I agree with that SUSE is consistently excellent, but why does the reviewer think DVD playback is a must? Is he talking about data DVD’s or movies? Do many people watch DVDs on their PC’s? Or is more data coming on DVDs now and the SUSE distro can’t read them easily?
I have used SuSE, as well as other distributions, on several machines and what makes SuSE unique in my experience is the way it totally locks up in a way that reminds me of old Macs. The hour glass sits there forever and the machine responds to nothing short of pulling the plug.
There are things I like about SuSE – I have used 7.2 through 9.0 – but this one particular issue is enough to put me off from SuSE and look elsewhere. Can it be they have fixed this problem in 9.1?
i tried out suse 9.0 via an ftp install and i found it unbearably slow. it took about 5 minutes to boot up and another 3 minutes for the desktop to start up. i don’t have any speed problems with debian. does suse need recent hardware or would my installation have been borked?
look and you`ll find in the packages, using it for some weeks now, use links on distrowatch page also you get some nice stuff there. upgrade to kde 3.2.2 and play
When are these people going to learn that adding DVD Playback requires licensing a codec, and that means extra money tacked onto the price. It also means that that version that includes a codec can never be distributed freely.
I remember trying Dropline Gnome on a freshly installed Slackware box once…DVD playback (movies) worked just fine. Why is that? Dropline is free for download.
so what? so Novell can license the codec for DVD playback and add 10 bucks to suse’s price. don’t make the codec available in the FTP version, I am sure is some one really wants DVD playback, they will pay for the distro, or know how to add it themselves.
I remember trying Dropline Gnome on a freshly installed Slackware box once…DVD playback (movies) worked just fine. Why is that? Dropline is free for download.
Because Dropline gnome includes a codec that is *NOT* legally licensed (depending on what country you live in). Use of that component without a license is illegal in the US and most of Europe and other countries.
so what? so Novell can license the codec for DVD playback and add 10 bucks to suse’s price. don’t make the codec available in the FTP version, I am sure is some one really wants DVD playback, they will pay for the distro, or know how to add it themselves.
Notice that’s exactly what I stated. I think they should add the option for people to download a licensed player for $5 or $10 from the SuSE website or something similar, just like Lindows does.
I like the idea of being able to purchase a distro and then freely distribute across my network. It doesn’t make good business sense to allow sharing copies of a distro to others for free. What happens is you get a few willing to support the developers by paying for the distro and the rest wait to get free copies from the Net. A company such as Novell loses money that could of been put into further development.
For SuSE Linux to compete against other OS and distros they will need to include features such as DVD playback out of the box. Novell should not expect that a newbie to Linux or dear old Mom would know how to download/install the codecs from the developer’s site. I’m fairly sure most PC users would admit they are willing to pay a little extra for a complete desktop solution that includes all the popular codecs and not just a few. Novell could still offer a stipped down Personal version of the distro for free (allows sharing), while offering full featured retail versions with all licensed codecs (no sharing). I know there are some of you that would wine if this were to happen but for Linux to prosper distro developers need to rethink their marketing. You cannot pay your staff, pay rent, fund R&D or put food on your table by giving everything away for free. Those that do will certainly see their business or product fail.
I tried to install SuSE 9.0 when it came out. I had problems with the FTP install … it simply wouldn’t work. So I mirrored SuSE’s 9.0 FTP directory to another machine here locally, and then installed it.
After messing around with it for a while, I decided SuSE just wasn’t for me. But that’s old news, that was 9.0
When the 9.1 LiveCD became available, I downloaded, burned the ISO to CD, and have since loaded the LiveCD on both of my computers and my laptop.
I have to say, I’m very impressed. I hate to say this, but one of my bigger gripes with SuSE 9.0 was simply the look and feel of it. I thought it was hideous looking … though I didn’t realize just how important that (apparently) was to me until I took a look at the 9.1 LiveCD. When I was configuring 9.0, I couldn’t come up with an acceptable look.
Now you may be thinking I’m one of those people that likes to waste their time messing with icons, desktop wallpaper, colorizing their window borders, and so on. You could not be more wrong. I *HATE* messing with that stuff. And that is why the “out of the box” look and feel is so important to me. I want to be able to just install the O/S, and have a relatively good looking system and then forever forget about the icons, the desktop wallpapers, and all that garbage. Or at the very least (most?), I would be OK with selecting a different theme that comes with the default install. But I don’t want to go online and hunt down icon packs, window frames, widgets, etc…
So – that was the big difference that I saw between 9.0 and 9.1. But I should also point out that I have yet to install 9.1. I hope that the 9.1 LiveCD is an accurate representation of what the 9.1 install will be like.
Another big (and more relevant) difference between 9.0 and 9.1 is that 9.1 comes with Gnome 2.4 (though there is no Gnome on the LiveCD). But that was a deal breaker for me regarding SuSE 9.0. I prefer Gnome – sue me, and I wanted Gnome 2.4 but SuSE 9.0 only had Gnome 2.2. (I wish SuSE 9.1 had Gnome 2.6, but I’ll have to wait on that.)
I’ve spent a lot of time with the SuSE 9.1 LiveCD and I’m pretty impressed with YaST. I doubt much has changed since 9.0, but for some reason I was never impressed with YaST before. Again though – last time around I think I was just disenchanted by the whole concept of SuSE from the word “go” due to the FTP problems, the install problems I had, and the horrible look and feel I experienced.
But YaST really is a terrific Desktop Administration Tool. I have been mostly happy with Mandrake’s Control Center, but YaST takes it to an entirely new level. However – I sometimes feel that YaST is a bit much (sort of). The way it is organized isn’t always clear … but I’m sure I’ll get use to it as time goes on. But I do think it might be better to have the most commonly used options right up in front, and then have an easy to see “Advanced” or “Expert” button for the not so common things.
Anyway – I’m going on too long now. But like the Subject says, SuSE 9.1 LiveCD has changed my mind regarding SuSE. I look forward to buying the Professional version (I have to have Gnome).
I just received 9.1 professional. It’s a very nicely tuned system. Novell has done a great job with the QA (Quality Assurance). I have it installed on a laptop and a 64 bit AMD Athlon 64 3200+ desktop. Wonderful system, it’s really polished and it works well. I have a little more reasons to get the pro version (ex. 64 bit port), but if you just want to have a linux working it’s the best choice for desktop linux. Xandros, Linspire etc.. I have tried them all and NONE of them are as polished and well running as Suse 9.1.
About the dvd playback, if you really know how to install packages using RPM then you can use your skills to install the decryption software. It’s unfair that that has to be done to get dvd working out of the box, I too would pay the extra $10 to get dvd working and this has to be looked into for future versions of any distro that considers linux to be used on the desktop. For god’s sakes I bought the Linspire dvd player which came with legal codecs for $10. If Linspire can do this I see no reason why the Suse/Novell camp can’t. Let’s face it you have to pay for the software and there should be no excuse to call a desktop linux distro a desktop distro without including legal dvd. At least Suse included MP3 playback support (which is more than I can say for other would be “desktop” distros).
There was a previous post about having dvd out of the box and paying for it. I agree if a company is going after a target audience and the software is there (as it is with Xine and Kaffiene) I see no logical reason not to license that codec. Freedom is one thing, but open source is the player here, not RMS’s babble and insanity. We want and need dvd, and some are breaking the law to get it. Also why no legal dvd players out except for the linspire version? Is there no market? Do all linux freaks have to pirate and hack and break the law? This madness must be stopped, the market is there and the software is there.
Seriously this Suse 9.1 release feels like a couple of versions more than 9.1, the good news is that some Novell folks said that this is just a taste of things to come. I can’t wait to see more work from Suse/Novell. This release has actually left me bored as nothing is broken and in about 20 minutes I have a full blooded desktop that looks nice, is stable and works fine. The 2.6 kernel makes for a snappy desktop and overall feel is out of this world. Cheers to Suse and Novell, you are at the top of your game. keep it up.
I picked 9.1 standard from a local store Saturday. The installation was good and all, but the big surprise was that there were no c-compiler included. I mean, Suse is great, but sometimes you just NEED to do a configure;make;make install, and that is not an option here. I of course checked YOU, freshrpms and so, but THERE IS NO GCC PACKAGE FOR 9.1! I managed to install apt-rpm (with 10 dependencies I had to discover and install by hand, I had forgotten RPM dependency hell, but there it was again), but the repositories I checked still had no gcc (or mplayer, etc.).
I’m just glad I kept my Arch partition intact. I don’t know what to do with my SuSE now. 30 Euros is not that much, but I feel kinda cheated (Yeah, I could have done more research before buying it, I know). Of course I could upgrade to pro, but… it shouldn’t be necessary!
Hi there. I’ve been a long time SuSE User (since 6.0). After 8.1 I changed to Slackware, because I like to play around. Last week I installed SuSE 9.1 for fun, I was really disappointed. cdrecord is heavily patch and only works with resmgr. I had to install cdrecord from a fedora rpm to change permissions by hand. Had to do that, because resmgr didn’t work quite well with my usb2-cdr. Another very annoying thing is the auto mount of cd and usb-sticks.
Even copy data from cd to hd is incredibly slow. 🙁
<p><em>SUSE 9.1 Personal has no GNOME, Evolution, Mozilla. The reviewer must have used SUSE 9.1 Professional.</em></p>
<p>The article makes no such claim as to Evolution and Mozilla — it’s right there in the first paragraph. You misunderstood what it says. Don’t blame the reviewer for your own misunderstanding.</p>
<p>If you have a correction to make, I’ll gladly make it. If you want to attack the review as well, your comment is more likely to be ignored as a troll.</p>
This issue was up on OSNews not long ago. Someone pointed out that Linspire offers legal DVD playback ready-to-go (using Xine) with codecs and decryption – as an add-on option for $4.95 (thereby keeping the base price down). I think SuSE should do the same next time.
This is a make-or-break feature for a staggering number of Windows users. If they can’t play DVD movies in GNU/Linux, there is significantly less incentive to switch.
This may not be any kind of issue for corporate desktop distros, but it’s a showstopper for home desktop distros. It invalidates the entire distribution — they may as well take Kaffeine and Xine right out if there is no DVD playback.
What’s worse is that it is *not* just a single download for libdvdcss. You generally have to download half a dozen RPMs to modify the Xine libs, and then get a new version of Kaffeine and/or Xine. I haven’t tried it with the new SuSE 9.1 yet, but that’s the way it was with 9.0. It was a huge hassle that required fairly decent Google skills to find. The average home user would never be able to do it without third-party intervention. I plan to write a good how-to on adding DVD playback support, but not for at least a week. Too much other stuff to do. Even then, will most users think to search Google for the right information? The point is, they shouldn’t have to.
I may have been wrong with Evolution and Mozilla, but I see that you have now removed both paragraphs with indeed said that GNOME is part of SUSE 9.1 Personal.
> When the 9.1 LiveCD became available, I downloaded, burned the ISO to CD, and have since loaded the LiveCD on both of my computers and my laptop.
You better redownload the update 9.1 LiveCD as the first version (and the one shipped with SUSE 9.1 Personal) allows a remote non-password root login (see SUSE security advisories) if you permanently work with it.
… – Playback is just sooo difficult… why don’t you knock your silly DVD or whatever playback mourning off, finally?! It’s kinda boring to still have to read it after the 1200th SuSE review that has been posted on this site, especially where the answer is always the same. If you can’t install an RPM with SuSE, where Konqueror will even open the installer (=Yast) for you upon downloading, you might as well be not just ready yet for using Linux.
To re-iterate: This is a licence-issue, in case your fave distro has DVD playback out of the box, they simply don’t care about it (Lindows is the exception, of course).
For SuSE, you get all you need in one place, for all flavors of SuSE, here:
“I tried to install SuSE 9.0 when it came out. I had problems with the FTP install … it simply wouldn’t work. So I mirrored SuSE’s 9.0 FTP directory to another machine here locally, and then installed it.”
I did the same and I was very pleased by what I saw with SuSE 9.0. It felt to me to be the best put together commercial distro I’ve tried, with YaST and YOU being ‘killer apps’ (I hate that term).
I’m looking forward to the 9.1 ftp files appearing (early June I think?) to do the same there.
I installed SuSE 9.1 as soon as it was shipped to me. I have to say that it lived up to all the hype. Here are my first impressions.
– The boot up speed seems to be improved
– KDE loads in record time!
– The Desktop has received a lot of polish and looks great
– The menus have been cleaned up and are more than respectable
– CD/DVD software is coming along quite nicely (K3B is maturing)
OK, here is the bad:
SUSE is still shipping XFce3.X. That’s two versions in a row that have ignored some very respectable progress on the Desktop front. What’s up with that?
Here is one that shocked me! The Kernel 2.6 does not ship with hardware RAID support for IDE drives! AKKK!
On this latter issue, I have not decided on the best way to approach a resolve. I have a Web server with a Promise RAID controller (Mirrored). I have considered installing 9.1 and then rolling back to the 2.4 kernel. That would be a shame given the performance enhancements offered by the 2.6 kernel.
Additionally, SUSE 9.1 has too many improvemants for me to stick with the SUSE 9.0 on this server. I have been eagerly awaiting the improvements of 9.1 just for this specific box. While I could get a lot of these improvements by upgrading individual packages, it would be a dependency nightmare. What a let down!!!
So, any thoughts on how to approach this kernel issue are welcome.
Cut your silly drivel. The kernel ships with plenty of IDE Raid drivers from 3ware, LSI, Adaptec, etc…
Promise offers binary-only drivers and that is why they are not part of the stock kernel. Pick your hardware accordingly and you will be happy.
And don’t tell me, oh but it works on windows. Sure, and an Apple Wireless Airport card works great on OS X, have you tried to get it to work on Windows XP?
I was actually citing the error message that SUSE 9.1 produced when I attempted to install 9.1 on that server. It actually stated that, “while 2.4 supported some of the IDE RAID controllers, kernel 2.6 does not support them at all”. Again, that was not drivel, nor sniveling. That may not be the error word for word, but it’s real close!
The part about Promise offering binary-only drivers was news to me, and it’s good to know. While I have not had the problem long enough to have done any indepth investigation, what I have read thus far lead me to beleive that kernel 2.6 does not currently support RAID for IDE (I know it does for SCSI).
I thought that your responce was a little abrasive and confrontational however, I would like to thank you for the insight.
Again, I welcome any thoughts on how to resolve the issue. As I said, I have thought of installing 9.1 and rolling back to the 2.4 kernel. If you have any (constructive) thoughts please share them.
Just read your comment on IDE RAID. I have been in the situation as you as well, that is setting up a server, and I was thinking about going down the Prosime route as well (I always did with chepo-Windows-systems). However, I did download all the drivers for the controllers of interest in advance in order to read the readme.txt which come with the drivers. If you read the Promise-readme, you have to ask whether this is plain honest or plain stupid (marketing wise) — they don’t seem at all convinced by their Linux driver and it shows in the readme 🙂
Do yourself a favor and get a 3Ware, these are professional scale controllers for Linux. With 9.1, check which driver revision is shipped with it. From 3Ware, there was a strong recommendation from 3Ware to have the latest BIOS and drivers for RAID 5, you can take stock-Suse ones for 0 or 1, however, speaking for Suse 9.0 (check readmes of current drivers).
There are web-admin tools (RAID status, etc..) from 3Ware for SuSE 8.x, these didn’t work for 9.0. but I have an unofficial customized version for that as well for (9.0 which works); Unfortunately, I couldn’t yet check whether this is any good for 9.1 as well (but should be).
I you go for 3Ware, note that they don’t neccessarily tend to update drivers for older products too long, you can indirectly draw conclusions about that by checking the latest versions for older 3Ware hardware. So get yourself a 7506 series, these are pretty current and you can hook plenty stuff to them + having all RAID options.
Whilest you are at it, check their drive + mobo compatibility list; Not that others won’t work, but if there is an issue, the customer won’t blame it on your ignorance… I have set up 2x 300 GB “unsupported” Samsungs and they are fine on an unsupported P4-mobo… I do run lenghty data-integrity tests under heavy load.
Hey Anonymous, thank you for the great post. I have actually been using this server for quite some time, and have just upgraded the OS as new versions of SUSE come out (I love the Admin tools in YaST). Unfortunately, the Promise RAID controller is integrated into the motherboard. I may just get another controler as you mentioned in your post.
While I think that this controller would be fine in a Windows box, I don’t have any Microsoft products on this particular network. If you knew me you’d laugh, as that is quite the understatement.
I agree with that SUSE is consistently excellent, but why does the reviewer think DVD playback is a must? Is he talking about data DVD’s or movies? Do many people watch DVDs on their PC’s? Or is more data coming on DVDs now and the SUSE distro can’t read them easily?
I have used SuSE, as well as other distributions, on several machines and what makes SuSE unique in my experience is the way it totally locks up in a way that reminds me of old Macs. The hour glass sits there forever and the machine responds to nothing short of pulling the plug.
There are things I like about SuSE – I have used 7.2 through 9.0 – but this one particular issue is enough to put me off from SuSE and look elsewhere. Can it be they have fixed this problem in 9.1?
DVD playback is super important. I know plenty of people that have their PC hooked up to their widescreens via DVI.
If Linux is going to make it as a desktop os, dvd playback is very important.
cheers
i tried out suse 9.0 via an ftp install and i found it unbearably slow. it took about 5 minutes to boot up and another 3 minutes for the desktop to start up. i don’t have any speed problems with debian. does suse need recent hardware or would my installation have been borked?
look and you`ll find in the packages, using it for some weeks now, use links on distrowatch page also you get some nice stuff there. upgrade to kde 3.2.2 and play
When are these people going to learn that adding DVD Playback requires licensing a codec, and that means extra money tacked onto the price. It also means that that version that includes a codec can never be distributed freely.
I remember trying Dropline Gnome on a freshly installed Slackware box once…DVD playback (movies) worked just fine. Why is that? Dropline is free for download.
so what? so Novell can license the codec for DVD playback and add 10 bucks to suse’s price. don’t make the codec available in the FTP version, I am sure is some one really wants DVD playback, they will pay for the distro, or know how to add it themselves.
I remember trying Dropline Gnome on a freshly installed Slackware box once…DVD playback (movies) worked just fine. Why is that? Dropline is free for download.
Because Dropline gnome includes a codec that is *NOT* legally licensed (depending on what country you live in). Use of that component without a license is illegal in the US and most of Europe and other countries.
so what? so Novell can license the codec for DVD playback and add 10 bucks to suse’s price. don’t make the codec available in the FTP version, I am sure is some one really wants DVD playback, they will pay for the distro, or know how to add it themselves.
Notice that’s exactly what I stated. I think they should add the option for people to download a licensed player for $5 or $10 from the SuSE website or something similar, just like Lindows does.
Why they should add extra 10?
You can just download package from internet with one click ?
Where is problem here ?
May be people have normal dvd player after installation
of XP?
I like the idea of being able to purchase a distro and then freely distribute across my network. It doesn’t make good business sense to allow sharing copies of a distro to others for free. What happens is you get a few willing to support the developers by paying for the distro and the rest wait to get free copies from the Net. A company such as Novell loses money that could of been put into further development.
For SuSE Linux to compete against other OS and distros they will need to include features such as DVD playback out of the box. Novell should not expect that a newbie to Linux or dear old Mom would know how to download/install the codecs from the developer’s site. I’m fairly sure most PC users would admit they are willing to pay a little extra for a complete desktop solution that includes all the popular codecs and not just a few. Novell could still offer a stipped down Personal version of the distro for free (allows sharing), while offering full featured retail versions with all licensed codecs (no sharing). I know there are some of you that would wine if this were to happen but for Linux to prosper distro developers need to rethink their marketing. You cannot pay your staff, pay rent, fund R&D or put food on your table by giving everything away for free. Those that do will certainly see their business or product fail.
“The only thing it can’t do is download new versions of software”
What does he mean by that? Why can’t it install new versions of software?
Does Suse have some installation tool such as apt or urpmi?
Victor.
i installed suse 9 and under x, that very fast and reactive
take about 50 second to boot on a amd 1800+
very nice distributions
SUSE 9.1 Personal has no GNOME, Evolution, Mozilla. The reviewer must have used SUSE 9.1 Professional.
I tried to install SuSE 9.0 when it came out. I had problems with the FTP install … it simply wouldn’t work. So I mirrored SuSE’s 9.0 FTP directory to another machine here locally, and then installed it.
After messing around with it for a while, I decided SuSE just wasn’t for me. But that’s old news, that was 9.0
When the 9.1 LiveCD became available, I downloaded, burned the ISO to CD, and have since loaded the LiveCD on both of my computers and my laptop.
I have to say, I’m very impressed. I hate to say this, but one of my bigger gripes with SuSE 9.0 was simply the look and feel of it. I thought it was hideous looking … though I didn’t realize just how important that (apparently) was to me until I took a look at the 9.1 LiveCD. When I was configuring 9.0, I couldn’t come up with an acceptable look.
Now you may be thinking I’m one of those people that likes to waste their time messing with icons, desktop wallpaper, colorizing their window borders, and so on. You could not be more wrong. I *HATE* messing with that stuff. And that is why the “out of the box” look and feel is so important to me. I want to be able to just install the O/S, and have a relatively good looking system and then forever forget about the icons, the desktop wallpapers, and all that garbage. Or at the very least (most?), I would be OK with selecting a different theme that comes with the default install. But I don’t want to go online and hunt down icon packs, window frames, widgets, etc…
So – that was the big difference that I saw between 9.0 and 9.1. But I should also point out that I have yet to install 9.1. I hope that the 9.1 LiveCD is an accurate representation of what the 9.1 install will be like.
Another big (and more relevant) difference between 9.0 and 9.1 is that 9.1 comes with Gnome 2.4 (though there is no Gnome on the LiveCD). But that was a deal breaker for me regarding SuSE 9.0. I prefer Gnome – sue me, and I wanted Gnome 2.4 but SuSE 9.0 only had Gnome 2.2. (I wish SuSE 9.1 had Gnome 2.6, but I’ll have to wait on that.)
I’ve spent a lot of time with the SuSE 9.1 LiveCD and I’m pretty impressed with YaST. I doubt much has changed since 9.0, but for some reason I was never impressed with YaST before. Again though – last time around I think I was just disenchanted by the whole concept of SuSE from the word “go” due to the FTP problems, the install problems I had, and the horrible look and feel I experienced.
But YaST really is a terrific Desktop Administration Tool. I have been mostly happy with Mandrake’s Control Center, but YaST takes it to an entirely new level. However – I sometimes feel that YaST is a bit much (sort of). The way it is organized isn’t always clear … but I’m sure I’ll get use to it as time goes on. But I do think it might be better to have the most commonly used options right up in front, and then have an easy to see “Advanced” or “Expert” button for the not so common things.
Anyway – I’m going on too long now. But like the Subject says, SuSE 9.1 LiveCD has changed my mind regarding SuSE. I look forward to buying the Professional version (I have to have Gnome).
I just received 9.1 professional. It’s a very nicely tuned system. Novell has done a great job with the QA (Quality Assurance). I have it installed on a laptop and a 64 bit AMD Athlon 64 3200+ desktop. Wonderful system, it’s really polished and it works well. I have a little more reasons to get the pro version (ex. 64 bit port), but if you just want to have a linux working it’s the best choice for desktop linux. Xandros, Linspire etc.. I have tried them all and NONE of them are as polished and well running as Suse 9.1.
About the dvd playback, if you really know how to install packages using RPM then you can use your skills to install the decryption software. It’s unfair that that has to be done to get dvd working out of the box, I too would pay the extra $10 to get dvd working and this has to be looked into for future versions of any distro that considers linux to be used on the desktop. For god’s sakes I bought the Linspire dvd player which came with legal codecs for $10. If Linspire can do this I see no reason why the Suse/Novell camp can’t. Let’s face it you have to pay for the software and there should be no excuse to call a desktop linux distro a desktop distro without including legal dvd. At least Suse included MP3 playback support (which is more than I can say for other would be “desktop” distros).
There was a previous post about having dvd out of the box and paying for it. I agree if a company is going after a target audience and the software is there (as it is with Xine and Kaffiene) I see no logical reason not to license that codec. Freedom is one thing, but open source is the player here, not RMS’s babble and insanity. We want and need dvd, and some are breaking the law to get it. Also why no legal dvd players out except for the linspire version? Is there no market? Do all linux freaks have to pirate and hack and break the law? This madness must be stopped, the market is there and the software is there.
Seriously this Suse 9.1 release feels like a couple of versions more than 9.1, the good news is that some Novell folks said that this is just a taste of things to come. I can’t wait to see more work from Suse/Novell. This release has actually left me bored as nothing is broken and in about 20 minutes I have a full blooded desktop that looks nice, is stable and works fine. The 2.6 kernel makes for a snappy desktop and overall feel is out of this world. Cheers to Suse and Novell, you are at the top of your game. keep it up.
I picked 9.1 standard from a local store Saturday. The installation was good and all, but the big surprise was that there were no c-compiler included. I mean, Suse is great, but sometimes you just NEED to do a configure;make;make install, and that is not an option here. I of course checked YOU, freshrpms and so, but THERE IS NO GCC PACKAGE FOR 9.1! I managed to install apt-rpm (with 10 dependencies I had to discover and install by hand, I had forgotten RPM dependency hell, but there it was again), but the repositories I checked still had no gcc (or mplayer, etc.).
I’m just glad I kept my Arch partition intact. I don’t know what to do with my SuSE now. 30 Euros is not that much, but I feel kinda cheated (Yeah, I could have done more research before buying it, I know). Of course I could upgrade to pro, but… it shouldn’t be necessary!
Search for gcc in the yast package manager and you will find it.
Hi there. I’ve been a long time SuSE User (since 6.0). After 8.1 I changed to Slackware, because I like to play around. Last week I installed SuSE 9.1 for fun, I was really disappointed. cdrecord is heavily patch and only works with resmgr. I had to install cdrecord from a fedora rpm to change permissions by hand. Had to do that, because resmgr didn’t work quite well with my usb2-cdr. Another very annoying thing is the auto mount of cd and usb-sticks.
Even copy data from cd to hd is incredibly slow. 🙁
<p><em>SUSE 9.1 Personal has no GNOME, Evolution, Mozilla. The reviewer must have used SUSE 9.1 Professional.</em></p>
<p>The article makes no such claim as to Evolution and Mozilla — it’s right there in the first paragraph. You misunderstood what it says. Don’t blame the reviewer for your own misunderstanding.</p>
<p>If you have a correction to make, I’ll gladly make it. If you want to attack the review as well, your comment is more likely to be ignored as a troll.</p>
-Jem
This issue was up on OSNews not long ago. Someone pointed out that Linspire offers legal DVD playback ready-to-go (using Xine) with codecs and decryption – as an add-on option for $4.95 (thereby keeping the base price down). I think SuSE should do the same next time.
This is a make-or-break feature for a staggering number of Windows users. If they can’t play DVD movies in GNU/Linux, there is significantly less incentive to switch.
This may not be any kind of issue for corporate desktop distros, but it’s a showstopper for home desktop distros. It invalidates the entire distribution — they may as well take Kaffeine and Xine right out if there is no DVD playback.
What’s worse is that it is *not* just a single download for libdvdcss. You generally have to download half a dozen RPMs to modify the Xine libs, and then get a new version of Kaffeine and/or Xine. I haven’t tried it with the new SuSE 9.1 yet, but that’s the way it was with 9.0. It was a huge hassle that required fairly decent Google skills to find. The average home user would never be able to do it without third-party intervention. I plan to write a good how-to on adding DVD playback support, but not for at least a week. Too much other stuff to do. Even then, will most users think to search Google for the right information? The point is, they shouldn’t have to.
-Jem
I may have been wrong with Evolution and Mozilla, but I see that you have now removed both paragraphs with indeed said that GNOME is part of SUSE 9.1 Personal.
> When the 9.1 LiveCD became available, I downloaded, burned the ISO to CD, and have since loaded the LiveCD on both of my computers and my laptop.
You better redownload the update 9.1 LiveCD as the first version (and the one shipped with SUSE 9.1 Personal) allows a remote non-password root login (see SUSE security advisories) if you permanently work with it.
… – Playback is just sooo difficult… why don’t you knock your silly DVD or whatever playback mourning off, finally?! It’s kinda boring to still have to read it after the 1200th SuSE review that has been posted on this site, especially where the answer is always the same. If you can’t install an RPM with SuSE, where Konqueror will even open the installer (=Yast) for you upon downloading, you might as well be not just ready yet for using Linux.
To re-iterate: This is a licence-issue, in case your fave distro has DVD playback out of the box, they simply don’t care about it (Lindows is the exception, of course).
For SuSE, you get all you need in one place, for all flavors of SuSE, here:
http://packman.links2linux.de/?action=128
The liblzo file required by MPlayer has to be installed via Yast, where you search for lzo.
go look and you`ll unofficial rep you can yast or apt-get gcc dvd libs, mplayer etc
“I tried to install SuSE 9.0 when it came out. I had problems with the FTP install … it simply wouldn’t work. So I mirrored SuSE’s 9.0 FTP directory to another machine here locally, and then installed it.”
I did the same and I was very pleased by what I saw with SuSE 9.0. It felt to me to be the best put together commercial distro I’ve tried, with YaST and YOU being ‘killer apps’ (I hate that term).
I’m looking forward to the 9.1 ftp files appearing (early June I think?) to do the same there.
I installed SuSE 9.1 as soon as it was shipped to me. I have to say that it lived up to all the hype. Here are my first impressions.
– The boot up speed seems to be improved
– KDE loads in record time!
– The Desktop has received a lot of polish and looks great
– The menus have been cleaned up and are more than respectable
– CD/DVD software is coming along quite nicely (K3B is maturing)
OK, here is the bad:
SUSE is still shipping XFce3.X. That’s two versions in a row that have ignored some very respectable progress on the Desktop front. What’s up with that?
Here is one that shocked me! The Kernel 2.6 does not ship with hardware RAID support for IDE drives! AKKK!
On this latter issue, I have not decided on the best way to approach a resolve. I have a Web server with a Promise RAID controller (Mirrored). I have considered installing 9.1 and then rolling back to the 2.4 kernel. That would be a shame given the performance enhancements offered by the 2.6 kernel.
Additionally, SUSE 9.1 has too many improvemants for me to stick with the SUSE 9.0 on this server. I have been eagerly awaiting the improvements of 9.1 just for this specific box. While I could get a lot of these improvements by upgrading individual packages, it would be a dependency nightmare. What a let down!!!
So, any thoughts on how to approach this kernel issue are welcome.
Cheers,
Robert and his Promise controller
Robert,
Cut your silly drivel. The kernel ships with plenty of IDE Raid drivers from 3ware, LSI, Adaptec, etc…
Promise offers binary-only drivers and that is why they are not part of the stock kernel. Pick your hardware accordingly and you will be happy.
And don’t tell me, oh but it works on windows. Sure, and an Apple Wireless Airport card works great on OS X, have you tried to get it to work on Windows XP?
Hey, there was no drivel from my camp.
I was actually citing the error message that SUSE 9.1 produced when I attempted to install 9.1 on that server. It actually stated that, “while 2.4 supported some of the IDE RAID controllers, kernel 2.6 does not support them at all”. Again, that was not drivel, nor sniveling. That may not be the error word for word, but it’s real close!
The part about Promise offering binary-only drivers was news to me, and it’s good to know. While I have not had the problem long enough to have done any indepth investigation, what I have read thus far lead me to beleive that kernel 2.6 does not currently support RAID for IDE (I know it does for SCSI).
I thought that your responce was a little abrasive and confrontational however, I would like to thank you for the insight.
Again, I welcome any thoughts on how to resolve the issue. As I said, I have thought of installing 9.1 and rolling back to the 2.4 kernel. If you have any (constructive) thoughts please share them.
Robert
Just read your comment on IDE RAID. I have been in the situation as you as well, that is setting up a server, and I was thinking about going down the Prosime route as well (I always did with chepo-Windows-systems). However, I did download all the drivers for the controllers of interest in advance in order to read the readme.txt which come with the drivers. If you read the Promise-readme, you have to ask whether this is plain honest or plain stupid (marketing wise) — they don’t seem at all convinced by their Linux driver and it shows in the readme 🙂
Do yourself a favor and get a 3Ware, these are professional scale controllers for Linux. With 9.1, check which driver revision is shipped with it. From 3Ware, there was a strong recommendation from 3Ware to have the latest BIOS and drivers for RAID 5, you can take stock-Suse ones for 0 or 1, however, speaking for Suse 9.0 (check readmes of current drivers).
There are web-admin tools (RAID status, etc..) from 3Ware for SuSE 8.x, these didn’t work for 9.0. but I have an unofficial customized version for that as well for (9.0 which works); Unfortunately, I couldn’t yet check whether this is any good for 9.1 as well (but should be).
I you go for 3Ware, note that they don’t neccessarily tend to update drivers for older products too long, you can indirectly draw conclusions about that by checking the latest versions for older 3Ware hardware. So get yourself a 7506 series, these are pretty current and you can hook plenty stuff to them + having all RAID options.
Whilest you are at it, check their drive + mobo compatibility list; Not that others won’t work, but if there is an issue, the customer won’t blame it on your ignorance… I have set up 2x 300 GB “unsupported” Samsungs and they are fine on an unsupported P4-mobo… I do run lenghty data-integrity tests under heavy load.
Hey Anonymous, thank you for the great post. I have actually been using this server for quite some time, and have just upgraded the OS as new versions of SUSE come out (I love the Admin tools in YaST). Unfortunately, the Promise RAID controller is integrated into the motherboard. I may just get another controler as you mentioned in your post.
While I think that this controller would be fine in a Windows box, I don’t have any Microsoft products on this particular network. If you knew me you’d laugh, as that is quite the understatement.
Thanks again for the great post.
Cheers,
Robert