Here’s a review of SuSE 9.3: “Right now I’m looking at a SuSE 9.3 installation which offers me everything I’m used to plus more. It’s hard to say if and when I’ll switch, but it sure looks tempting. In more than one way SuSE feels so much better than Ubuntu, and it’s hard to resist all the small details and finishes Novell put into the product.”
Well, it goes a bit further, and is rather decent, but how come there aren’t any deeper reviews of a Linux distro?
Oh no, once in a while one does stumble upon a “I’ve spend a week/fortnight/month with linux, and write about my perils”.
It’s a desktop — Install KDE, and use it, what’s the buzz, what’s the fuss?
Thank you… man is it ever going to end!!!!??
Its an OS not a class experiment
Its an OS not a battlebot
Its an OS not a significant other
Install it, use it, go out and enjoy the rest of your short life.
I love tinkerers but dude …a cigar, is just a cigar. The review is what it is.
The problem is that there are proportionately more reviews of this nature than there are in-depth reviews. Every time a new distro comes out, someone installs it and writes a review of their first impressions. Fine. No problem with that.
Install it, use it, go out and enjoy the rest of your short life.
If you have such an attitude to OSes, then should you be on this site?
The point you fail to grasp is that there is no need for this type of review any more. All the major distros install with no problems and look nice (with the usual caveat of subjectivity).
How easy is this distro to maintain, for example?
People do install patches – to improve stability or fix security problems – so they may not find it easy to “enjoy the rest of their short life” if Kmail has just destroyed an important e-mail.
Even better – don’t bother at all and stick with Windows.
Well, you could always check my review of Libranet 3 out:
http://www.dia.net.au/david/libranet3reviewnormal.pdf
It’s long, it’s detailed, but I’ve had very positive feedback on it. It’s up here as well:
http://www.reviewlinux.com/?m=show&id=62
I’ve got to edit it and correct a few tiny things that were pointed out to myself post released of the review, but it’s pretty damn factually correct. Enjoy.
Dave
I agree. This is just another useless KDE review. How can this even be called a review?
“The first thing you’ll probably notice is the SuSE wallpaper, it’s a soft shade of blue but fits in perfectly, the Crystal icons look sharp and the icon text is blended with a soft outline. The vivid colors really welcome you to click and explore your way around your computer and its applications.”
How about an indepth look at the thousands of patches SuSE adds to their kernel which makes their distro crap. Or how about realizing YaST is a slow and messy piece of shit. SuSE has a history, write a bit about why Novell purchased them and Ximian. Find out what their goals are.
For gods sake, write about something else than the wallpaper.
How about an indepth look at the thousands of patches SuSE adds to their kernel which makes their distro crap.
How do SUSE’s patches make SUSE a worse distribution than it would be without them?
SUSE 9.0 was a great improvement over Mandrake 8.2, but now I’m looking for my next Linux desktop. I’ve got my Ubunto CD to try, but I’m also planning to give the latest Mandriva and OpenSUSE a spin.
“SUSE 9.0 was a great improvement over Mandrake 8.2”
To be honest they cannot be compared, because Mandrake 8.2 was 3 releases older than SUSE 9.0 (unless yours was a typo and you mean Mandrake 9.2)
Other than that you are right: SUSE 9.0 was absolutely great for its time.
To be honest they cannot be compared, because Mandrake 8.2 was 3 releases older than SUSE 9.0 (unless yours was a typo and you mean Mandrake 9.2)
Ach, true.
Sorry I didn’t make it clear that I was switching distros and upgrading after using Mandrake 8.2 since shortly after it was released. For its time Mandrake 8.2 was also steller.
How about an indepth look at the thousands of patches SuSE adds to their kernel which makes their distro crap.
I completely agree with you on this one. I don’t know how they managed this one, but they somehow screwed up the bttv driver in the latest SUSE. This is the same driver that has been around since kernel 2.2, and has been stable since kernel 2.4. Not only that, this is the same driver that I myself, whom has never programmed a thing in my life, can install in about 3 minutes, and have it fully working.
Not to mention their Nvidia installer script, which made my system unstable and somehow screwed up X windows, while still not managing to fully install the driver. (I did it by hand afterwards). Then, once it was running, sax2 wouldn’t enable 3D accel (did this one by hand too).
The system running on top (their Ximianized Gnome for example) is top of the line in my opinion….you couldn’t find better. Despite what you said, I find YaST (excluding sax2) to be a very good tool.
But for gods sakes can they either
a)quit screwing up their kernels
or
b)learn how to compile them properly
This is why I like CentOS, the system on top may not be the prettiest, but the underlying system is rock solid. I would rather have a system where I have to customize it to my liking a bit more, than one where the kernel won’t function properly on my system.
Of course, CentOS is built on RHEL AS, and I have never tried SLES, so maybe it is the same for their enterprise products.
I see for opensuse they have added a much needed bugzilla (I couldn’t find one before) so this of course is a good thing.
I just upgraded from Suse 9.2 to 9.3. There are a few improvements, added features, and fixes which is all well and good but now Thunderbird and Firefox and a few other programs will not print anymore. The worse part is that I have no idea how to fix this. If I knew this would happen I would have never upgraded. I love Linux, the OS you have to fiddle with and fix all the time.
What would be really interesting is to talk about maintainability and upgradability. How easy is it to upgrade to the latest version of SuSE? Do packages break? Is upgrading unsupported? What about installing applications that aren’t packaged as SuSE RPMs? How easy or difficult is it to get these packages to integrate nicely with the system?
IMHO, all distros these days look good from an eye candy point of view. Usability wise, they are pretty much equal. The review claims that SuSE 9.3 is better than Ubuntu, but makes no effort to substantiate those claims. What is better? The default theme? How well does it support WiFi out of the box?
> How well does it support WiFi out of the box?
Out-of-the-box support for Centrino (Intel PRO Wireless 2200 802.11b/g) WiFi is, for me, the most important improvement going from SUSE 9.2 to 9.3.
“Out-of-the-box”, is not there. Although its the only distro that i’ve had great success with using the ndiswrapper package for my Linksys wireless PCI and PC cards.
What would be really interesting is to talk about maintainability and upgradability. How easy is it to upgrade to the latest version of SuSE? Do packages break? Is upgrading unsupported? What about installing applications that aren’t packaged as SuSE RPMs? How easy or difficult is it to get these packages to integrate nicely with the system?
I’ve just installed SUSE after having previously used FC3/4 and Kubuntu. The thing that strikes me most is that it seems to take a lot of the guesswork out of configuring and installing, I haven’t had to manually edit a script or config file since the configuration tools handle much of that and it gives it a polished look and feel. But that can also be a drawback. I don’t mind editing files by hand, in fact I find it can be faster and easier than using config tools. I’m guessing from what I see so far that if I start trying to tweak and poke around too much in something SUSE insists on controlling, I may break something. Having said that, it’s probably a huge advantage for users that get frustrated with having to edit files by hand or search around to make something work.
As for installing other packages, can’t comment too much since I’m still fresh into my install. I can say that I have compiled a few packages without issue, and used checkinstall to package them. That way they show up in Yast and can be managed as regular packages.
IMHO, all distros these days look good from an eye candy point of view. Usability wise, they are pretty much equal. The review claims that SuSE 9.3 is better than Ubuntu, but makes no effort to substantiate those claims. What is better? The default theme? How well does it support WiFi out of the box?
The theme is ok, it’s inoffensive but regardless of distro I usually customize it right away so it’s generally a moot point for me. WiFi seems to be pretty good from what I can see, one thing I thought was pretty slick was the integration of wpa_supplicant in the wireless config. If installed (it’s available as a package at install, but not by default) then you can easily set your WPA-PSK key in the config and SUSE will bring up wpa_supplicant automatically with the interface. Sure, wpa is easy enough to configure and manage manually but that’s the kind of touch newer users might appreciate.
Everything else on my laptop was recognized and configured at install, even ACPI works with suspend to RAM. That was the case with previous distros, too, so I can’t say that it’s any better or worse with hw management/configuration etc.
I would suspect that, given the linux experience and preferences of many users on this board, SUSE may not be favoured by many. I don’t think it is geared towards customizability or veering from base install, the config tools may second guess what you’re trying to do and wipe out changes you make manually, it is a bit bloated (although one person’s bloat is another person’s extra functionality and a bit slower than previous distros I’ve used (although not substantially slower, still very useable).
But at the same time it is very slick, bootsplash et al. and very useable. Like I said, I don’t mind having to edit files by hand but I haven’t *had* to yet with SUSE. Everything worked out of the box and the KDE fit-and-finish is the best I’ve seen. I strikes me as being a solid product for working on, if not so much for tweaking or heavily customizing. I think it’s a platform that could work very well for people that just want to work and work well.
So there you go, just my $0.02…
Cheers.
Well for some people reviews with screeshots like this one are useful. Can’t help it. These articles will stop appearing when there’s no need for them anymore…
Go figure.
Funny the article writer switched from gentoo to SuSE,i did just the opposite.I have just booted SuSE 10 beta on a other box for testing and it boots significant faster than (9.3).SuSE doesn’t really persuade me with additions in order to buy a box.Yast is not bad but i sincerly prefer emerge or if i have to apt-get.
“Yast is not bad but i sincerly prefer emerge or if i have to apt-get.”
Actually SUSE *does* have APT, the best one among the RPM distros, IMO. Tons of packages available.
Review: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/2143
Screenshots: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=406&slide=1
Is pretty poor, IMO. I’m talking from a Gnomer’s point of view, and i don’t think they’ve put enough work into their desktop.
As far as the community is concerned, I’ve never known such a bunch of self-important zealots in all my years of using linux.
I chose to try Suse, and because I needed help getting something to work, which should work by default(beagle), i was treated very poorly in the irc channel. yes, i know it’s not official support, but the community helps make a distro. idiots.
ubuntu and mandrake communities are much better, with fedora close behined them.
for support and general chit-chat, suse users lose.
In my experience the two most useful sources for help with in depth linux problems are the suse mailing lists and the gentoo forums.
Everything else mostly is just not helpful (most IRC channels most of the time, Redhat ML) or at worst a collection of insults and “why would you want to do that?”s (Debian, I love the distro but I hate the other users, well, they probably hate me too =)
yes, these are the important things: a distribution that comes out with a new release roughly every 6 months must be able to undergo several upgrades and still be stable. both suse and mandrake had a hard time here. that’s why i started to use debian. its a pitty, i miss the feel of suse – attention to detail. but it becomes TOO unstable if you start to play with it. don’t try to install rpm’s from all over the web (and you have to if you want the latest software and all the things suse does NOT deliver) or it’ll become unstable…
but hey, for a normal user, it is the perfect distribution (esp now i heard 10.0 did some work on speed, as suse is awfully slow).
“but it becomes TOO unstable if you start to play with it. don’t try to install rpm’s from all over the web (and you have to if you want the latest software and all the things suse does NOT deliver) or it’ll become unstable…
”
I believe this issue has already been covered. Stick with packages that are ment for your distro (a fact that applies to all the distros) and you’ll be fine. Package hell is nothing new, and it’s mitugated by using a distro that has mostly what you want. Just like game consoles concentrate on particular types of games.
well, if a gnomer thinks the suse users are bad, it must be really bad, as they are used to be mistreated by their gnomedevelopers.
anyway, maybe its just because the community is very new, and beagle is very young (suse should’ve never inlcuded it in the first place, imho – its an unstable and slow piece of crap – of course, as it is immature yet).
beagle is ok(using 0.12) although it’s memory requierments are quite high.
But my main gripe with suse is it’s community support. The people that seem to use it are very immature, and very sensitive about saying “suse has a bug”. also known as zealots.
Having used SUSE for 3 years now, it is still the only distro I have installed that works form start to finish. Most distros out of the box are really marketed towards novice users and official support is for installation problems only. After 30 days your on your own. If you do alittle searching you might find some SUSE support forums on the web that are anything but zealots towards ppl with questions. I always got a good response from them. try subscribing to the Novell News server or goto http://www.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?location=home&language=EN
you should get a go response from the users or even Novell workers at these two locations.
I recently tried to upgrade a Suse 9.2 machine to Suse 9.3, and was unable to resolve dependency clashes, etc., without first uninstalling blocking packages including yast. Pretty handy when all you have left for installation purposes is rpm…
For reasons which I’ve now forgotten, I was also unable to install via ftp (a method which worked quite well previously).
I was feeling quite optimistic about Ubuntu (even though I’m repulsed by a distribution named after an ideology – anyone for Communism, or Autocracy?) until I needed to install packages not available in any of the Ubuntu repositories. In the end I reverted to Debian unstable, which has a much more comprehensive software listing (at least for the software that I was interested in). Ubuntu may be ok as a desktop distribution, but certainly not much else – don’t be fooled by the facade!
I am unimpressed by software that is infrequently released – a model pursued by most commercial software, including an unmentionable OS, Apple’s MacOSX, and Suse. This model is both antiquated and makes maintenance excruciatingly painful. Who really cares about major versions except marketers?
Conclusion: if you want a maintainable system with a comprehensive, up-to-date software selection stick to Debian, Gentoo or FreeBSD.
Who really cares about major versions except marketers?
Application developers and support departments, for a start. Neither are helped by having to work to a constantly moving target.
You might not believe it, must-have-the-hottest-latest-version crowd is a rather small if noisy minority.
I am unimpressed by software that is infrequently released – a model pursued by most commercial software, including an unmentionable OS, Apple’s MacOSX, and Suse. This model is both antiquated and makes maintenance excruciatingly painful. Who really cares about major versions except marketers?
If you’ve used Mac OS X, you’ll know that this model doesn’t make it hard to maintain. Due to the way applications are packaged (in bundles) with all the dependencies handled, you don’t have problems upgrading. It’s actually a drag and drop install/uninstall process, which is very easy for the casual users.
For the Unix stuff, you have a choice of Fink (a port of Debian’s apt), Darwinports and Gentoo’s portage. OS X is one of the few OSes out there that are easy to maintain.
I have a dual boot linux/MacOS X system at the moment, but hardly spend any time in MacOS X (except when I want to use the Airport, which currently has no linux ppc drivers), as I care very little for most of what MacOS X has to offer (it may be fantastic for others, but I care more about nuts-and-bolts than aesthetics).
I find MacOS X to be just as bad a maintainence problem as Windows. A lot of my software (installed from fink and darwinports) broke during the upgrade to Tiger. Portage on ppc was unfortunately not very mature the last time I looked (earlier this year).
If MacOS X officially sanctioned either or both fink and DarwinPorts and ensured that software in these systems didn’t break during upgrades, I might consider revising my position on this issue.
That being said, a very large portion of software that may be worth installing on a mac is commercial, and not available in a standard repository – there is no way of executing “upgrade all my commerical software” for free!
Every time I come back and try some commercial software, I am inevitably dissappointed – please show me something which doesn’t have a free comparable or better than comparable offering.
I’m sticking with software built by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, thank you very much!
I find MacOS X to be just as bad a maintainence problem as Windows. A lot of my software (installed from fink and darwinports) broke during the upgrade to Tiger. Portage on ppc was unfortunately not very mature the last time I looked (earlier this year).
A lot of the breakage in Darwinports and fink had to do with the change in compilers. GCC 4 changed the ABI, hence you can’t use libraries compiled for GCC 3.3, and the new version of GCC also broke some packages, who knows why. The simplest way to have solved the problem was to install the developer tools and the extra GCC 3.3 compiler, and made the GCC 3.3 compiler default. That was how I got by until fink updated itself.
Don’t blame Apple for everything. Commercial software is always going to be a pain to update, unless all companies agree to some central repository where all users can download updates (ah… the dream…
Every time I come back and try some commercial software, I am inevitably dissappointed – please show me something which doesn’t have a free comparable or better than comparable offering.
Matlab. There is nothing comparable that is free. Octave just doesn’t cut it and is usually about 100x slower in a lot of the code that I run (mainly due to loops). Not everything can be vectorized and even if they were, Octave still doesn’t run as well as Matlab. OpenOffice is still a joke when it comes to presentation tools. It doesn’t compare with either Keynote or Powerpoint.
Open sourced software is great, but it isn’t the be all end all.
I’d tend to agree with your sentiments about Matlab, et. al., though I’ve been finding software such as various combinations of Scipy, Scilab, Axiom, etc., can generally fill the gaps.
As far as office apps are concerned, I prefer WYSIWYM, and I loathe screen presentation tools, for alternatives see, for instance: http://www.miwie.org/presentations/presentations.html
— “I was feeling quite optimistic about Ubuntu (even though I’m repulsed by a distribution named after an ideology – anyone for Communism, or Autocracy?) until I needed to install packages not available in any of the Ubuntu repositories. In the end I reverted to Debian unstable, which has a much more comprehensive software listing (at least for the software that I was interested in).”
One of the first things I did when I installed Ubuntu is add the Debian unstable repositories. No need to revert to anything, as every Debian package Ive tried has worked seemlessly on Ubuntu. The only reason for seperate Ubuntu repository is to limit their scope of support, not because you can only install those packages!
well said.
if you do try unstable, you should have the sense to realise you will need to find support from forums and not the official routes
until I needed to install packages not available in any of the Ubuntu repositories. In the end I reverted to Debian unstable, which has a much more comprehensive software listing (at least for the software that I was interested in).
Ubuntu universe is debian sid, and at most it is 6 months old. If there is something in debian, you can get it from the ubuntu servers. And besides, even if you add a debian repository, that’s hardly going abroad, Ubuntu is 90% debian anyway.
(even though I’m repulsed by a distribution named after an ideology – anyone for Communism, or Autocracy?)
It’s an ideology in the sense that “friendship” or “happiness” is an ideology I guess…
Conclusion: if you want a maintainable system with a comprehensive, up-to-date software selection stick to Debian, Gentoo or FreeBSD.
If you consider Debian sid to be a general use OS, then why not use Ubuntu breezy? It’s more or less a copy of sid, but as it’s not a release version yet, people aren’t encouraged to use it, exactly the same as with sid.
Ubuntu may be ok as a desktop distribution, but certainly not much else
Well, Ubuntu is a desktop distribution, so there we go.
Suse is one of those distros that does a ton of things the right way.
As a gnome user I have always been a bit put off by the QT/KDE focus of the distro but the polish has been there for awhile. From the graphical install to the grub splash and before that lilo graphics to the boot splash using the framebuffer back to the level of detail in the desktop and the integration of the Yast2 tools into the KDE control center. There is a lot of spit and polish to this distro especially as a desktop.
You would think considering the level of Enterprise level tools for OpenLDAP, lvm and other configuration setups I would also say its a good server distro but alas there are two problems. Everyone in the world outside of Suse still seem to be very Redhat focused in their support. Talking to an Oracle linux rep about Suse (one of their partners) about an install issue with Suse was maddening. But that is not the really horrid part ….
The really nasty part is that the Yast2 has a configurator backend that runs everytime you save something from Yast2 and it routinely hosed my manual settings.
Though I prefer a more gnome-focused distro and the placement of different apps in /opt is frustrated I found KDE to be a great workstation install for our Unix programmers at my last place of work. With just the slightest touches on install and explanation these guys moved from Windows/Exceed over to Suse in a heartbeat. Good stuff.
However, as a server distro I found myself frustrated more than a few times by its insistence that it knew what was best for my system better than I did.
kat is similar to beagle….
why use beagle when kat is a kde application?
Why did Novell buy Ximian only to do fsck all with Gnome? Did they just want Evolution Connector or whatever the Exchange client is called?
I’ve hated KDE since the 3.0 days when it started to look more childish than Fisher Price WinXP.
And yes, YAST is crap (as a software updater and control panel), nowhere near apt or yum.
I agree with you that YAST is crap and a monster, but then apt and yum are NOT configuration tools. A desktop distro need some kind of control panel to perform basic system administraion and maintainance.
Why did Novell buy Ximian only to do fsck all with Gnome? Did they just want Evolution Connector or whatever the Exchange client is called?
Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. Novell have never been a particularly strong-willed company. That’s probably why some Gnome people have left, some KDE people have left and some executives have left.
They seem to still be committed to KDE in their core products, but really they’re just not thinking enough about integration and new ideas and how things will fit together. Hopefully, OpenSuse will make them do that. Look at what Red Hat is doing with Gnome, Java, Eclipse, Red Hat Directory Services etc. They have a clear idea about the direction they’re heading in and what they want to test and allow the Fedora community to go out and use. Red Hat can do that without any problems because they’re an all open source company – they have no proprietary software to try and vainly protect.
Novell still seem to be hanging on to their old proprietary software in vain. They’ve realised that Netware wasn’t, and isn’t, going anywhere and moved to a Linux environment, but they haven’t gone far enough. Software like Groupwise, NDS, Zenworks etc. is simply winding down in many companies. They need to re-invigorate those pieces of software, get people using them and get people interested again. Even their new Open Enterprise Server is a hotch-potch of Linux and Netware when what they should have done was just ported everything to Linux, open sourced it and got everyone using it.
And yes, YAST is crap (as a software updater and control panel), nowhere near apt or yum.
YaST is the best configuration tools there is on just about any distribution. I don’t know why you’re comparing it to apt or yum because they are simply not the same things.
Quickie question about Suse 9.3 I want to ask, as I’m going to be installing it.
Is it possible to get the small network CD, boot off it and do a network install over wireless? It’s something I’m sure a lot of people would like to do, but no matter what I do there are no wireless drivers installed initially and there are no means for setting up a wireless connection like you can with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Can it be done, and does Novell/Suse have plans to do it?!
I am unimpressed by software that is infrequently released – a model pursued by most commercial software, including an unmentionable OS, Apple’s MacOSX, and Suse. This model is both antiquated and makes maintenance excruciatingly painful. Who really cares about major versions except marketers?
This is how most commercial distributions with nothing to offer make their money. By providing a system that breaks when upgraded, companies can force their users to pay for upgrades every six months. I prefer the BSD (and Gentoo, I suppose, although I have never used it) distribution method, where there is a fine distinction between the operating system and the userland changes. Here, an increase in the OS version number means something more than “we’ve upgraded all of your software to the latest stable versions.” One can upgrade their desktop software without interfering with the operating system, or conversely, upgrade the operating system without breaking the desktop.
why use beagle when kat is a kde application?
I’d guess at the point in time when Suse started to finalize the 9.3 release Kat was not close to anything usable, if it was started at all. Beagle on the other had had been in development for a long time, and had a lot of hype going for it. Was it a good or bad move from Suse, I’m not sure. I’d guess it both helped and harmed Beagel. Gave it more exposure, but also a reputation for being not too stable(deserved or not, doesn’t matter).
But now you see Kat catching up, and it look like Mandriva are going to use it on their next desktop release.
It sounds like you don’t realize that Ubuntu’s “Universe” repository has every package in debian, compiled against the versions of software in Ubuntu.
If you really need to pull software from debian Unstable, your best bet is to add the deb-src sources, and “apt-get source” the package you need. then rebuild it. Otherwise, you’re liable to pull in new glibc packages, and untold bizarre breakages.
-Mark
I had SuSE installed, it is starting to show its bloat.. slow.. and a lot of things I do not want. Desktop yes, you could use it, no on a laptop. Stick with ubuntu..
Paul
Funny… Suse installs and runs fine on my laptop.. Ubuntu wouldnt get past the boot loader on the CD.
To each their own
Or whatever the fates will let you have.
In the review the guy mentioned Sun Java 1.4.2 but forgot to mention that Suse 9.3 ships with 1.5 as well.
Previous versions of SuSE ALWAYS trashed my MBR if I installed the bootloader to it. Is this still an issue with 9.3? I believe the last time I tried SuSE was when 9 or 9.1 was released. I never encountered that problem with other distros (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Mepis, Red Hat, Slackware, and Libranet).
And as many have noted, once you start upgrading packages, SuSE has a tendency to become unstable, but that was using past versions (7 and 8). I would be curious to see how well SuSE handles upgrades when 10 is released.
“I never encountered that problem with other distros (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Mepis, Red Hat, Slackware, and Libranet).”
But other’s have, it’s all in their bug tracking systems.
“But other’s have, it’s all in their bug tracking systems.”
That’s true, but I find it odd that it always happens to me with SuSE. I realize that there’s a possibility of it happening using any distro, but it just seems a little odd for it to always occur with SuSE. I guess it wouldn’t matter much if I planned to use only SuSE.
Never had that problem with 9.1 or 9.2. I always have problems with updates breaking things. After a fresh install and adding all the recommended updates, there is only a 50 50 chance that my box will boot.
I am really looking for something to switch to, not an endlessly configurable hobbyist distro, but an out of the box workstation/desktop solution.
Aah, If only life were that simple. Mixing Debian Unstable and Ubuntu leads to dependency hell as soon as something marginally unusual needs to be installed. This is precisely why I landed up “accidentally” reverting to Debian Unstable. I have no regrets about the reversion though.
Good luck to anyone trying to get both Ubuntu and Debian Unstable repositories working on the same machine…
I’m new to Ubuntu after I was fed up with Suse …
and Ubuntu is way more linux than suse.
Suse is the right system for a windows user who
does not care for his system.
So I can say exactly the oposite of the review 😉
“Who really cares about major versions except marketers?”
That’s gotta be the dumbest question in the world. A lot of people care about major version numbers. Ever heard the term, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? A whole lot of people like the way their servers work and don’t want to touch them unless they are broke. The only time a server is broke is when it crashes or when it has a security hole in it. But go ahead and run apt-get on 1000’s of servers every day, and download hundreds of useless enhancements. I’m quite sure the administrative overhead of doing so is so completely worth getting the latest version of GCC on your system.
BTW, I also think Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora are POS. And it’s exactly because they keep changing everything in it. If you want a real distribution, buy RHEL or get a clone of RHEL like CentOS. These are the only real distributions.
That’s got to be the dumbest answer in the world! Ever heard of a rhetorical question (let me help you out – this is one too)?
There’s a wonderful bit of software called NFS – it allows you to share directories so that only a single machine runs apt-get and all the rest remain up-to-date (when you want).
I’d love to see RHELL or RHELL clones supporting non-standard hardware and software (that’ll be the day).
Its funny but one of the longest-lived, and arguably well-trusted and stable OSes – FreeBSD, developed ways and means to keep up-to-date precisely the way that has been imitated (and extended) by the likes of Debian and Gentoo.
“BTW, I also think Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora are POS. And it’s exactly because they keep changing everything in it. If you want a real distribution, buy RHEL or get a clone of RHEL like CentOS. These are the only real distributions.”
New to Linux are we? Try using it since it’s early days, and you’ll realize there’s no such thing as a “real” distribution. Every one at one time or another has had issues.
Suse 9.3 is great. I’ve read in the comments on here of several bashing it (mostly the gnome trolls), but I haven’t had any problems with it. I’ve only tried 4 distros so far (Mandriva, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Suse), and Suse by far has worked better for me. Fedora seemed to be really unstable, and Ubuntu was pretty much a joke with it’s hardware detection. I had a couple of problems with Mandriva with hardware, and tried Suse 9.3 a month ago. I havent’ had any problems with it. I added the Pacman repo to it, and got my DVD support right away. I’ve never run into any problems with the updates, and with the exception of my TV card (Avermedia PCI 550), all of my hardware worked perfectly out of the box. Suse is a great distro!
Yast is great!
Actually SUSE *does* have APT, the best one among the RPM distros, IMO. Tons of packages available.
SuSE is a good polished distro.I use both SuSE and gentoo.All media simply run faster and can have more functionallity when compiled from source.There’s no pacman package that can equal compiled from source one with the proper flags and so on.Nonetheless SuSE 9.3 is recommended.
sogo stole google!
havre it loaded on two laptops and a shuttle SN25P
that SUSE 9.3 is a better product than this worthless resource kit.
They went from a useful product to junk in one release.
****
Good job, NO applications worth two cents, but
hey they got tons of garbage no one uses or
would use because of segv faults all over the
place. I have to say, at least in Windows an
application has functionality, but this is
JUNK plain and simple.
Oh well, SAME HYPE, same stuff, this site is junk
the source code is from Kmart is it is lucky.
Linux = Lame Idiots Numbnuts Using X-windows
Fags are jacking each other off, reading about
a new screensaver, spreading disease and wanting
more free Gov handouts.
Joke of a site, it is really creative copying
and pasting links on a piece of junk website
where the article is 5 days old. Not only that
the IT field is dead, taken over by CHEAP
labor and SAND Idiots from India. Nothing
like having someone wipe their butt with
their right hand, it is really nice.
DEPORT ALL ILLEGALS, SEND SAND IDIOTS BACK
TO INDIA, BOYCOTT ALL CHINA JUNK. SEAL THE
USA OFF AND MAKE OUT OWN GOODS/SERVICES.
GLOBAL GULAG FROM HELL IS NOW UPON US!!!
Now go back to reading old junk, on a piece
of junk website, that caters to sand people
and environment nutcases and liberals.
good day
When you install an application, Yast automatically installs any packages the applications depends on, which is very nice.
Trouble is, it doesn’t automatically remove them when you later remove the application.
Say you’ve got a KDE-only install and now you want to try some Gnome application, which will bring in all the Gnome libraries. Turns out you don’t like the app, so you remove it, yet all those libraries will stay installed. That not only clogs up the hard drive but also slows down yast whenever it goes through its configuration files.
I think the package manager should distinguish between packages that you explicitly asked for and packages that were automatically installed as dependencies and automatically remove the latter when no longer needed. Do any distros do that?
I think the package manager should distinguish between packages that you explicitly asked for and packages that were automatically installed as dependencies and automatically remove the latter when no longer needed. Do any distros do that?
Like Infinite Disk?
It was a utility which would track every file access and any unused files would be offloaded to removeable media. If you ever needed the file again it would pause the system ask you to insert the disk to copy it back onto your hard drive. In this case most of the files would be on the original install media so there’d be no need to copy them anywhere.
That would be great for anybody in these days where most commercial distros load you up with three sinks in the kitchen, two utility sinks in the basement, and four closets full of buckets. (Not to mention every possible variation of commode.)
Like Infinite Disk?
That doesn’t sound really like what I had in mind.
“I think the package manager should distinguish between packages that you explicitly asked for and packages that were automatically installed as dependencies and automatically remove the latter when no longer needed. Do any distros do that?”
Well, Debian has deborphan, but it only lists unnecessary packages. Aptitude does almost exactly what you are wondering about.
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/134
Sounds like deborphan can’t actually tell the difference between manually and automatically installed packages so it will list packages that you do in fact still require as well. How does it identify the orphan’s anyway?
Does aptitude work differently?
“Sounds like deborphan can’t actually tell the difference between manually and automatically installed packages so it will list packages that you do in fact still require as well. How does it identify the orphan’s anyway?”
Well, deborphan finds the orphaned dependencies.
From “man deborphan”
“DESCRIPTION
deborphan finds packages that have no packages depending on them. The
default operation is to search only within the libs and oldlibs sec-
tions to hunt down unused libraries.”
Aptitude is an extremely complex package manager. An “aptitude dist-upgrade” calculates all the dependencies better than apt, removes orphaned dependencies but also tries to reinstall apps which were originally in the system but you removed.
By the way, that was me. I was in another system and I forgot to login.
deborphan finds packages that have no packages depending on them. The default operation is to search only within the libs and oldlibs sections to hunt down unused libraries
Fair enough, but that simple approach has its disadvantages.
On the one hand it will identify a library as unused that you explicitly installed, say because you’re writing a program or you’re compiling a source tarball that depends on the library.
On the other hand e.g. it wouldn’t identify the rather chunky ‘tetex’ as an orphan after simply giving ‘lyx’ a spin, because tetex is not a library.
Aptitude is an extremely complex package manager. An “aptitude dist-upgrade” calculates all the dependencies better than apt, removes orphaned dependencies
So does aptitude remember whether a package was installed by user request or to satisfy a dependency?
Found the answer to my last question:
http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-doc/en/ch02s02s05.html
In fact yast has those “automatically installed” packages too and handles them similarly to aptitude.
But unfortunately it forgets about them once you click the “Finish” button and actually install the packages. So next time you start yast they’re treated the same way as manually selected packages, and thus they aren’t removed automatically when no longer needed.
Would be nice if Novell could fix that.
“Not to mention their Nvidia installer script, which made my system unstable and somehow screwed up X windows, while still not managing to fully install the driver. (I did it by hand afterwards). Then, once it was running, sax2 wouldn’t enable 3D accel (did this one by hand too).”
If you follow the HOWTO ( ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/nvidia-in… ), you’ll see you don’t *have* to manually enable it:
“NOTE: There is no need to try to enable 3D support. It’s already
enabled, when the nvidia driver is running.
“
SuSE is excellent. Period. For example, compared to the unintuitiveness of Redhat, SuSE shows its European roots by its user-friendliness and hardware support. I hope they keep it, now that they have been 0wned.
Remember that the happy state of SuSE Linux today is the result of independent development and adoption of different packages, even seemingly redundant.
I have installed SuSE 9.2 in my wireless laptop with no problems. Everything is supported out of the box. SuSE 9.3 can only be better.
Pay no attention to the whiners. Probably they spend all their time installing and uninstalling stuff, and then complaining about useless details.
For example, compared to the unintuitiveness of Redhat, SuSE shows its European roots by its user-friendliness and hardware support.
Replace “European” with “German” and you sound like a Nazi.
Pay no attention to the whiners.
Are you so insecure that you can’t stand any criticism of your favourite Linux distribution?
(And yes: Suse is a great distro. It still ain’t perfect.)
“Replace “European” with “German” and you sound like a Nazi.”
Sorry. The previous poster was wrong with his “European roots”, but I don’t agree with associating the word Nazi with Germans either. I have lived in many, many places, but if I could choose freely (no family, no money issues) I’d choose Germany as my fav place where to live: great country, great people: extremely friendly, helpful, honest…
Sorry. The previous poster was wrong with his “European roots”,
Yes, my comment was out of order.
But I’m glad you agree on the “European roots”. Even though Europe isn’t a nation (yet), that was nationalistic nonsense.
but I don’t agree with associating the word Nazi with Germans either.
The word Nazi is very much associated with Germany anyway. And I don’t see how my comment said anything negative about non-Nazi Germans.
“The word Nazi is very much associated with Germany anyway”
It shouldn’t. I am Italian and I object to the word fascist being associated with Italy. 60 years, isn’t it time to forget?
I am Italian and I object to the word fascist being associated with Italy.
Associations can go two ways. I think it’s wrong to make the automatic link from “Germany” to “Nazism”, but it’s perfectly appropriate to make the link from “Nazism” to “Germany”, because that’s where it happened and because supposed Germanic superiority was a crucial part of the ideology.
60 years, isn’t it time to forget?
You mean pretend it all didn’t happen?
“You mean pretend it all didn’t happen?”
Time is important. I mean, how many people do hate modern Romans because of the atrocities committed by the ancient Empire?
Every Italian or German who is 60 or younger was born after the war ended.
But even more important very few countries, if any, or rather their governments, have never done anything wrong.
SuSE’s patches have benn both a boon and a nightmare at various times in its history. Around version 5 or 6 (I forget which) nobody could support as wide a variey of hardware as SuSE could (and I bought my first copy because of it) because they expended a huge amount of effort incorporating various patches into the Kernel, and more importantly getting all those patches to play nicely together.
They could support my USB Zip drive out of the box!!
However, in more recent history, they incorporated non-release versions of an ACL-over-NFS patch which caused our Solaris file-server to reliably crash whenever anyone tried to copy a Linux-local file to the NFS server. This was perhaps partially Sun’s fault, but only because their NFS Server implementation trusted the client to not spit garbage at it, and it would trigger a Kernel null-pointer bug.
Sun’s fix, by the way, basically involved completely ignoring ACL-over-NFS info. when it came from [SuSE] Linux.
I personally think this was more SuSE’s fault, as they enabled ACL’s by default — when all the info. I could find on ACL’s suggested it was still beta on local file-systems, let alone over NFS — instead of providing an ACL-patched Kernel as an option!
So anyway, I think they had a great plan in the beginning of supporting a widest amount of h/w possible, but they get too over-zealous sometimes and usually break things in wierd ways.
I’ve used it quite a lot over the last few jobs, and I’d say the golden rule is to avoid the .0 releases: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0… The ones after that seem to be a great deal more reliable.
SuSE 9.3 crashes very, very often. I’ve never seen a linux distribution crash as badly as this one.
“SuSE 9.3 crashes very, very often. I’ve never seen a linux distribution crash as badly as this one.”
On how many boxes have you tried it? Please keep in mind hardware compatibility when saying something like that.
I have tried it on several boxes and found it one of the most stable.
SuSE (9.3) is a very polished and feature rich distro.The perfect distro (OS) simply doesn’t exist.Here you win some and there you loose some.I run both (hardened)Gentoo and SuSE.Personnally SuSE 9.3 on the desktop comes closest to the most feature rich and stable desktop.Whereas hardened-gentoo makes a better and a more secure (proxy,irc,ssh..)server.
Been surfing around and found this rather thorough review. Hope this will help someone. 🙂
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=9846/ur0507n/ur0507n.html