SuSE Linux today unveiled the latest version of its Linux package – introducing an easy to use, application rich desktop for home users. Available April 14, SuSE Linux 8.2, sets a new milestone for ease of use – incorporating the latest versions of KDE 3.1 and Gnome 2.2. From the press release:
“Additionally to OOo 1.0.2, CD/DVD writing applications, sound mixing, editing, and an integrated synthesizer, SuSE Linux 8.2 is the first distribution to include MainActor, a professional video editing application, enabling customers to compose and edit digital movies. The KDE scanning application Kooka and the commercial OCR tool Kadmos enable users to scan both printed and hand-written texts into the word processing application.
With the comfortable and enhanced SuSE configuration profile manager, notebook users, who commute between different locations, can switch to the network and hardware configurations of every office site and therefore, can use scanners and printers of the respective location with a simple mouse click. Laptop users will also value the improved wireless LAN support that can be easily configured with SuSE’s YaST2 tool (Yet another Setup tool).
[…]
On April 14, SuSE Linux 8.2 will be available directly from the manufacturer via www.suse.com and at computer retailers. The recommended retail price for SuSE Linux 8.2 Personal (3 CDs, User Guide, 60 days of installation support) is $39.95; the price for SuSE Linux 8.2 Professional (5 CDs, 2 DVDs, User Guide + Administration Guide, 90 days of installation support) is $79.95.
C|Net News.com has a story, BusinessWeek, eWeek and InfoWorld.
is nice and all, looks good, supports most harware, but they are still not up to par on the desktop. First of all, their tools seem slow, and have avery bulky poor interface because their Ncurses equivalents look the same. In addition 3d is not configured and it doe snot support virtually all USB devices like Xandros. Finally they are not OSS, ahve poor menu layouts, not the fastest distribution around and include too much low quality 8 year old software such as XV,
Everything else seems pretty solid and they do have more tools in YAST than any other vendor, but as I mentioned their tols need a lot of usability improvements, added features and polish.
Ever since RedHat decided to strip MP3 software out of their distro and cut their menus down to about a dozen “user friendly” entries, I’ve been on the lookout for a replacement distro. SUSE seems to be the second most popular Linux distro out there, but 8.1 received poor reviews. Will 8.2 be a replacement candidate? I’d be interested in inital impressions as soon as they are available. Have SUSE released a 8.2 beta for testing?
>In addition 3d is not configured
You have to enable it manually on 8.1 I think, but you don’t know how that is for 8.2.
> and it doe snot support virtually all USB devices like Xandros
I think their USB is as good or as bad as anybody else’s. They use the same drivers as the other distros do.
I think you should wait and see 8.2 before talking “in general”…
Xandros uses a technology like XP’s it doe snot require drivers for every individual camera etc. It supports any USB camera, I’ve already tried 3 which were not dupported by Gphoto and used compact flash and secure digital.
In 8.1 even after it downloaded the 3d drivers I could not manage to get 3d to work properly even though I enable dit in Yast. It worked out of the box perfectly on Xandros.
Also 8.1 actually recieved pretty good reviews, soem were baised though, for example teh Register’s.
eeew! Thats the third time in one thread.
Seriously, I can’t wait. I’ve been trying to get into Linux using the so-called consumer friendly distro’s, Lindows, Lycoris, and ELX. Cripes! I can’t even get them installed. My PC’s custom built, but nothing weird, all standard components.
I figure I’ll have to go with a more established distro thats more robust and component-aware. So I’m going to wait for Mandrake 9.1 and now Suse 8.2 and try again.
Xandros uses a technology like XP’s it doe snot require drivers for every individual camera etc. It supports any USB camera, I’ve already tried 3 which were not dupported by Gphoto and used compact flash and secure digital.
I dunno, I plugged in my digital camera, usb cf reader and usb hard drive, and they all worked fine with SuSE. No need to do anything else.
I very much doubt Xandros has any drivers that suse doesn’t.
Back when I was a frustrated newbie I bought SUSE 7.3 and 8.0, hoping SUSE would make things easier for me and wireless would work on my laptop. Each time I kicked myself for wasting the money because Mandrake did everything SUSE did as far as hardware and Redhat seemed more stable and better designed overall.
Wait for Eugenia to review if you’re thinking about buying it. She has her opinions and she’s picky but that’s the qualities a good reviewer should have.
Suse & Redhat still offer i386 or i486 distributions so they can offer i386 for other plate forms (ie sparticuse or what ever) can’ they move with the times, how old is a i386 any processor is only spose to last for 10yrs, we have now gone past the use by date. Yes its great that you can load your distribution on any plat form, what is not great is I have an old Pentium 3 (that’s right its old 2yrs old) & I cant get the speed, multi media or what ever quality because you want to support old & none X86 based processors. Move with the times, 10 yrs has gone & its all X86 processors & when you talk servers you talk a different support & then you can offer your different distibution (as you do). Well I guess I’ve had my dumby spit.
Come April or September, and one sees a plethora of GNU/Linux distros (to be more accurate, I should say one sees a plethora of Linux distros; since very few of them call use “GNU/linux” anywhere in their nomenclature–>however, I dont want to start any ‘wars’)
What do we get? A new kernel version, some new GUI tools (atleast in some), among the most recent versions of a host of applications, better hardware support, a cd or two less or more than the previous version; as applicable. And its the same story year after year.
That sets me thinking…
Say, being a newbie, if I try a distro A; which supports all my hardware except the Sound Card. I try reading the manuals (I hope I am not going to be mocked upon for my assumption!) and play around a little bit with the configuration/ install drivers, etc..but to no avail. So I try distro B. Now my sound card is working, but not X. FInally, I find out that I might have to wait for a new version of some library/ application that will help me solve the problem. And more often than not, a ‘latest’ version of most distros will support it. In other works, I might have to wait till the new version is released.
Now lets assume I change a piece of hardware (say the sound card) with a more recent piece of hardware. I face a similar problem. so do I wait again for a new version?
The same story with applications. Some apps might work with one version, other might not.
If that were the case; would I, the user, be concerned whether my distro has OpenOffice.org v.1.0 or 1.01?
Why dont GNU/Linux (or Linux) vendors focus on more core issues such as hardware suport/ cross-platform compatibility for applications; etc? Why are most of them content at being “assemblers” of packages rtather than being innovators? This has nothing to do witht the programming skills of the people who work for these distros. It has more to do with the focus of the management.
now before my post gets too long, let me see if my USB keyboard is supported on Distro C that I have been reading about of late….
nm!
How soon will Suse 8.2 be available for net-install? Net-installing Suse 8.1 has been swift and smooth for me, however, I was disappointed with its performance. Hopeful, Suse 8.2 will be the product of the year, like the previous Suse 7.3.
Suse is like the kitchen sink. It’s like a 200lb gorilla. It’s got everything. But in the end it is also very cumbersome. I prefer Gentoo,
especially its portage system.
yes! i love SuSE! can’t wait. im still running SuSE 8.0 Professional thats awsome!
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-992155.html?tag=fd_top
Red Hat is renaming its Advanced Server product Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and introducing an Enterprise Linux ES version for lower-end servers that have one or two processors, said Mark De Visser, vice president of marketing for the Raleigh, N.C.-based company.
The Enterprise Linux line also includes a WS version for workstations with one or two processors, De Visser said. It costs $179 or $299 per year for basic and standard subscription plans.
If the other Linux vendors copy RedHat’s move to lower prices, it will make an even more formidable opponent for Microsoft, especially as a vast armada of software is currently being ported to Linux.
The SuSE products have proven to be quite solid and hope they put out a cheaper version of their enterprise linux and email/groupware server.
All in all, good happenings on the Linux front.
You are the only one trolling, I had contructive criticisms for SuSe and also some complements, I am not trolling.
I dont know if it was the net install or that particular version, but out of the box, my SuSE 8.0 Pro (CD install), although not quite as snappy as 8.1 (net install), had much better network performance. I dont know if they leave out a few things (excluding the proprietary stuff) in the network installation, which causes this, but the network performance was poor enough to drive me back to 8.0 on the desktop. On the laptop, I was able to configure my wireless effortlessly in 8.1, so it stays. I wish they would put in the ACPI/APM/whatever patches needed for managing the battery (& speedstep?) on the laptop in future versions: its silly to ask the user to recompile the kernel just to get these things to work.
>I think their USB is as good or as bad as anybody else’s.
Unless they’ve improved it, it’s worse. 8.1 wouldn’t work reliably with my MS mouse. I had unplug it, plug it back in , reconfigure the mouse and so on, after every boot.
>Unless they’ve improved it, it’s worse. 8.1 wouldn’t work reliably with my MS mouse. I had unplug it, plug it back in , reconfigure the mouse and so on, after every boot.
Which mouse model was it? (Mine is Intellimouse Explorer) There might be a dirty fix to it: If you have the PS/2 adapter for the USB mouse, connect it using that, reboot & select the PS/2 (or Aux port) version of Intellimouse from the list when Yast2 prompts you during bootup. Then shutdown, hook it up to the USB port, and repeat the process, this time selecting the USB model from the list. As I remember, this method added a couple of lines to the mouse section of /etc/X11/XF86Config, although I cant paste it here, since I am at home right now. Weird method, but worked for me with SuSE 8.0
I have this odd ball thumb drive (SOYO 64MB), no other distros (redhat, mandrake, xandros, lindows, knoppix) have driver for it, except SuSE. I’ve been using for the past 6 months without single issue.
though I like to see a few things refined, i think overall they have the “desktop” thing down – compile as many drivers for as many available (popular) hardware out there.. it’ll be the king.
Seems like only yesterday that they released 8.1 and Suse Office?
..to reviews and a full package list. I use 8.1 currently and find that SuSE are extremely thorough and complete in their packaging and integration. But will 8.2 worth the apt-get dist-upgrade time? (or ftp-install I’m not sure whether to do a dirty or clean install yet..)
Alex,
I have had no such issues with my SuSE 8.1 installation, USB worked with everything I throw at it, cameras, tablet,firewire works good too. One thing I did have issues with was the RPM for NVIDIAS drivers, but I think it was faulty RPMs because I wasnt the only one according to NVIDIAs tech support. But I got 3D working with the source packages. As for Fizzol I am using a Intellimouse trackball and I have no problems with it. Have you tried switching it to another USB port to make sure its not the port?
I haven’t tried Suse for AGGESSSS but I know it’s the most complete Linux distro ever! They give you everything an average desktop user may need. I have never spent big money (I mean boxed editions) of any Linux distro but I think I will give Suse a go and buy the boxed editon (since I don’t have a choice lol) Does anyone know how the fonts compare in Suse 8.2?? Are they as good and as sharp as in Red Hat 8.1 and Yoper? Does it come with the new font rendering improvement in XFree and also is the utility that allows you to change the XFree resolution on the fly included?
I’ve got a copy of SuSE 8.1 sitting right here, I honestly can’t say it does anything Mandrake can’t do. Those two distros are very similar but if they were both free, I would still pick Mandrake. The only thnig I would say SuSE wins on against Mandrake is the default menu layout.
I have dual booted with SuSE 7.3 and now i run SuSE 8.1 with a windows partition. it is brilliant i will not hesistate to buy it, i bought Redhat but didn’t like it and i tried mandrake and Lycoris none of which i stuck with, but Lycoris was good but lacking the software i wanted and the drivers for my laptop unlike SuSE. It was the only version that detected everything for my NEC laptop, it was for work only so i wasn’t bothered if the 3D graphics never worked.
I only had one problem and that was with the mouse, i was still not used to the setup and it couldn’t configure the mouse pad and the USB MS mouse to work together at the same time, i had to reinstall it again to do it properly, for some reason configuring the config file never worked. But it was more my fault than anything. I can swear by this product, i’m going to preorder it on Amazon now if i can.
I’m going to get the mac version soon as well.
SuSE is optimized on i586 since 8.1,
That’s why it’s faster than redhat.
“I think their USB is as good or as bad as anybody else’s.”
I still remember many years ago, when SuSE shiped the first distro with some backported USB drivers which enabled me to use my USB keyboard (it was the first USB keyboard from Microsoft) without patching and compiling a (unstable developer) kernel by my own. Of course today all distros support my old keyboard, but is this also true for all other USB hardware?
There are definitly differences between the kernels which various vendors ship and this includes drivers. In support forums I can see messages likes “My hardware didn’t worked with distro X but did with distro Y.”. If you just happen to own the “right” USB device there could be big differences between various distros. But I think there is only a small number of such devices.
Cheers,
Andreas
As I look at some distro’s there seems to be a lot of *new* releases coming. Does Suse offer a reasonable upgrade price or do you have to buy the full version over again? I haven’t messed with them since 7.1.
I usually buy about 2 Linux distros per year. I install them, give a try and soon forget about them. The last one was Red Hat which I disliked for several reasons Mostly buggy or incmplete Devleopement environment in KDE, and inability to boot properly from the HD with Boot Magic, along with my other OS’es ( BeOS, DOS, WINDOZE, OS/2)
In comparison I am very favorably impressed by Suse 8.1 : Installed like a breeze, easy to use,rather nice UI ( although not yet at the level of Win XP or Mac OS X)
So I shall certainly buy Suse 8.2 when it appears and try to run it in a mini-network with a Power Mac G4.
Ive used SuSE since 7.3. Ive been certainly most impressed with 8.1 and its been very good to me. Problem with SuSE though is they dont have any decent package management system they can really call their own with regular updates. Sure they are based on RPM, but where is the fresshrpm.net suse edition? Even manually compiling apps doesnt work out half the time. As for the other comments…..Ive had zero issues with USB anything in SuSE and I havent had any 3D problems either. You just need to know what youre doing with the nvidia drivers and X11….its not that hard.
I will pick up a copy of 8.2 most definately because I find SuSE to be the best distro to get others to convert to from windows, but for myself…..Ive recently converted to Gentoo as well. Gentoo is by far the best distro Ive ever seen, but its not for the faint of heart or n00b. Its a ultra high performance and optimizable source based distro with the best package management system EVER….no….really. Portage is take off of a BSD ports system and it just works and works well. Any program you want to install, uninstall, or upgrade is one command away. No dependency hell, no preconfiged binaries, it automatically downloads the source and compiles it to your system based on your customized make.conf setup.
Anyway, I am looking forward to SuSE 8.2 for desktop users etc…..but I highly recommend anyone that knows linux and considers themselves a power user to check out Gentoo…..you wont be disappointed.
The fonts are perfect IF you install like i did, all the fonts from windows with the handy font installer program in the control panel.
I use Garamond for nearly everything and its just as good as it is on windows, however the fonts that ship are a bit lazy.
I had this setup on my laptop and my desktop at the time.
@teknishn: Unless you are on 56k. I was going to try this but i was held back due to my land line being a normal phone line and i get kicked off every 2 hours.
//SuSE is optimized on i586 since 8.1,
That’s why it’s faster than redhat.//
Come again?
I’m running RH 8.0, with a kernal optimized for Athlon T-Bird 1.1 Ghz … which ain’t no i486 architecture.
How did I get the kernal optimized? Ran up2date .. downloaded the new kernal … reboot.
Ya, I almost forgot that part. I wouldnt go the Gentoo route unless you have broadband. Modems just wont cut it.
I’ve ran up2date on a 700MHz Laptop & Desktop & Athlon XP-1700,yes it grabbed the best kernel after that, but the software is optimized to i386. I have ran and re-ran RH 8.0 & SuSE 8.1 and in my opinion SuSE just runs faster.
@FaithMAX
SuSE offers a Professional Upgrade, it’s the same as the usual Pro-edition, but there is only 60 days of support and one manual, for about Euro 49 – at least in Europe.
@Alex
Large parts of Linux’ USB stack and drivers are developed by SuSE, so I don’t think their hardware support is worse than any other distro’s – even my bluetooth adapter and my Intuos2 tablet worked out of the box.
And BTW, if you use a nVidia card, what about #>switch2nvidia_glx (look at the readme…)
@[email protected]
SuSE is i586, their glibc is available as i586 and i686, and their kernel is available in different flavors like i586, SMP, Athlon etc.
The last time I bought the update to SuSE 8.1 PRO, it only cost $50 compared to $80. And you can do a fresh install with that, I believe it only comes with less documentation.
There is way more to optimizing a system than just the kernel. In fact the kernel is only a small part of the whole picture. When he says SuSE 8.1 is optimized for i586, (which is correct), that includes EVERYTHING and the kitchen sink. Everything from gcc to X11 to KDE, all 2500+ apps binaries, and the kernel.
Recompiling the kernel by itself will get you a little gain, but its really no cause for celebration when the rest of the entire system is not optimized….namely the entire graphics subsystem and window manager. A fully optimized/customized Gentoo rig is really somthing to see though. Its truly is insanely fast…..even on olde hardware. I setup a Gentoo test bed on an old Athlon 800 with 512SDRAM and its WAY faster than my SuSE 8.1 install on my 1800 AthlonXP with 768DDR.
Thank you tknishn! That was exactly my point the kernel isn’t all there is to it.
I have done the samething with Gentoo too. If you want a true optimized system, go with Gentoo. If you want a good optimized system, that grabs all your hardware and installs an insane amount of software, go with SuSE!
I have been wondering about SUSE for quite some time. Is it able to recompile and install a new kernel without user intervention?
RedHat does this and gets it right every time. I am lazy and I have found RedHat 8.0 to be the easiest on me and the one that requires little of me to run it.
BTW, I have a pro-star 8593 laptop and sleep mode and battery life have always worked in RedHat 8.0. Before RedHat, I used to run Mandrake. I am still fond of Mandrake and I like their configuration tools. Somehow, it never proved as stable as RedHat.
I will give all three Suse, RedHat and Mandrake a try when they come out with a new release. Anyway, back to my question? Is it possible to recompile the kernel by using YAST without me having to lift a finger?
Thanks,
Eu
As a previous SuSE user of 7.3, 8.0, and 8.1 I can say that 8.1 did get some good initial reviews, but as folks used it, it has bcome known as a very broken distro and it really hurt SuSE’s image for me. For example (something really really basic here): they shipped 8.1 with a version of mozilla compiled with gcc 3.2 but the sun java version included was not. Result? Java was broken in 8.1. The only real fix was to download another version of mozilla from usr-local-bin.org or mozilla.org. Another big problem: the updated YAST is nice, but it didn’t include a progress indicator as it was connecting to ftp sites for updates! How stupid is that? People would leave their computer sitting for hours with absolutely no indication of what was going on.
Trust me, check out the suse-linux-e mailing list archives (available on the suse site) and you will see just how loyal suse users feel about 8.1.
My point is that SuSE seems to be rushing things, when they don’t even take the time to check things like whether java works in the mozilla they ship. It shows carelessness. That is why I wait to buy 8.2, if I ever do, until I’ve had a chance to read the reviews of real users.
I never had a problem with Java or Mozilla, both worked the way they were supposed to. The only problem I did have app wise was with Evolution, but to fix that I just used the Red Carpet Express to update it instead of installing SuSEs build.
You can easily recompile the kernel with SuSE, but not with YaST and not without lifting a finger. Im not too familiar with a user non-intervention kernel recompile. At some point you need to go in and tell it what you want changed and save the new config. ??Otherwise youll just be recompiling the same config?? In SuSE, or any distro for that matter, I just goto the kernel source and do the following:
make menuconfig (go make my changes and save new config)
make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install
mv /boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.old (bzImage = is the kernel..different name in some distros)
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot
If somthing didnt work out you can just boot to a cd, mount the boot drive, and rename your .old kernel back into action
make sure that whatever you call the kernel (bzImage)…that it matches in the grub file menu.lst
Pretty easy
I agree on those issues, they were a pain so i used opera instead which was included on the disks. I personally would prefer it if suse added the java SDK to all their versions, its not enough that it is on the pro version average users myself had a hard time getting it to work and then doing anything with it.
I had to get my local colege admin to do it for me and it took him 2 hours if only because he forgot how to do it anyway but point is i could never have done it and i’m not paying £80 for the pro version just to have it.
At the time it was easeir to get the work done in windows sadly, now soon it will be apples turn to impress me.
Well, the Mozilla/Java problem with 8.1 is well documented. See this on the SuSE site (scroll down to section on “java”):
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/mozilla.html
Here is a post from the mailing list:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2003-Jan/3722.html
I also forgot to mention the infamous ide-cd rom/scsi emulation problem in 8.1 that caused so many people problems:
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/81_ide-scsi.html
http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/cdrw_dvd.html
I like SuSE. I hope 8.2 is much better and especially much better tested. The problems I’ve mentioned above are basic things that should work. These are not obscure issues.
” SuSE Linux 8.2 is the first distribution to include MainActor, a professional video editing application, enabling customers to compose and edit digital movies.”
Look out Mac OS X, SuSE’s gonna getcha !!!
The fonts are very good. Much better than Red Hat. SuSE is the only distro that I know that come with byte code interpreter enabled by default. Take a look of a screen shot of OpenOffice and Arial font and compare it with Red Hat. Its unbelieble.
The only think I don’t liked in SuSE 8.1 was a bad support (well, any support) for brazilian portuguese in SuSE menu.
Sorry for the poor English.
I don’t know if you folks realize, but SUSE expected to be profitable in 2002 – and they were not. They are now desperately hoping to make it in 2003. See this story:
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-992143.html
And the quote from Dyroff:
“SuSE had hoped to move into the black in 2002, but has had to shift its target. “The goal is to be profitable this year–meaning as soon as possible,” Dyroff said.”
So when you say that SUSE seems to be rushing their releases, well they are – they have to become profitable “as soon as possible”… and so, their releases may not be exactly polished. Actually, one suspects that SUSE is on thin ice indeed… shades of Mandrake here, despertation is beginning to creep in.
Also, for those of you promoting Gentoo… it is not a bad distro, or should I say WAS not a bad distro as in 1.1, but frankly, they got a lot worse – and don’t flame me, because I don’t care, I’m just giving you my feedback, and the feedback of many other users. If you like Gentoo, take a look at a distro still in development, that has aims very much like Gentoo, but are implementing it better:
http://archlinux.org/
They still have a way to go to get to a release 1, and they need more developers, but I am really looking forward to arch in the future.
Regardless, Linux will survive and flourish, whether Man or Suse are around or not – personally, I’d like both Man and SUSe to survive, but I guess we’ll see.
In addition to SUSE , debian leaves byte code enabled, as
far as I know.
I have used SuSE off and on since, well, a long time ago. I purchased 8.0 and 8.1 and was very happy with both. SuSE has excellent international support and is very easy to use in my opinion.
Having used both systems, I would also like to point out that Alex’s post regarding USB is incorrect; or at least misleading. My experience has been that SuSE supports USB in exactly the same was Xandros does, and both of them do it pretty well.
The only thing I don’t really like about SuSE is that their update servers must be 386 machines that are hooked to the net via 9600 Baud modems. SLOW!
Anyway, I will gladly use SuSE 8.2 for some purposes. I think my favorite distros will remain Debian and Gentoo though; in no particular order.
I started using Suse 8.1 because it was the only distro that installed the nvidia 3d drivers. I could never get them going on any other distro. That bumped up my glxgears numbers from 160 fps to 3000 fps. That was nice.
Other reasons I liked it were the stability and the fonts were better than red hat 8.0.
All my USB devices (mouse, keyboard, hub, printer, scanner) worked fine.
The Yast updater is good, but sloooooowww. Half hour to hour to update is not good.
Other reasons I didn’t like it include:
1. the java mozilla incompatability.
2. I tried getting apt-get, but I needed an rpm v4.0.x and Suse only came with 3.x.x. I tried updating rpm, but needed too many libraries.
3. The software versions were behind in bug fixes, especially the gnome aps like anjuta, evolution, pan. Updating them was impossible because of dependency hell.
(Except for evolution, which Ximian red carpet fixed)
4. The setup seems to have problems if you have more than one optical drive. It didn’t seem to notice my cd recorder, and the cd writing software would try to access the dvd. That required fiddling with a few config files.
5. The sound disappeared, and required a re-install to get it back.
Right now I’m using RedHat Phoebe beta3. Where the fonts in suse were as good as windows, the fonts in redhat gnome are better, and consistant across the apps, including mozilla.
In KDE the fonts are good in some aps (kde and openoffice) but not good in others, especially mozilla, and thus not consistant. Even in kde the gnome app fonts seem better.
Someone told me they have the same font-handling, but I’m not too sure about that. Especially since (before I fixed it) the anti-aliasing and rgb order were colouring all my fonts in the kde apps and openoffice, but leaving them black in the gnome apps.
I may be a bigot, but I really like the look of gnome. For me it looks better than the KDE in suse (which looked pretty good, better than the gnome in suse AND the KDE in redhat).
The only thing I wish I could do in gnome is to change the colour in the title bar. I do like the control over themes one has in KDE.
And I miss the nvidia 3d I had in suse.
I think I definately will have a look at Suse 8.2, just to compare the gnome desktops, but this time I’m not going to install it over redhat, but beside it. I don’t want to give the redhat up without being very sure of suse.