“All in all, SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS is the best Linux system I’ve used. It’s easy to install and has a large selection of both desktop and server software. It has been extremely stable during my use. It is clearly an excellent choice for Linux beginners, with its fine documentation, easy installation, and comprehensive graphical configuration tools, while also offering software selection and powerful tools for the experienced user.”
This is a good article, much more thorough than the usual “review”. I installed SUSE Linux 10. OSS on my laptop a few weeks ago and my experiences were pretty well the same, though I went for Gnome rather than KDE. This really is a great distro though some clunkiness with YaST lets the side down as the reviewer points out.
That said, I wiped it off a week later. Why? Well first installing all the missing proprietory stuff (java, flash, acroread, etc.) and the missing multimedia stuff to enable playing of mp3s and DVDs was a pita. Second, I found the distro painfully slow on my rather ancient laptop (p3 I gig, 384 mb ram). I tried switching to Xfce instead of Gnome but SUSE’s implementation of it was buggy.
I replaced SUSE 10.0 OSS with Ubuntu 5.10 but wiped that in turn a few days later. Too many bugs for me and the Ubuntu stock colour scheme is depressing to say the least. I finally settled on Debian Testing which a) works well, b) is very, very fast on my old cpu, and c) doesn’t require the faffling around with missing multimedia unlike SUSE.
But if you have a fairly new and fast machine, I guess you could do very well with SUSE 10.0 OSS. It’s always been a top-class distro. I have it now on my destop machine.
On Debian T, what desktop environment did you finally choose?
On Debian T, what desktop environment did you finally choose?
Gnome and Xfce, but I use Xfce with Gnome just as a back-up. Xfce seems to work extremely well and my machine runs quite happily and fast in less than 100 megs of ram. I’ve put the link to os-works in my apt sources so I get their debs. Did recompile the kernel, though, with processor=p3 Coppermine to help speed things up. Haven’t tried KDE which may run great – no idea. Not really much disk room to experiment so I probably won’t install it.
Agreed, its a pretty good article.
However, he is comparing to Mandriva 10.1. He really should be comparing to 2006, which is on the cover disks at the moment. Haven’t yet had the courage to take my Suse users to 10.0, because 9.2 and 9.3 were both fairly flaky in ways that Mandriva has never been (sparing everyone the mournful details!) and am at the moment, having taken one to 9.3, wondering if I dare go to 10.0, or whether it wouldn’t be smarter to just go to Mandriva 2006.
My impression is that, except for urpmi (much better than YaST), 9.3 is about comparable to 10.1, but that 2005 or 2006 are definitely ahead in predictability and stability. Don’t know what others experience has been?
He mentions the issues with printing, but he should mention the even bigger issue with YaST – rpm dependencies. Yes, you really can find yourself staring at it while it refuses to install A because it needs B and B because it needs A…. Apt is the answer, but it should just come with the base install.
Why were you using OpenSUSE in the first place? The OpenSUSE OSS edition is really only for the people that are OSS purists so it makes no sense to install proprietary software on it. If you wanted that stuff, why not just go with the SUSE Linux 10.0 that is also available for free. It comes with acrobat reader, flash, java, and mp3 support built in (well installable anyways). DVD’s still not supported out of the box, but that isn’t too hard to do anyways. Just add the packman repo to Yast and install mplayer.
http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories gives a list of additional repos for SUSE.
http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178/42/ has more information about adding repos if you don’t know how and explains how to get codecs and DVD’s working.
If you want to improve SUSE’s performance try SUPER: http://www.opensuse.org/SUPER and you can even turn a SUSE 10 install in to a SUPER install using the SUPER repo as outlined in the first link.
I don’t know why people don’t like YAST so much, I happen to like it very much, but maybe that is just me. Oh well, to each his own I guess.
PS. While SUSE 10.0 does come with mp3 support from t he helix engine, it is not as good as xine. I would recommend adding the packman repo and using the vanilla xine package from there.
I for one think YAST is awesome. I wish the KDE devs would take alot of it and integrate it… being a QT app and novell GPL’d it.
About SUPER, I don’t have a second machine(or at least hard drive) to mess with it otherwise I would.
But other’s complaints about Suse feeling heavy are not unfounded. I also have seen it on my grandma’s machine.(duron 1ghz, 384mb ram, ati rage 128 pro, WD 80 gb 8mb cache, K7S5A) This machine was very fluid with not only FC2, but mandrake 9 as well.
Though as far as linux’s go, OS10 boots the fastest.
Thanks a lot for those links! I only uninstalled SuSe 10.0 because of the lack of packages, but packman for example seems to have quite a bit of them!
Think I’m gonna install SuSe again today…
I found the distro painfully slow on my rather ancient laptop (p3 I gig, 384 mb ram).
I had SuSE 9.2 on my 800MHz laptop with 128MB, now *that* was slow, although once it was booted into KDE and the necessary apps were loaded it was ok to work with (except OpenOffice).
Extended it to 256MB anyway, and it worked well except for 9.2’s inherent sluggishness.
Installed 10.0, and it provided a significant speedup in terms of bootup time and KDE responsiveness, presumably due to improved startup scripts and gcc-4.0 with its symbol hiding.
I have a AMD XP 1.2,, & 512 ram & it seems fine. I Had Kubuntu 5.10 on the system aa week ago, I didn’t like it. I installed it many times, trying to get a root pass.. put in, it is later that I found out Kubuntu didn’t have root. Ok I am no CLI lover or a traditionel linux user, but this was a bit dumbed down for me. So I give SuSE 3 thumbs up for user-friendlyness, but still complete.
Kubuntu does in fact have a root account, all you have to do is change the password.
“sudo passwd root”
Simple.
I did that and nothing seemed to happen. Oh well I like SuSE more anyway.
After the tons of enthusiasm lately about Suse 10.0 I decided to give it a whirl on my Mac G5. I had a Linux partition on there already which I wanted to overwrite. Everything looked great, until the system actually tried to commit the changes to the disk. It crashed awfully, taking down my OS X partition and all its data with it. I had backups, no problem, but still.. beware of Suse 10.0 on your G5!
The linux tools for repartitioning a Mac drive are buggy at best. What you want to do is boot the Mac install disc and use Apple’s disk management software to partition the drive the way you want ahead of time. I made three partitions on my Mac – one for OSX, one for linux, and one for the swap. Don’t forget the swap partition.
Then boot the linux install disc and tell it you wish to manually setup the partitions. Leave the partitions as the Mac set then – just change the partition types and labels via the edit function. Don’t try to move, resize, or create new partitions – only do that with Apple’s disk management software.
After that, linux will install and run just fine. I’ve had my Mac dual booting between OSX 10.3 and Fedora Core 4 since FC4 was released. I doubt SUSE will have any trouble either as long as follow the advice above.
SuSE 10 retail is miles ahead.It has almost all the propietary stuff included.Like flash,java and such.Furthermore it has a SELinux like system firewall but miles ahead in terms of ease of use.The easier to use the less error prone and that is beneficial for security.
With AppArmor it’s easy to block access to all files which aren’t necessarily needed for most apps to fucntion properly.All manageable via GUI (YAst) or cli.
You would be amazed how much unnecessary rights most default (linux) apps (boxen) have.
SUSE 10.0 Evaluation has also got the proprietary stuff.
I don’t understand why almost everybody downloads SUSE OSS.
SUSE 10.0 Evaluation has also got the proprietary stuff.
Good point! The “Evaluation” version has everything that the OSS has, plus Java, Flash, Acroread and all that stuff.
I don’t understand why almost everybody downloads SUSE OSS.
They might be put off by the name. “Evaluation” sounds like it’s somehow limited, when in fact it’s the same 5 CDs as the boxed version.
They might be put off by the name. “Evaluation” sounds like it’s somehow limited, when in fact it’s the same 5 CDs as the boxed version.
It might also be that even non-purists don’t want proprietary stuff that they don’t need, or want to be in control of what is installed and what is not. At least I wouldn’t want to have Acrobat (I prefer cleaner open source solutions like Evince) or Flash (can be installed per-account if wanted by a few clicks).
It might also be that even non-purists don’t want proprietary stuff that they don’t need,
The previous poster’s complain was about people downloading the OSS version and then complaining about the extra bother with installing the proprietary stuff.
or want to be in control of what is installed and what is not.
Err? With yast you’re just as much in control of what’s installed as with any other decent package manager.
At least I wouldn’t want to have Acrobat
Agree there. kpdf works great for anything but forms.
“They might be put off by the name. “Evaluation” sounds like it’s somehow limited, when in fact it’s the same 5 CDs as the boxed version.”
Exactly. Even if Novell and we SUSE users keep explaining that “Evaluation” doesn’t mean limited in any way.
Is it faster now>?< . Or something like Ubuntu on Valium.
No wiping or waiting here. No offense though it is a Great Distro
I have had good luck with SUSE, however it’s still slow compared to other distributions. Also, as usual, there are lots of “little” things set up differently than the way I like them “out of the box”…but I have to tell you, it is a great distribution. I have it running on everything (version 10.0 now). Laptop, big computer, file server, and daughter’s computer.
I just tested Scientific Linux Fermi 4.1 LTS for a friend who works there and will use that distro and being Red Hat based, it was strange going back, but it is a solid distro for her work at Fermi while there.
But for an all around generic distro, I am sold on SUSE and I always get the retail version.
WOW…things are progressing well….I just hope that Novell doesn’t mess it all up!
Well I installed it on my laptop with 128mb of ram.
The problem was that the installation was telling me that the ram was not enough and was asking me where is a swap partition.
The problem is that I didn’t have a swap partition because I hadn’t linux installed before.
Story Juice:
I had to install an old debian sarge from a cd I had, creating a swap partition, reboot from suse and telling it to *not* create a swap.
The bad thing is that the SuSE installer didn’t allow me to create the swap partition.
That happened after it downloaded the kernel, I did a ftp install.
So SuSE team please gice tools for creating a swap for people as me with 128mb of ram.
on Intel/Centrino laptops 🙁 🙁
It worked fine on Suse 9.3 but it fails on 10.0.
Speak for yourself. Works on my Thinkpad R50e.
You have all of the tools you need. Just create a custom partition and make whatever partions you want. Swapon is automatic. I NEVER, repeat NEVER take “default” partitioning as it is NEVER to my liking. Go to the expert settings and there is a GREAT GUI partitioner that you can use…
Anyway, 128mb is a little thin for today’s “heavy” distro’s…it’s a shame, but true. Even if it DID install well, the swap thrashing would be too much for me to take. Bloat, pure and simple…but there is a price to pay for all of the “features,” no?
Bob you are right ’bout heavy distro.
Yes that’s a price I can pay for a nice desktop as opensuse is.
I’m used to see “swaps” and I’m patient.
My issue, I try to explain better, is.
I booted the CD for a network installation.
It asked me a FTP server.
Another issue, I need to insert the IP address and the exactly directory.
With FreeBSD it shows me a list of ftp servers and I only need to choose one.
The problem was that at home I didn’t have internet access and so I was not able to insert a valid ip, and a valid directory path.
It then loaded the kernel from a FTP server and after that it asked me:
too low memory please tell me a swap partition.
In pratice you have a dialog where you need to write:
/dev/hda1 (for example).
The dialog is a text GUI dialog.
At this point if you didn’t have a previous swap partition created you cannot proceed with the installation.
And the installer at this stage doesn’t give you any tools.
The Expert Settings are later, not at the first stage I’m referring to.
But suppose you had a previous swap, as I did by creating with debian, and you don’t want to accept the default partioning schema, a later stage, there is another issue.
The current swap partion is used by the system because I don’t have enough memory so If I try to create a new schema I cannot tell the installer to delete that swap partition and create a new one, for example with a better size, because deleting that swap partition my system will reset because it is using it.
My shame is not swaps, my shame is that to install it I need more than 128mb of ram.
Sincerely I don’t see why an installer needs that much ram.
As a desktop I’m liking it, even if I have few ram, and I’m happy with it.
Only issue is that Jedit is a bit old, 4.1.
I recently installed SuSE on a laptop and on a desktop computer. The laptop installation was a pain when doing an nfs instal, it wouldn’t connect to my NFS server. I think it was a NFS version conflict but the error was vague so I had to figure that out myself. I finally burned the CD’s and it went well except I had to edit the xorg.conf file manually.
The desktop installation was easy with cd’s. All hardware was recognized and configured correctly. It is not as slow as I expected it to be. Maybe I keep it besides my ArchLinux desktop.
I found it amazingly easy to install and it was able to recognize and configure most of the hardware. It will not become my main Linux distribution but could be a good alternative to Windows to less experienced users who want to install Linux for the first time.
OK, now I understand you issue. Hmmm…interesting…and I agree..
Really .debs are why I tried Kubuntu, but besides the no .deb support SuSE is better.
I installed SuSE 10.0 Evaluation on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop a couple of weeks ago and I’m extremely satisfied with it so far. I tried other distros before, including Debian Sarge and Slackware 10.2 (originally I’m a Slackware fan), but I had problems with the Intel PRO Wireless adapter and ACPI. With SuSE 10.0 everything works like a charm! Wireless was running out of the box, both suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram work flawlessly. Updating to KDE 3.5 using Yast was a snap, it only took me some time to find a working yast-source.
Otherwise the system is very stable, and pretty fast, taking into consideration the amount of software I have installed (I chose the complete install, it was just under 7.2 GB…).
I would suggest this distro to anyone who wants to run linux on their laptop.
All this talk of it running slow with 800Mhz P3/256meg of Ram, my mums Mac G3 700 Tiger 336 meg of Ram runs pretty fast, although to be honest, she’s no “power user”.
Are mainstream Linux distro getting that bloated?
It’s something specific with Suse. Fedora doesn’t feel nearly so heavy. From the other posters I’m gathering that Debian isn’t either.
(guessing)
I’d say it has something to do with YAST being a part of many nooks and crannies in the system.
We’ll see what OS 10.1 brings in the coming months.
Perhaps I got a bad distribution CD / DVD in the boxed set I purchased from Amazon.com because I could not get SuSe 10 to install on either my laptop nor desktop computers. Both these systems are less than a year old, and have more than enough of what it takes to run SuSe. Each time, it would begin to install, than essentially stop with some kind of error message.
I ended up sending it back to Amazon for a refund and went with Mepis !