The recent release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0 has elicited strikingly different reactions from a pair of reviewers — Alan Canton, president of a software consulting company, who is experiencing SUSE for the first time; and eWEEK.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a seasoned SUSE user.
Two First Looks at SUSE 10.0
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Could that be the reason.
OpenSuse does not install propreitery plugins like Flash, PDF, Real. AC must have tested this.
Suse10Eval is free but has propreitery software in it. SVN would have tested this.
The negative experience that Mr. Canton had with his resolv.conf being wiped out is probably due to Yast. Yast makes a lot of things “easy”, but it tends to overwrite things you do not want overwritten. This is why I tend to always come back to Mandrake/Mandriva. They have friendly tools to configure things, but you are free to manually do things. Since I have a manually compiled kernel (to support my Parallels virtualization solution) and a custom-compiled Xorg (to get 3D support for my integrated ATI card), I appreciate Mandriva not undoing thing. However, day to day I tend to use its GUI tools to configure other things. In Yast, if you change one thing (using Yast), it fires up a big configuration script that automagically configures a bunch of things. I think there should be a simple checkmark page in Yast when you can remove certain subsystems from its control.
Could that be the reason.
OpenSuse does not install propreitery plugins like Flash, PDF, Real. AC must have tested this.
Suse10Eval is free but has propreitery software in it. SVN would have tested this.
Well, he did say Flash worked and he already had the proper acrobat plugin (nppdf.so).. so he’s probably using Suse 10 non-OSS.
.. I would say it might be due to Yast mis-behavior. (speaking of which.. I both like and hate Sax2.. it tries to do a lot of things for you–in fact it’s the only one that sets a particular option for a particular S3 video card in my laptop to prevent a certain bug which no other distro has done.. and for that I appreciate it. But when it gets things wrong, it really screws things up)
I agree…I have been using SUSE for 2 years now and love it, overall….I even “like” YaST. However, all of the comments above are right in certain situations. I have learned to do granular stuff manually, just like Slack…and if you know where you are going with YaST, it works well. It takes a little time to get the hang of it. I think that they continue to improve this tool, however, and given a few more refinements, it will be just fine.
Funny thing….I’m on a laptop right now running Knoppix because I was just starting an SUSE Eval install on this machine but aborted because I found out that the commercial DVD will be here tomorrow….rending the machine unbootable….so I get to have fun with Debian based Knoppix for a while…haven’t done that for a long time…it’s nice.
I hate when reviewers say things like “the biggest problem that Linux has with laptops is drivers.” Even though the guys said that to pick it apart (in the case of SUSE 10), it still reveals a misunderstanding of the situation. Most of the time, it’s not the drivers (kernel modules). Instead, it’s usually the configuration of the modules or the integration with the general operating system.
For example, on my Gentoo laptop, even though I compiled the ipw2100 drivers against my kernel and installed the firmware stubs, I have no wireless network on boot. In my /etc/conf.d/wireless, I define my ESSID and WEP key, but yet when I start /etc/init.d/net.eth1, it does not set either of these parameters. If I merely set the WEP key with iwconfig, then all of a sudden the initscript starts working. The only solution I found was to add the iwconfig command to my /etc/conf.d/local.start and make net.eth1 start after local.
The drivers work great, and so do the tools provided in the wireless-tools package and in GNOME. But due to a small bug in Gentoo’s initscripts, it seems (to the casual user) as if the drivers aren’t working.
And secondly, I happen not to care for SUSE. I don’t like YAST, I don’t like RPM distros, every SUSE installation I’ve seen has been clunky and slow, and every SUSE user I’ve known has been similarly slow. Why don’t they put their efforts into the KDE control panels rather than into YAST? A sure sign of bad software is when your release it as free and open source software and nobody wants to use it.
A long time ago, when my standards for Linux distributions were limited by what was available, I used to recommend SUSE (it had different capitalization back then, I think the ‘U’ was little and maybe the ‘E’ also). But now I think they’ve been generally superceded by Mandriva and Fedora, if not by (K)Ubuntu, MEPIS, and Kanotix as well. If I had to choose between SUSE 10 and Red Hat 7.0, I’d choose SUSE.
For the first time, we have a laptop Linux that’s not every bit as good as the competition, it’s better.
My experience also.
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trollbait
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Why don’t they put their efforts into the KDE control panels rather than into YAST?
why should they?Does Gentoo?Have you?
It’s rather nice to have all control options in one place,Yast.Just like FreeBSD 6.0 which i like to dual-boot has most of the important options specified in “/etc/make.conf” “/etc/rc.conf” and “/etc/defaults.conf” and “/usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC” only SuSE made a GUI,the only other Linux distro i’m aware of that has a decent control panel is Libranet.
If I had to choose between SUSE 10 and Red Hat 7.0, I’d choose SUSE.
If i had to choose between SuSE 10 and all other Linux distros i would still choose SuSE 10.
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Serious
It has the best and easiest mandatory access controll system i have ever seen.With a working policy that doesn’t cripple your system in any way.And goes much further than only some deamons protected somewhat.Ok security doesn’t sound very flashy and the average mileage may vary.Personally i think SuSE 10 is the most professional Linux out there today.
Have spent some while with OpenSuse 10 over the last few
days and it is good, very good. I like the way that soft
RAID partition configurations are a practical reality
without a PhD.
The problem is not with the distros at this level; it is
with drivers for wifi and dial up devices amongst others.
Manufacturers need to be bludgeoned by the rest of us.
Hats off to Theo De Radt on this.
Whilst consumers are expected to do weird dances and
rebuild kernel no wonder they stay with windows.
A
Really impressed with Suse 10.0 … even my die hard windows friends who have seen it are now interested in having it installed …
Perhaps we need to call time on some of these “reviews” and quietly ignore them. They are really very, very brief opinion pieces and debase the whole notion of a review.
Nothing against either of these two at all, but they are pretty typical of their kind: a page or two but no more, making rather general points. A couple of bugs are noted and a couple of plus points too. Every distro out there has plenty of both. Perhaps the pieces are useful, and better than nothing, but you’d probably get just as much information asking a random assortment of Linux-aware people for a brief opinion.
Looking forward to some proper full reviews where the OS is really tested in anger, including ease of use with servers and system configuration, memory and other resources usage, etc. For example, SUSE’s /etc/sysconfig directory is hardly ever mentioned in reviews, but it is a vital part of the mix if you want to run servers.
Looking forward to some proper full reviews where the OS is really tested
Sounds like we might be geting some good reviews from Mr. Anonymous. I agree that real reviews are quite tedious (love Eugenia’s, talk about tested in anger!), and maybe you are just the one to bring us that review.
So you and a handful of sysadmins would read the whole thing. Everyone else would see that it is five pages long, read the last page and look for other reviews.
Sometimes a little extended testing is good, if it can show how something is better or worse than something else. Reviews have to be specific to an audience, though, and you can’t do a review of every possible use of the OS and expect people to read it. We have manuals for that instead of articles.
If you want to see an OS review done from a sysadmin’s standpoint, I would suggest that you write it and submit it to OSNews.
reviews? but: they’re not — they’re called “first looks”
Hate to say it, but I agree with many of Mr Canton’s observations. Wake me when Suse has an official software repository.
I installed Suse10EVAL yesterday on my Primary HDD Slave(hdb).
I tried to install software to play DVDs but I am having problems.
I tried to follow the instructions on The Jem Report but unable to get Kaffeine play the DVDs. It still shows the same Xine related error.
I did install libdvdcss thru YAST. There was a step by step article that used to explain the process.
Does someone have a link to that?
Thanks