“I love working with many distributions and always have two or three installed on my computer. In the end, SUSE meets my needs as a developer, consultant, and home user better than any other single distribution. I can run my home PC and a multinational corporation with the same code — that is bang for your buck.” Read more here.
SuSE Linux Pro Review at NewsForge
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
As I got a new Athlon 64 machine at home now, I bought SuSE 9.2 Pro box and downloaded the Fedora Core 3 DVD.
What I liked about S9.2 was the way the installation worked and how it was able to resize the NTFS partition on the system (I already hat Windows installed). I liked KDEs way of controlling all kinds of settings and the current YaST is a great tool.
What I disliked most was the default theme that ships with KDE on SuSE. They don’t even have a decent no-nonsence theme in their package. I tried out the Gnome 2.6 packages they shipped, but somehow it all seemed “a bit less cared” for than the KDE part.
I tried FC3 afterwards, and though it leaves a lot to be desired regarding partition resizing, NTFS access and the like, it’s Gnome 2.8 desktop was simple beautiful and clean. (And somehow the machines UI response times were faster – no idea why.)
Does anyone have a desktop theme like the current Bluecurve for S9.2 x86_64? That would be great. 🙂
> Does anyone have a desktop theme like the current Bluecurve > for S9.2 x86_64? That would be great. 🙂
You can install the Bluecurve theme from the FC3 cd. It’s a rpm called redhat-artwork. I believe it installs both the KDE and Gnome theme. After installing that rpm, you can choose the Bluecurve theme from the themelist.
That was more of an opinion than a review.
> You can install the Bluecurve theme from the FC3 cd. It’s a rpm called redhat-artwork. I believe it installs both the KDE and Gnome theme. After installing that rpm, you can choose the Bluecurve theme from the themelist.
Doesn’t work because of failed dependencies (clashes with the installed KDE version).
Is there a website with SuSE 9.2 x86_64 KDE themes available anywhere?
I can second most of your comments on both FC and SUSE. However, I found FC3 to be just as unresponsive. I wanted to “upgrade” my Mandrake 10.0 Community install on my Centrino based Dell laptop. But, Mandrake 10.0 is much faster. Now, I’m afraid to even upgrade to Mandrake 10.1 because I’m afraid that the problem is in the kernel (HAL or something like that???).
Fortunately, I had room to leave Mandrake on and I’m back to using it.
darren
Are GNOME distros fading out? FC3 and Ubuntu are the only desktop distros I know of with decent GNOME 2.8 desktops available. Neither is particularly stable: FC3 is terribly buggy, and my Ubuntu system has regular Nautilus crashes, runaway famd processes, processes left running after the user logs out and occasional removable storage problems (“unable to unmount volume”).
Most of the commercial distros seem to use KDE. Does anyone know of a reliable GNOME 2.8 distro, commercial or free?
I have found that Mandrake 10.1 Official (please everyone, use official…most of the complaints I have heard about 10.x were from people using the Community release) is just as responsive, if not more so, than Mandrake 10.0 Official.
I really like SUSE 9.2 Pro. I think that at this point Mandrake 10.1 Official and SUSE 9.2 Pro are the best all-around “ease of use” distros (disclaimer: I like Gnome, but prefer KDE, so your mileage may vary among the easier distros).
Yes, Slackware is fast (always has been). Actually, Slack is my favorite distro to run (dropline) Gnome on.
I think I’d have clicked the abuse button on my own comment above if somebody hadn’t beaten me to it. I just upgraded ndiswrapper (0.10->0.12) and my problems have apparently vanished. So what I meant to say was “Ubuntu is a great GNOME 2.8 distro”. FC3 is still buggy, though.
It does bring up the battle between stable (as in un-changing) and stable (as in not-crashing), but that’s another issue.
I do think that stability is one of the areas in which SUSE shines (at least on my machines, as always ymmv). While it isn’t as rock-solid and thoroughly tested as…say, Debian stable (but what is), I have yet to experience any stability issues with my 9.2 Pro install.
I’m one of those people who probably have 4 or 5 distros installed at once on various machines; while I always seem to end up gravitating toward Slackware or Debian, I will use a distro as my primary “workhorse” distro to see whether or not it can take the heat. SUSE 9.2 Pro has handled rather admirably IMHO.
Yes, Debian Proper (Sarge installer): beautiful implementation of Gnome, fantastic distro overall.
Not much of a review for an article that seemed to just skim over SLP 9.2 features. Would of been nice to see some screen shots and comparisons to the previous release SLP 9.1 as well other distributions such as RHEL.
Anyway, what I’ve noticed with such reviews is that some are either saying Connector is included with SLP 9.2 and some are not. I was under the impression that Connector is included on the DVD but not on the 5 CD. I’ve learned not to always believe a sales rep especially since they want you to purchase more of their products, in this case NLD, not SLP. So if anyone is running SLP 9.2 please check both the CD and DVD for Connector to let everyone know if it’s there or not. If it is then I can’t see much point in purchasing NLD or why Novell would even release NLD instead of expanding support options for SLP.
What I would like to see Novell do is to increase the intervals when SLP is released. There shouldn’t be a need to release a distribution version every six months. I didn’t see much improvement between SLP 9.1 and 9.2 which is reason why I didn’t upgrade my network. After all users can easily use YaST to add YaST Sources so as to update KDE, Gnome and other packages or use Apt4rpm to update the distribution. If Novell wants my money every release then they’ll have to offer more in SLP such as including their Novell iFolder which would be useful for both private and enterprise sectors. Including licensed codecs for popular media such as Windows Media and Quicktime would also be an incentive for consumers to purchase SLP whether as an update or first time installation.
I was trying to install 9.2 via the mini iso (ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/iso/SUSE-Linux-9.2-mini-insta…) and a remotely mounted live DVD.
I tried both NFS and HTTP, with no success (got 404 or “bad request” w/ HTTP and general not found error with NFS).
I’m sure that these services are correctly configured.
Had Anyone more luck with this?
I prefer a “review” like this one as opposed to the many reviews that spend two pages talking about the installation process.
More reviews should assume that we know how to install the software. We don’t need two pages telling us what and what doesn’t work on xyz hardware.
Are you trying to install from your own dvd that is mounted on another machine or doing the ftp install? If you are trying to install from the ftp, the rpms aren’t up yet so you can’t install it. Check ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/README.txt for news. It should be up by the 10th of Jan. If you are installing from your own dvd, well I’ve never done it so I can’t help you on that one.
><it>So if anyone is running SLP 9.2 please check both the CD and DVD for Connector to let >everyone know if it’s there or not.</it>
I’ve put up a list of RPMS that are on the DVD but not on the 5 CD set. You can find the list at http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~anand/download/diff_DVDCD.txt
It has Ximian Connector on it (ximian-connector-2.0.1-3.i586.rpm) which means Ximian Connector is on the DVD but not on the 5 CD set. Shame on SuSE for doing this and not informing people.
I like SuSE 9.2 Pro but find the GUI responsiveness to be slow and browsing with firefox horribly slow (and don’t tell me about ipv6, dns, dhcp, blah blah blah since I’ve tried everything and browsing is still much slower than Windows XP Pro on the same machine).
Anand
i concur with others about suse’s 9.x slowness. i’ve posted about this before, though the comments were late so most likely no one saw them, so i’ll repost again. perhaps others will find these two tips helpful (but ultimately, it’s still slower than other distros, just now tolerable).
And if anyone else has other tips or solutions, please do tell!
=============================================================
i’ve bought the retail boxed Professional versions of Suse 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2. .. and i’ve just been dispappointed with the performance in general. part of this is due to:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2004-Oct/0556.html
> Out of the box “time kate” reported 4.5s.
>
> Pre-linking kate cut about 0.5s off this time. (A little
> poking about seemed to show that pre-linking cut 0.5s
> off the loading time of most KDE apps.)
>
> But I also noticed that doing an
> “export LANG=C” before launching kate cut a full second(!)
> off the startup time. (My default LANG on this box is
> en_GB.UTF-8)
>
> A quick analysis of the output from “strace -r konsole” showed
> that indeed, it was taking about 1 second for X11 to
> parse the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
> file
…
Thank you very much! With your suggestions it is much faster now. On this
machine kate launch time went from 6.3 down to 4.3. konsole from 5.4 to 3.3.
It is still not as responsive as this kde 2.2.1 I’m using now (Suse 7.3, the
best so far), but it is coming closer.
What am I missing with the LANG =C setting? How to enable it system wide?
One final note: your findings show that performance really seems to have been
forgotten. And the saddest part is some people are blind enough not to
recognize it.
.. and removing the “desktop” kernel parameter starting from version 9.0 can help on older machines and does help things a bit for me (as well as certain on/off combos of acpi, apm and desktop paramter together as suggested by someone at suse on the mailing list)
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/10/pohletz_desktop_90.html
.. since “The “desktop” boot parameter sets ten times shorter time slices (1-31ms) and ten times higher timer interrupt rate (1000/s) than standard. “
http://portal.suse.de/sdb/en/2003/10/90_scheduling.html
.. but even with all those two things–turning off utf8 and removing the desktop parameter–it’s still relatively and noticably slower on old machines (PIII 500mhz & 600mhz, 256MB & 512MB ram, 7200 rpm hd) compared to windows 2000, windows xp with antivirus off, freebsd 5.x, and other distros like mepis, mandrake 10.x. (both mandrake 10 and freebsd especially fly here!)
No. It’s not a review.
OSNews favors the number of articles rather than quality.
Are you trying to install from your own dvd that is mounted on another machine or doing the ftp install?
The first one.
By the way the official RPMs came out, so I’ll try with them.