SUSE LINUX has opened its entire 9.1 directory tree for free download and installation via FTP/HTTP.
SUSE LINUX 9.1 Available for Free Download
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No need to rush. Servers will be too busy, some will need time to sync the directories.
Nowadays, dialup is the most prevalent way of accessing the internet. Downloading an entire Suse install through a 56K modem is a chore for many users. Do you think that when high speed connections (ADSL, cable, etc.) become the norm all over the world, Suse will stop allowing free access to their ftp tree ?
Grabbing some packages off of ftp is less than getting 4 full iso’s as if becoming the norm for most distros these days.
I don’t know where you are (If in the UK, last time I was
there they were still using 2 tin cans and a piece of string
and you had to wait a year to get that!) Here dialup went out with the dinosaur and ISDN followed pretty quickly. ADSL is plentiful, fast and cheap (so cheap you get 2 or 3 months free service and free install as normal) and there are several cable companies and also fibre.
Wayne
I wish they would offer the ability to select multiple mirrors for download just like Cygwin/X setup offers, so that the downloading part will go faster.
The US ?
you have to realise its a big country
throughout the south broadband is few and far between
myself , i have been waiting for broadband for 9 years.
still no dsl , no cable , only option being direcway
which “seriously” thats no option
Now on the topic , this is for install by ftp only ?
or download for iso too ?
The news is that the version for free download is 9.1.
last versions, not all packages are allowed to download, so a installation failed when it comes to dependencies with these (java, moneyplex…)
suse rock …ehm… sucks
Where can I download the ISO? I don’t see an ISO directory on the server.
They won’t provide the ISOs. You can usually find them on bit torrent or edonkey sites though.
The news is *Novell* is offering free downloads of SuSE 9.1
What prompted my question was the fact that Suse doesn’t provide a full iso (the complete install on CD) for download, so that they can make money through the retail channel. The only rationale I see in allowing FTP installations is that they know that a lot of people don’t have a DSL or cable connection. This is due to various reasons : vast distances between the ISP and their potential customers (as said by the US fellow); lack of interest from old folks who can afford to pay but don’t care about downloading music or videos; the use of the internet solely for email or web browsing; …
These details made me think that there won’t be any incentive to buy a Suse box once everybody has a fast connection and can perform an FTP install in a few hours. By the way, I live in Canada and here too, both ADSL and cable are quite affordable.
In response to the guy from the southern part of the US, the iso you download will allow you to start the installation through the net. I believe it’s similar to the first stage of a Gentoo install (in some respect).
Actually it’s quite common in my area of the American south. You just have to have a good cable company like Comcast.
I get 6megs/sec downlink.
“Actually it’s quite common in my area of the American south. You just have to have a good cable company like Comcast.
I get 6megs/sec downlink.”
Not bad. Thats about 60 Mbit/s. And all that on cable
— Vecc
DSL coverage in the UK is currently 90% rising to 99.6% by summer 2005 – I`m in the middle of nowhere and even my tiny exchange has it.
There is no comcast where im at , there is communicomm
for cable , no isp through cable
for possibly 100 miles around me there is no comcast
and dsl is kind of hit and miss
there is dsl in 1 town and skips
about 60 miles then available in the next
i am about 150 miles from birmingham alabama
and about 60 miles from tupelo mississippi
both very well known places
and no broadband inbetween
First of all, Comcast sucks.. I used to have them as my cab;e provider and maybe it’s just in my area but the charges were ridiculous. Used to have TimeWarner with RoadRunner it was just as fast and alot cheaper.
There is a boot disk in fact, ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/boot/boot.iso
This iso just boots you into the installer, after that you can install from the net, or you can mirror the whole tree from a local network or disk. I know Suse 9.0 was about 4 Gigs I think (maybe wrong) I could imagine 9.1 being a bit bigger.
Someone should make a .torrent link and paste it here.
For those of you who missed it due to our downtime, our review is now back online at http://www.desktopos.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=17 – thanks to Ruffdogs for fixing the server!
I think they’re out trying to make a buck by getting some to give up on downloading and instead purchase. Can’t blame them.
I bought the Pro edition but thought about buying just the Personal edition and then downloading the few additional packages that I would need such as the compiler. Don’t know if that would have worked.
iam at unninett.no now, and we have 155 mb, but now iam downloading with 13,9 kbs..
Quote: If in the UK, last time I was there they were still using 2 tin cans and a piece of string and you had to wait a year to get that!
Err..how long ago was that? The last millennium? There are nearly 4 Million broadband connections currently increasing by 40,000 a week for a country with a population of 65 million. Even pokey little 10 house hamlets are getting broadband here. Broadband coverage of the UK will be 99.6% by next year.
What was that you were saying? The US is FAR BEHIND the UK in respect to broadband. Somehow I doubt you’ll ever reach 99.6% coverage.
Well, UK or US or whatever, you are all beaten by South-Korea anyway, practically every household there has a broadband connection, as far as I can recall.
I’ve just installed the ftp-version this morning and i was surprised to find the packages like java and mainactor which were absent from previous ftp-versions.
“”Actually it’s quite common in my area of the American south. You just have to have a good cable company like Comcast.
I get 6megs/sec downlink.”
Not bad. Thats about 60 Mbit/s. And all that on cable
— Vecc”
No, he was incorrect by saying “megs”
He has 6 Mbit not 60
No Cable has 60 Mbits… I have Optimum Online – known as the fastest, and that is 10 Mbits max…. rediculously fast though 
I know that Comcast isn’t faster though 
My girlfriend is from South Korea and we visit her family there at least once per year, if not more… They definitely don’t have broadband everywhere. It’s sort of scattered into chunks, just like anywhere else.
Yeah, most cable companies I’ve dealt with have been between 1.1 Mbit/sec (Megabit per second) and 3 Megabit/sec. I think most people are, for some reason, still confused by megabits vs megabytes, kilabits vs kilabytes, etc…
Seems I read somewhere that starting with version 9.2, suse will be sold like xandros.
Anybody know anything about this?
” I think most people are, for some reason, still confused by megabits vs megabytes, kilabits vs kilabytes, etc…”
Hehe, that’s perfectly acceptable… no normal person should be required to learn what all that means
In Israel, the broadband issue plain sucks.
The broadband (both cable and ADSL) is quite common, except in the north, but the system is porblematic. First, you have to buy a modem and the right to use the *infestructure* from either the (Monopolistic) Bezeq, the only non-mobile phone company in Israel, or from the (Monopolistic) HOT, the only cable company in Israel.
On top of that, you have to order the internet access itself form one of the many Internet Companies, most of them nothing short of evil: not only they charge outrageous prices for low-speed aceess (from 256KBit/s to 1MBit/s), they also force you to use this stupid PPTP dialer, which preety much denies you from doing stuff like installing SuSE form FTP unless you have a router.
Just a tip: If anyone is having trouble connecting through their cable/DSL router (Netgear WGR614 in my case) to install Suse, it may be because the router will not allow passive FTP sessions (or some such technical jargon). I had this problem when installing 9.0 via FTP, it could never connect to Suse’s FTP server when booted from the install disk (worked fine to connect from command line from other boxes). Even putting the target machine’s IP in the “Default DMZ Server” wouldn’t fix the problem. If I remove the router and plug the target machine directly into the cable modem, the install worked flawlessly.
My solution was to download the entire 9.1 directory to my web server, and doing an HTTP install from there. Worked great, and much faster
“I have Optimum Online – known as the fastest, and that is 10 Mbits max…. rediculously fast though
I know that Comcast isn’t faster though 
”
You call that fast? Here in Sweden we have something
called “Bolina”. Download speed at 8.5mb/sec (68mbit/sec) and costs around $35/Month.
I will download the ISO but the linked page says the CD image is only 23 megabytes in size! Suse is way bigger than that, isn’t it? Is this some sort of skeleton distro where you go online to complete the install?
Didn’t you read the tagline in the article?
“SUSE LINUX has opened its entire 9.1 directory tree for free download and installation via FTP/HTTP.”
Please read the instructions on the SuSE site. It clearly explains it all. The iso is a boot iso and you install the rest via FTP, the way SuSE has done it for ages.
uhh… We have states that are larger than the UK. It’s a big country, pal.
http://www.distrowatch.com/?newsid=01653#0
has the links for mirrors and a link to the iso on there servers.
enjoy….
-Nex6
I can’t see the reasoning in offering the Professional edition for free. Can someone clarify if this ftp/http download is for SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal or the Professional version?
ftp version is a modification of the pro version.
it is just missing some packages and some other minor things.
Other then that it is pro.
-Nex6
There is no comcast where im at , there is communicomm
for cable , no isp through cable
for possibly 100 miles around me there is no comcast
Altough it’s off topic:
the reason is ADSL as to be near the central phone (about 4 kilometers). If not the company can install signal repeaters for another 4 kilometers and so on. You are out of luck since the cmpanies see no market where you are to install 3-4 ADSL signal repeaters.
____________________________
I am waiting 2-3 days to install SuSE 9.1 on ftp (9.0 ftp version was really a complete system !!).
I am now testing Fedora core 2 (my first time install of Fedora) but it lacks hundreds of distro customized packages that I find and use on SuSE. Also the fonts in Fedora are really baddly rendered, if comparing to SuSE and Slackware (specially Slackware has optimum font rendering).
(Anyone knows when the next stable Slackware will be out ?)
Is this some sort of skeleton distro where you go online to complete the install?
Yes and no …
That just the kernel image and initial installer. It’s IMPORTANT that you know the IP address of your ftp mirrors
e.g. http://ftp.mirror.getmeforfree.com = 192.345.55.678 (IP Address)
and … the right dir
e.g. /pub/linux/distros/suse/i386/9.1
and your network card driver….
-Nex6
Is pppoe support present in the installer?
OK. I was exaggerating. The first and last time I applied for a phone line in London was around 1978 and it took almost a year. I left the UK in 1980 but have been back a few times to go shopping at M&S, etc, but I have noticed that it is a technological backwater compared with the far east where I currently reside.
Down here in our broadband background country, we are finally turning things forward. I cant give a percentage of coverage but some form of fast internet access is available eg. ISDN, Sattelite, DSL, Cable and the new Wireless DSL. At the moment 256Kbit DSL is retailing for around $30 with decent 512Kbit around $50-$60 and 1.5Mbit at $80+. Cable is much more expensive at around $70 with a standard speed of 10Mbits.
The issues our telco faces (Telstra, also known as Hellstra for there fantastic HellDesk) is there RIM devices which block out DSL access, these are mainly used in new suburbs. So a couple of companies are releasing Wireless DSL and also Telstra are testing Fibre optics. As for me, well a 256Kbit connection does me fine.
“Hehe, that’s perfectly acceptable… no normal person should be required to learn what all that means
”
Haha, who ever said any of us were normal? Just kidding. I am just sometimes surprised at the amount of people that talk about things they don’t understand… but thats not really a trait unique to the computer world, I suppose.
and your network card driver….
Well … if you use a (realtek chip) $15 network card (like me) SuSE configures it for you and loads the correct module ( at least, it did with the 2.4 kernel )
I installed it via FTP even if I was amazed that it said that he asked me to use hda4, it was already used as swap previously by my previous Debian, as swap because 128mb of ram were not enough for the installation process. :/
I left the UK in 1980 but … it is a technological backwater compared with the far east where I currently reside.
Sure …
… and you also have digital monkeys walking the streets and cleaning the network cabling for you.
I should know… I have no DSL and typical connection speeds for PPP are 24000. I got my first higher than 28.8 connection this last week. 46000. I noticed instantly and still don’t know why it happened. I hope it continues.
Mandrake has had this capability since version 8 or 8.1. Are these other distros or any of the BSDs that do this?
you have to realise its a big country
throughout the south broadband is few and far between
myself
Broadband is pretty common in certain areas of the south. Really cheap and really fast if you’re in the right places. Also, while Atlanta doesn’t really count as the south, I have to mention the multi-gigabit connection at GaTech
Mandrake has had this capability since version 8 or 8.1. Are these other distros or any of the BSDs that do this?
As far has I know (AFAIK)
SuSE has it since the down of Linux… (At least since version 7.3
Read the previous posts.
“”am at unninett.no now, and we have 155 mb, but now iam downloading with 13,9 kbs..””
I think you mean 155Kb (bits). When you say you’re downloading at 13.9KB (Bytes) this would be correct.
1 Byte = 8 bits
and Kb = kilobits while KB = KiloBytes
Therefore, your 155Kb / 8 = 19.38 KB MAX download speed. (assuming you have the correct speed. I have heard of 128Kb or 256Kb, but not 155Kb). So you getting 13.9KB download sounds about right.
To this very day you can call the Bell Sympatico (Canada) sales reps and ask if they offer a 3Mb (bits) or a 3MB (bytes) connection, and you will have them totally lost! Sadly, not even the sales reps know the difference. I can’t really expect Joe User to have a clue!
This ftp distro has already solved the little problem” Windows No Longer Boots Following the Installation of SUSE LINUX 9.1″ if you resize any NTFS partitions. I buy SUSE 9.1 Pro and it works fine.
Whew, only took four hours, but here I am writing this to you from my spankin’ new 9.1 installation. I was a little tripped when I updated my system and there were 63 updates, guess it’s better’n, say VS which has been out a year and no fixes…. NVidia wouldn’t start – changed to nv, searched on Suse’s installation support site and found the answer: I had enabled plug & play OS in the bios the day before.
First impression is that hardly anything’s changed – menus still randomly organized (or at least making barely logical sense), no firefox or thunderbird.
I’ll leave it on my system for a while, but looks like it’ll pay to wait.
hi
i try to install suse 9.1 but each time they seem to freeze the machine during loading module… (during hardware detection…)
i have a tekram card (sym53c8xx driver)
but install via my ide cd-rom
i tried the default installation, manual… same thing…
any idea?
thanks
—
La boîte à prog http://www.laboiteaprog.com
Yup, I can’t seem to get the FTP part to work. I am trying an FTP mirror now, maybe that will work.
Also, liked anothers post about downloading the full 9.1, then setting it up locally as an ftp/http server and using your local box. That should work..I hope?
LOL — I will tell you what happend: You wanted to be the first posting your opinion, no matter what. Otherwise you would have found the Firefox browser along with Konqueror under the highly organized menu Internet > Web Browser > Firefox.
Was it more than five seconds it took you to “evaluate”..?
Hmm, no go Anonymous…
The FTP version didn’t come with Firefox, or Thunderbird, maybe you’re referring to another version, but this thread’s about the FTP install. 4.5 GB download but no firefox or thunderbird. Oh, and as for being first? Not hardly, #45 or so…
Later,
Will