? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:18PM (#13868321)
        His point was that since every distro has a very easy install these days (with the exception of some distros that aren't meant for noobs) there's no point in talking about the install in a review. It's a waste of space and time.

        For distros like SUSE, Mandriva etc. the only thing that needs to be said about the install is 'it's easy'.

        Way too many reviews talk about the install way too much and then don't spend enough space talking about how it is to actually use the distro.
        • It isn't. I have installed a bunch of distros over the last two weeks and they were far from just the same. Also, installation is still not flawless for many distros.
        • In your response you say, talk about how it is to actually use the distro. But let's face it: with over 300 distros, what separates them? I'll tell you, the hardware configuration utilities, server configuration utilities, installation, and package management. That's it folks. I've got news for you, Gnome 2.12 functions the same on SuSe as it does on gentoo, on redhat, yadda yadda. Yeah, maybe a menu moved, or a theme changed, but nobody is rewriting these things from the ground up to reinvent their di

      • I don't see how this got an insightful moderation, since it's just a troll.

        A troll is someone who has no legitimate interest in the subject of a forum and who posts inflammatory messages with the intent of disrupting that forum.

        Having an opinion someone doesn't like doesn't make that person a troll.

        I felt that the other poster had a legitimate point.

        GNU/Linux installers used be very unfriendly ( some still are ), but that is in the distant past making it past the time for people who write reviews to

    • Um... maybe because nobody installs windows, or OSX on a blank box... but most everyonehe installs linux on a box that was either blank or had another OS preinstalled. Get a grip, the install is very important for potential new user. When was the last time you tried to install windows... for me it was 3.11... other than that, it has always been pre intalled.
    • Microsoft isn't pushing their OS for its easy install. You never hear about OS X's install.

      That's because 99% of users never have to install Windows or OSX. It comes on the computer and they don't futz with it. Whereas probably 90% of linux users have to install it themselves, on widely varying hardware, for which your instructions on a napkin may not apply. When I was using linux (before osx was available) I installed it many times, always on irregular hardware, and had various issues with the install

    • Microsoft isn't pushing their OS for its easy install. You never hear about OS X's install.

      That's because compared to most linuxes, XP isn't easy to install. It's a pain in the ass. The only driver I ever need to install seperately with SuSE is the driver for my Nvidia GeForce and even that is semiautomated in SuSE. With MS every fiddly bit of crap that is attached needs it's own driver and most of them will just run under Linux. This is the main change in SuSE 9.3 that I don't like. Something about th
  • Jeesh, yes we understood you learned a new phrase, now get over it :-P

    One real question though: Up to and including SuSE 9.1 I have always had one major complaint (That does not stop me from using SuSE, but is an absolute showstopper when thinking about recommending it to friends). Everything is fine as long as you only install the default packages and a few select ones, but very often packages (which are distributed with SuSE, I'm not talking about external rpms) would install just fine, but never show u
    • I think that is more of a KDE thing. However, all linux distros could really use an upgrade path. If I had a datacenter box using SUSE 9, I should be able to put the SUSE 10 CD in, and get an "upgrade" entire version button. Apt-get do work to some degree, but the CD networkless method seem more natural in a giant datacenter. Or maybe someone has a better way out there?

      • However, all linux distros could really use an upgrade path.

        I successfully "upgraded" from Suse 9.3 to 10.0 last week.

        It was the first real upgrade that's actually worked hassle-free, as opposed to upgrade, meaning backup-everything-and-selectively-restore-after-a- fresh-install.

        Well, I did have to go into Sax2 and redo my resolution, but that was it. All my settings and programs continued to work just fine.

    • Re:"hands down" and a real question (Score:4, Informative)

      by kikensei ( 518689 ) <<joshua> <at> <ingaugemedia.com>> on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:47PM (#13868452) Homepage
      Here are 10 or 11 repositories of SuSE compile RPM's: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Re positories [opensuse.org] Here's how to install then as sources for YaST: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11504. html [novell.com] I recommend Packman's excellent package site, from the first link. Once you add the sources, YaST performs essentially the same apt-get (or synaptic), resolves dependencies, and doesn't break stuff when you add new packages.
    • What happens if I add LyX for example?

      I just tried it (Suse 10.0 on an AMD64) -- the link for LyX shows up in the KDE menu under the Office->Word Processor items. The couple of other apps (eg K3B) I've installed after the initial install also show up with new links in the menu. Looks like that's now a non-issue.

      (I've been a SuSE user since about 6.1. My only gripe with recent versions is that they don't include my two favorite viewer apps, kuickshow and mplayer. No big deal to download and build them,
    • very often packages (which are distributed with SuSE, I'm not talking about external rpms) would install just fine, but never show up in KDEs menu.

      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.

  • What a media-rich Distro Review (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BlueRayMan ( 924733 ) * on Monday October 24, 2005 @07:52PM (#13868178)
    http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse10/siia/s use10install.html [madpenguin.org]

    I've never seen a Flash movie of a Linux distro install before! Nice.

    I tested the boot.iso on an XP box, until it failed to detect that I was using a MN-510 (a usb wireless networking adapter made by Microsoft.)

    So thumb's up on this review -- but the distro is not a smashing success, because it fails to properly embrace the MS switcher. The test is not can we install it--it's "can the previous generation..."

  • I've got Suse 9.3 (KDE) running at home but it still has minor niggling missing features that hinder widespread adoption.

    KDE: I'll say it again, from Kmail there's no print selection feature. My hope is KDE 4.0 will have that feature.

    Hardware issues: I've got a usb keyboard that doesn't kick-in on boot sometimes. The wife just resets. I've got an Epson printer/scanner/more (Linux drivers hosted in Japan!) that goes to sleep and cups can't start it.

    OpenOffice.Org:
    Had I known how unstable OOO was when I i

    • Re:Details & Packman's! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @02:25AM (#13869903)
      KDE: I'll say it again, from Kmail there's no print selection feature. My hope is KDE 4.0 will have that feature.


      That's a roadblock on Linux'es way of "widespread adoption"? there's no "print selection" feature in Kmail? Uh, OK....

      Hardware issues: I've got a usb keyboard that doesn't kick-in on boot sometimes.


      My experiences are completely the opposite. I too have an USB-keyboard (Apple Keyboard in fact). I plugged in in to my Gentoo-box while it was running. System detected it without any problems and I could use it right away. What happened in Windows? I plugged it in, but I couldn't use it. It needed to install some drivers. I installed the drivers, and the machine rebooted. But I still couldn't use the keyboard, I had to plug in my old PS2-keyboard so I could log in! It installed even more drivers and rebooted. And it STILL did not work! It installed even more drivers and THEN it started to work!

      No, it doesn't stop there. What happens if I unplug the keyboard and re-plug it in to a different USB-port? In Linux, it just works. But in Windows, it wont work untill I reinstall the drivers! Hello?! it's the same keyboard, only on different port!

  • Hardware support (Score:5, Insightful)

    by applecrumble ( 910692 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:09PM (#13868283)
    I always find it unfair when Linux distros are labelled poor because they don't support somebody's hardware, like their wireless card not working. The Linux developers would happily develop drivers for software if they were given the hardware specs to do so, but that isn't the case and drivers must be created with little help from the manufacturer. For example, I'm sure Novell would love to have native drivers for every wireless card out there, but if the companies won't co-operate, the best they can do is the ugly hack of using the win32 driver wrapped in an emulation layer. It's similar to complaining about why you can't play Playstation 2 games on Xbox hardware; the latter was never designed to work on the former and Microsoft wouldn't offer any help to get it working, but that doesn't mean Playstation 2 games are rubbish.

    • I always find it unfair when Linux distros are labelled poor because they don't support somebody's hardware, like their wireless card not working. The Linux developers would happily develop drivers for software if they were given the hardware specs to do so, but that isn't the case and drivers must be created with little help from the manufacturer.

      In many cases the manufacturer would happily develop drivers if they could make a closed-source Linux driver without the exercise turning into a total buttfuckath

      • Perhaps... of course, even ignoring what I assume you mean by "buttfuckathon", it's still much easier to make binary drivers for Windows since x86 is essentially the only architecture. The manufacturer should be happy to do whatever the customers want, which for me would be to release all specs (and possibly a reference driver for x86 Windows or maybe even Linux) so that free drivers could be made for any OS on any architecture, but apparently not enough other customers feel that way.

        • Perhaps... of course, even ignoring what I assume you mean by "buttfuckathon", it's still much easier to make binary drivers for Windows since x86 is essentially the only architecture.

          The CPU architecture isn't the issue at all. Having to rebuild the driver every time the kernel changes, or build some kind of hacky not-so-reliable wedge like Nvidia does, is the issue.

          The manufacturer should be happy to do whatever the customers want

          In principle I agree, although of course we'd need to pay for it. I'd fear a

    • thats one of the fortunate things im looking forward to in freebsd. the manufactureres of wireless hardware are very happily supplying not only help but paying some people to be writing drivers for wireless hardware for FreeBSD 6.0...

      Ill be mean and throw the grenade now. Its cause its BSD not GPL. They can benifit more from the BSD liscence than they can from the GPL. Dont flame me bout it im just pointing out an example. And im happy with it, it means that theres going to be open source drivers, and they

      • the manufactureres of wireless hardware are very happily supplying not only help but paying some people to be writing drivers for wireless hardware for FreeBSD 6.0

        Interesting. Can you provide a specific example? Although in theory I can see that BSD licencing might make it easier for manufacturers to provide closed-source drivers, in practice those that care can pretty easily provide closed-source drivers for Linux. The problem is that most of them don't really care, because of the tiny market share h

    • Youre' right...Sort of (Score:4, Insightful)

      by katharsis83 ( 581371 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @10:17PM (#13868891)
      You're right, I'm sure Linux developers would be happy to work on driver support if the manufacturers were more forth-coming. I'm also sure that most Linux developers are also saints who donate to UNICEF, help old ladies across the street, and also only say "LOL" when they're actually laughing. None of that's relevant.

      The problem is that none of this matters to the end-user who's giving Linux a shot for the first time. It doesn't matter whose fault it is that their digital camera doesn't work, or why their laptop's sound card can't play back sound. You just lost a customer.
      • All you have to do is to educate the user. Just tell them that they are complaining to the wrong people and point them in the direction of the company that makes the hardware. Maybe if the complaints went to the hardware manufacturer they would make drivers themselves.

        If a user leaves linux because there is no driver let's at least make sure he/she understands who is at fault.

      • The problem is that none of this matters to the end-user who's giving Linux a shot for the first time. It doesn't matter whose fault it is that their digital camera doesn't work, or why their laptop's sound card can't play back sound. You just lost a customer.

        The difference here is that, in most of the open source community, the concern is not that we have greater sale rates, but that we write better software. When hardware can't be driven by the Linux kernel, the open source user base is less likely to

    • Do you think it's any solace to hear it when your hardware isn't working?

      I think the level of hardware support is an important factor when rating releases, because if a release doesn't support your HW, it's going to be a hassle.

  • geek sweat (Score:5, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:10PM (#13868286)
    ...but here we are in a world where SUSE is open and still making geeks sweat every time a new release comes out

    I'm fairly certain the geeks would still be sweating regardless of whether a new version of SuSE came out...

    And totally unrelated, how cool would it have been if Digital Research had owned SuSE at one point? I would have loved to have a machine running DR-SuSE sitting around the office.

    • Re:geek sweat (Score:2, Informative)

      by Sinter ( 650182 )
      A close relative of mine currently works for Novell, and you wouldn't believe how many people mispronounce SuSE. It is pronounced (by the German employees, at least): Zoo-suh, not Seuss, not Suzy. Just wanted to clear that up.
      • if it was supposed to be pronounced Suzy they should have spelt it properly.

        As far as I am concerned is it Sues, a distribution of Lie-nux

        =)

  • Suse 10 Rocks! (Score:4, Informative)

    by canuck57 ( 662392 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:18PM (#13868320)

    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....

  • Upgrading was a pain and other issues (Score:5, Informative)

    by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:37PM (#13868411) Homepage
    I ran into several issues when I upgraded from 9.3 to 10 last weekend.

    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 /etc/fstab fixed that, but YaST was useless. What I hate is that the new YaST install would not allow me to go in and fix it during the upgrade process. I believe I was able to edit this in previous versions.

    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 /usr/include/quicktime fixed that.

    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)

    by mymaxx ( 924704 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:39PM (#13868418)
    I have tried several distros: Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva and Ubuntu to name a few. So far, openSUSE 10 is the first to support both my Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 B/G wireless card with WPA support. All I had to do was download the firmware from the Intel site and use SUSE's wizards to get WPA configured.

  • YaST and SuSEconfig (Score:3)

    by rsax ( 603351 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:48PM (#13868456)
    I deal with RHEL and CentOS quite a bit but I don't use the GUI provided tools to manage servers. I always prefer editing text config files and managing them using Subversion. Are there any SUSE pros here that manage their servers completely without YaST or SuSEconfig? Anyone know of websites that show the text config file equivalents of their GUI counterparts? It's easier to do so with Redhat considering the sheer number of websites devoted to that distribution.

  • Works for me (Score:2, Interesting)

    by l0perb0y ( 324046 )
    I've been using 10.0 since about the 8th and I've got to say it's pretty nice.

    Easy, Quick install
    Nice auto-update features
    Pretty console
    Easy to configure firewall
    Not too hard to figure out where they hid the config files

    The problems I've had so far:

    A crippled libxine is used EVERYWHERE. I've tried pakman's and super's xine but still can't get all the media to play that I could with Gentoo.
    The last two security patches (firefox and snmpd) have broken their respective programs.

    This is my first Suse. I've been
  • despite the increased hardware support, my wireless pc card (DWL-650 revP) still doesn't work with it... must I buy a new card to use suse?????????
    • Have you tried using ndiswrapper and the windows drivers?
    • You just need to grab the madwifi drivers. I'm kind of surprised Suse doesn't already have them because Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo have had them for at least a year and a half. Of course the problem might not be the driver, but rather the encryption. No linux distribution I have tried yet handles WPA out of the box. You still have to mess around with wpa_supplicant which is kind of a pain. Not sure why this hasn't been integrated into the network control panels yet like everything else.

  • Just installed SuSE10 last night (Score:5, Informative)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @09:25PM (#13868625) Journal
    Pro:
    - 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.

  • Eewww! (Score:2, Funny)

    by jkinney3 ( 535278 )
    The thought of making "sweaty geeks" is really kind of gross! I mean, bathing already takes too much time away from reading /. and playing games and coding.... What we need is an open source air freshener...

  • And if you get even CLOSER... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @10:08PM (#13868852) Homepage
    It all starts looking like a bunch of 1s and 0s.

  • it *scared* me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @10:41PM (#13869022)
    my Xeon workstation has some win-sound card built in, and for the first time it made music after I installed SuSE 10 - never before used my main server for multimedia but now I can. Later that night it scared me again with BSOD screensaver finally coming up in the random selection. I also installed it on my Thinkpad T22 with wireless linksys card, it's all good. Used to be a paying RedHat customer from RH 5.0 to 8, but "crossed over" to SuSE at 9.0 and haven't looked back.

  • I just installed 10 (Score:3, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @11:21PM (#13869210)
    I just built a new machine, Athlon 64 3500+ (939) with a gig of ram.
    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..)

    • 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.

      And this is probably the biggest irony for Windows users - after years of saying "it just works" with Windows, the Linux camp gets easier and easier every year, while the Windows camp gets more and more painful - viruses, worms, trojans, driver hell, etc. Ever notice that you can usually bring a Linux system completely up to d
  • Two questions regarding suse i've been wanting to start switching over for a while but never actually got into it beyond using a redhat and/or suse box as a server. Is there a site that has 1:1 mappings on which windows shortcut is equivalent to what in suse (kde?) as in winkey or crtl etc = start menu, what do i use to pull it up instead of having to use the mouse? I mostly use my laptop as a dumb terminal to logon to my windows / linux machines but I don't know of an RDP equivalent in linux? I was able
  • I remember reading somewhere that one of the new features for SUSE 10 is reduced boot time. Can anyone confirm or deny that? For reasons I don't think are worth going into at the moment, it would be very useful to me to have a SUSE machine that can boot up quickly, say in 30 seconds or less. Can SUSE 10 do this, or be configured to do this?

  • Guys, help (Score:3, Funny)

    by carcosa30 ( 235579 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:33AM (#13869524)
    I installed this, now how do I access the bindery?

    I'm a CNE, so if you tell me where the bindery is I should be ok.
  • After recently installing SUSE 10.0 (KDE/Konqueror version, vs. Gnome), including the latest available version of Firefox from the 5-disc CD set, installing all the updates (via Yast), and finally installing the Googlebar (directly from toolbar.google.com), only to find out several problems with the toolbar. First, in the options settings, the checkboxes have icons in them, making it difficult to see if a box is checked or not. Secondly and more importantly, the text box where you enter in the text to sea

  • FreeNX Comment... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chicane-UK ( 455253 ) <chicane-uk@ntlwor l d . c om> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @02:53AM (#13869981) Homepage
    From TFA: Microsoft has tried a similar approach with their remote desktop support built into Windows XP but, as usual, it's only a half-assed attempt at something the rest of the free world is doing properly.

    Strange.. I find Remote Desktop on Windows one of the most easy to use and fully featured remote desktop systems on any operating system? Could someone please elaborate and tell me exactly what is so half arsed about it when compared to the competition?

  • Random thoughts on SUSE 10 (Score:4, Informative)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @03:43AM (#13870107)
    Some random thoughts

    1. Installation is a no brainer. For some bizarre reason it showed me a winter scene with penguins. Weird. One oddity is that during bootup there is an option to "Press ESC for more details" fine, except once you press ESC no way to switch back to the less details mode.
    2. SUSE offers GNOME or KDE. GNOME is 2.12, it works great but integration with SUSE is horrible. The menus are cluttered with crap (e.g. do I really need the choice of 4 console apps in a default GNOME install?), Beagle isn't enabled by default and other niggles pervade. It almost feels like an afterthought. The SUSE crew might not like GNOME, but Novell owns Ximian so its hard to fathom why it looks so sloppy. Novell really has to start cracking a whip and get its teams working in the same direction.
    3. YaST is a very powerful configuration tool. It's not exactly task sensitive or user friendly but it does a good job. It had no problem detecting my hardware although configuring a monitor was considerably more difficult than it should have been. To get a decent refresh rate I had to manually change the vertical and horizontal refresh rates of the settings. How many people are going to bother with that?
    4. YaST is an ugly, ugly application. It doesn't look like a GNOME app. It doesn't even look like a KDE app. I think it's been statically linked to QT a default an ugly theme. I can understand that static linking removes dependency hell but the least they could do is make it resemble the default theme.
    5. SUSE looks a lot better in KDE. I hate KDE to be honest, but I think I'm going to have to get used to it.
    6. I finally got a chance to play with MonoDevelop. I just couldn't get it to work on FC4 but it works fine here. To be honest it's got a long, long way to go. I wonder if Mono shouldn't be looking at #Develop which is miles better but needs porting first.
    7. I have an NVidia card. "For legal reasons" I discovered the software installer downloads the driver manually. This process could be improved, such as offering to restart X after installing your new driver.
    8. FreeNX - yippee! Requires manual configuration including new firewall rules - boo!
    9. OpenOffice 2.0 - I like. Ximian seem to have had their hands in here since it is the "Novell Edition" with different icons.
    10. SUSE 10 contains a lot of Java stuff (including my favourite editor JEdit) but Eclipse is strangely not included. Also weird is that it ships Java 1.4 rather than 1.5.
    11. The software update system works a lot better than FC4. It could be my imagination, but is it really using incremental patches? If so well done.
    12. By default SUSE is set to boot straight into my normal user account without prompting for a password. I don't like this. I switched it off manually. Perhaps it was an option in the installer, but it wasn't something I noticed or would expect to look for. Perhaps the first time you start it should ask you if you want to continue with that behaviour or use a password from now on.
    13. In common with most dists, multimedia is a complete disaster zone. If certain codecs can't be supported for "legal reasons", at least put in a dummy codec for the format which says this and tells you a link that you can go to. In other words make it a no brainer to get codecs. After all, SUSE do something similar with NVidia and other drivers.

    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.

  • I'm looking to upgrade the "family PC" (it's Red Hat install is creaking with age) and was thinking of Suse. I read through all three pages of the review and didn't find the answer to two of my biggest concerns:

    Other desktops? I like Fluxbox and Window Maker and despise KDE and am even impatient with Gnome.

    And numero-uno: Can I actually INSTALL something on it? Starting with JUST a TARBALL? Good compiler support, *complete* library/header files/developer packages, basic development/scripting tools (Perl

    • Can I actually INSTALL something on it? Starting with JUST a TARBALL? Good compiler support, *complete* library/header files/developer packages, basic development/scripting tools (Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, libc)? Is "compile", formerly a given in the Linux world, considered a bad word in a Suse forum?

      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

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