SuSE released the “live” bootable CD of SuSE Linux 8.2 for everyone to try out this new version of the OS. More details here.
SuSE 8.2 Live Evaluation Now Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Where can the 8.2 live CD iso be found – seems like the mirrors only have 8.1
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-8.2/SuSE-8.2-LiveEval-i…
>> Essentially, the error said I better make a rescue disk because something about my /boot partition might not be compatible with my system type. At this point i have no idea if Red Hat just nuked my drive or what since everything else looks fine.
This is to do with the old 1024 cylinder thing, which hasn’t been a problem for years. I don’t think the partioning screen is really the best place to give people unnecessarily scary warning messages (I am sure Red Hat could phrased it in a more friendly manner).
Where can the 8.2 live CD iso be found – seems like the mirrors only have 8.1
There is a fast mirror at ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/suse/suse/i386/live-eval-8.2/ but wait until I’m finished downloading please.
I tried Suse 8.1 and Knoppix 3.1 and 3.2. I like Knoppix much more since it boots faster and it boots into a useful system right away without asking me any question.
All the Linux distros have to do is unite and make a standard installer but they can’t . Pure idiocy.
All the Linux distros have to do is unite and make a standard installer but they can’t . Pure idiocy.
If you mean that all linux installers should look, work, and be exactly the same. That won’t work since each vendor adds a little something here and subtracts a little something there.
If you mean that there should be a standard installer interface (such as Installsheild where the interface is common, but the options are not), that has been tried. For example, Caldera’s (excuse me SCO’s) LIZARD is used to install SCO, Lycoris, and possibly others (though I heard Lycoris was going to switch if they haven’t already).
It isn’t idiocy, it is bringing what each company feels is best of breed to their customers.
Before I go, it never fails to amaze me that 90% of new Linux users focus on the beauty of the installer and not on the installed product. The worth of an entire distro is judged almost soley on the prettiness of the installer. Doesn’t anybody actually use the system once they set it up?
As one sided as it sounds, I do think a unified install interface would be a good thing. It could be flexible, standardizing CLI, GUI, net installs, partitioning in CLI or GUI… etc etc. Source distros could even use it, given enough flexibility. It’s stuff like this that UNIX is all about- flexible, workable tools. Of course, I doubt if there’d ever be anyone interested in actually doing it. Benefeits are too low, flamebait’s too high (even though you’ve gotta be a jackass to say anyone’s wasting their time, unless they’re writing a brand new text editor from scratch), and there are more interesting things to do.
Such an idea might compliment autopkg well…
I have become an anti-Suse evangelist. I will never, ever go near it again after it fucked with my BSD disklabels. Why would it do such a thing? I don’t know. But it’s Bad! Bad Bad!
Eugenia’s link is so tortoise; downloads at about 15kbps. Iconoclast’s is super fast; about 200kbps.
Eugenia, do you know when net-install will be available?
What was wrong with the moderated down comment?
“suse vs red hat
By grimlock3000 (IP: —.bath-me.clinic.net) – Posted on 2003-04-15 17:01:12”
I thought this was intended to be a place to comment about the posts. Perhaps the guy doesn´t make brilliant statements, but again, this is just a forum and not a journalism novel prize contest.
I’m sorry but I just cannot get it. 🙁
Lets have someone bit torrent this baby.
I don’t know, I’ve never been very fond of Suse, it just rubs me the wrong way for some reason. The live cd was actually my first experience with linux, but I didn’t do a whole lot with it. I don’t know if it’s been improved at all, but their Gnome sucks, I think its even worse than Redhat’s KDE. I mainly use gnome so it’s kind of important to me.
Also, if you’re going to use an RPM distor, at least use redhat, becuase you will actually find rpms for redhat, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of rpms for suse. Finally, YAST just seems very intrusive. I mean you have to pretty much do anything you want to do through yast, if you want a control panel to do things…use windows XP, I hear they have a very nice one.
Thankgod I finally setteled on a REAL distro. I had tried redhat 9 just recently, but I really didn’t like it, it was pretty slow I thought, and there were lots stupid things like /sbin not being in path. Also real player hard crashed the machine twice in a row, had to completely reboot. I finally went back to Debian and for good this time. I’ve got the great backports of Gnome 2.2 installed and I’m extremely happy. I finally worked out all those small problems that were keeping me from sticking with it. I’d advice anyone that’s looking for a distro to give debian a try. I’ve been messing with it for a while now, it does take some time to learn, but I finally think I can say it’s worth it.
Oh yeah and for a live cd use KNOPPIX (based on debian), it’s AMAZING.
Initially I thought grimlock3000’s comment was posted in another article; searched the last 15 articles with negative result. I thought there was nothing wrong with grimlock3000’s comment; a bit long, but nothing that warrants erasure.
“use redhat, becuase you will actually find rpms for redhat”
There are zillions of Suse RPMs at http://www.rpmseek.com
I like Knoppix much more since it boots faster and it boots into a useful system right away without asking me any question.
I hardly think that a distro which boots with read-only permissions on the hard drive to be usable. Plus, since it needs to be in the CD drive in order to run, I can’t play DVDs with it. Of course, you can always install it, but doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose? Knoppix I think is good when you need to get Linux up and running quickly or if you want to take Linux for a ‘test drive’ (even though you’ll only get half the picture, since it doesn’t come with Gnome), but’s not a distro I’d want to use full-time.
Before I go, it never fails to amaze me that 90% of new Linux users focus on the beauty of the installer and not on the installed product.
I don’t mean this to be as big of a troll as it sounds, but I think the installers on some distros are actually prettier than the distros themselves
Hell, in the case of Redhat / Xandros / Lindows / etc, if the installed system worked as smoothly as the installers do, everyone would probably be using Linux by now.
The problem isn’t with different linux distro’s installation.. the problem is with SOFTWARE installation once you are in your favorite desktop environment. Installing Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9 and Lycoris doesn’t have to be the same or on some kind of ‘standard’ but if I download a program I want to be able to install and uninstall it as easily as in windows. I don’t want to have to go download APT or track down a million dependancies.
“use redhat, becuase you will actually find rpms for redhat”
There are zillions of Suse RPMs at http://www.rpmseek.com
Could anyone briefly compare/contrast the different RPM archive sites (rpmseek, rpmfind, freshrpms, etc) and why you would want to use one or the other?
Also, in the case of the sites that carry RPMs, what do you do in the case where there are no RPMs for your distro/version? For example, consider the following:
http://rpmseek.com/rpm-pl/xine.html?hl=com&cx=0::
I see no RPMs here for Xine on SuSe 8.x. Of course, you could head over to freshrpms, but those are for Redhat?
>>There are zillions of Suse RPMs at http://www.rpmseek.com
No i’m sorry that doesn’t compete with freshrpms.net. He’s done some amazing work, as freshrpms.net, along with apt is the only reason I ever used redhat. Also, another nice thing is you can get mozilla rpms actually from the mozilla site, instead of just getting one from joe smoe somewhere on the net. That goes for most things. There are a lot of packages that do have suse specific rpms, but not as many as Redhat. So i guess what i’m saying redhat is the best of the worst, the worst being rpms.
>>I hardly think that a distro which boots with read-only permissions on the hard drive to be usable.
First off I’m pretty sure that knoppix only mounts vfat and ntfs drives readonly, and secondly, that is very easy to fix. Type ‘sudo passwd root’, that will create a password for root. Then just su to root unmount the drives and remount them any way you like. And for dvd’s you mean u can’t throw another cd drive in your computer and boot off that. Don’t you have a cd burner or something?
Personally I dislike suse with passion. My college (HSU in N. California) uses suse in a couple of labs (CS & Engineering), and I find that it cramps my style… /media bothers me soooo much… and Yast is clunky imnsho
BUT, The sysadmin for those labs loves it, and I can’t fault him for having different preferences.
On that Note, I will say Iconoclast did a good job of replying to the (trollish) remarks of eric. I would just like to add that a distro designed for a PPC will be different than one for x86 for arch. reasons, one for servers will be different than one for desktops for security and functionality reasons.
This is the opensource world, companies must have different products in order to be relavent. But I don’t see why KDE can’t be in the same place though… /opt or /usr/*
What I think eric probably meant was along the lines of “why can’t they be consistant?” Because consistancy doesn’t rule out differences or compatibility.
RPM is kind of a joke to me. One package format, many different (and usually incompatible) implementations… e.g. Suse vs. Red Hat vs. Mandrake RPMs… Just doesn’t sit well for me (I use Slackware 9, and tgz works pretty well
)
finally….w00t!
Ok, finished burning the iso and evaluating the Live Evaluation. One thing you notice: Yast is remarkably fast; it let’s you configure (although it correctly autoconfigures) your eth0, sound, screen resolution, printers and etc, and it does it very fast. This new Suse version has a greenish “Suse Update Checker” (a la Red Hat Network) on panel. Mozilla 1.2.1 (also Konqueror) has already plugins installed (Java Blackdown-1.4.1-01, Shockwave Flash). It let’s you create passwd for root and a user. It’s also very polished; great icons, Keramic theme and clear Start menu.
I loaded it up on my compaq 6000 and came to login screen with out a login?
nothing in readme
anyone else have this problem?
Compaqs are finicky, use another more generic machine.
Here is another one if you cannot find your SuSE rpm on http://www.rpmseek.com
http://rpm.pbone.net/
use advanced search
I also use apt-get for grabing SuSE rpms and fou4s for automatic online updates.
Have a lot of fun 🙂
and it was OK, but there were a lot of things that kinda bugged me. namely the way it mounts cd devices in /media and and other drives in /windows etc, etc. I set it up the way I like but it didn’t seem to like it……that’s with all drives mounting in /mnt. It really didn’t like my dvd drive and just overall made me angry. Yast was OK I guess, but it certainly wasn’t the be all and end all.
here’s my impressions in more detail
http://www.lycoris.org/viewtopic.php?topic=7658&forum=33
perhaps it just takes some more getting used to…i dunno….
I realize my post was a bit long but I do not think it was innapropriate. In almost every thread, people are comparing X product to Y product. In many Linux threads, someone goes off on how good Gentoo is compared to everything else. I have never seen those moderated down. I wrote up my experience with Red Hat in relation to Suse 8.2 to give people an idea on the differences i went through. I put a decent ammount of effort into writing up my post and was not exactly happy to see it taken down, especially since it is the first post i ever made on OSNews.com. Next time I will post up some really useful info like, “Suse sucks and would not run my SVCD, go with a source distro, Gentoo 0wNz!” =/
Here’s the bottom line. Although these are from SuSE 8.1, it would be nice if anyone could comment on some of these items. Al in all I kinda liked it, but it didn’t really give me any overwhelming reason to keep it installed, or purchase it. I’ll try an ftp install 8.2 when I can, and if it corrects some of my issues I might buy it. I guess that’s why there’s so many distros. no one distro is right for all people….
anyway, here were my peaves…
“1) Yast bites for installing packages from the net. It’s too darn slow, the way it checks dependencies bugs me, and you can’t select multiple files. I downloaded all the rpms for videolan, and I refuse to install them via CLI. Good luck trying to find a GUI way….
2) The way and location that it mounts drives is buggin me too. I have a cdrw and dvd. suse tells me a have a “cdrom”, a “cdrecorder”, and a “dvd”. It mounts them in a folder called /media and it also mounts your other partitions in a folder called /windows. not so bad in itself, but I’ve been screwing with fstab and creating other folders trying to get mount points where I want them. It doesn’t like what I’m doing, but no other distro has ever had issue with it.
3) Changes to the menu don’t actually appear. Go ahead…change it all you want, but the way it’s set up it hides things like crazy while not saying that they’re hidden. The entries in the menu editor don’t seem to have any bearing on realtiy whatsoever.
4) Not suse’s fault, but kde3.1.1 kept crashing apps whenever I tried to print.
5) How the frig do you play a DVD? mplayer is included, but gives me an error any time I try to play a dvd. perhaps it’s set for german dvd region or something….whatever…still a pain.
6) When you try to install apps as regular user that have their own installers such as mozilla, netscape, or openoffice, when you ./ to install it gives you some weird error about display and gtk. it doesn’t do it as when you’re actually logged in as root, not just sudo CLI.
Anyway, to sum it all up, I’m sure that with a lot of tweaking I could make it work the way I want it to, but there really isn’t anything all that special about it that would warrant such effort. There are some odd permission issues, not enough stuff preconfigured like browser plugins, and it just takes too much effort to make it run anywhere even close as well as Lycoris. It’s faster, sure. It prints, yep. It’s got KDE3…whoopideedoo….
Now that I have tried all the mainstream distros, except linows and xandros, I can honestly say that Lycoris, issues and all, is still head over heels above the competition.
The only other distro that even compares to Lycoris is JAMD…and it’s not a real distro anyway. That guy does some great work with red hat stuff…too bad he doesn’t go for it and create a real distro of his own.
Lycoris still rules. period.”
<rant>
Why is it that people feel the need to reply to articles about Distro X with “Distro X sucks. Distro Y rulez”. Look, if you don’t have anything good to say then don’t say anything at all. aargh!
</rant>
first of all, I at least posted what my issues were…which is more than alot of people do. I gave it a real shot…and I’ll give it another shot.
as for the comment to not say anything at all…..well then how can anyone learn what the differences are or learn how to fix their problems, or even accept them?
note that I also asked for anyone to commetn on the issues. i never bash anything for the sake of bashing it…it’s all a learning experience. i can certainly understand your frustration about people who just post “it sucks”, but that’s not what I did, and was certainly not my intent. I’m a simple home desktop user if you couldn’t tell…and those things ticked me off.
lastly, I most certtainly did not spell “rules” with a “z”.
Is it my imagination, or did SuSE just release a commercial product built around the *pre release* of gcc? … gcc3.3pre?
Must be a misunderstanding on my part. Must be.
Happens all the time.
It is if you want a fast bootable linux and not much else. SuSE with their LIVE evalutation is trying to give you a complete replica of the boxed version except in the form of a free bootable cd. This is why the install is the same and so is YAST. Sure they, can’t possibly include all of their apps on that cd, but you get the idea.
Can’t i just make an ISO from the FTP Folders at suse.com,
and do a bootable CD from it, with all the RPMs, that I WOULD
like?
Or, is there a way to make the “livecd” install to HDD, like
the normal one?
thx
sammy
Hello everyone, I’m posting this comment from SuSE Linux 8.2 Live-Eval CD! It works great, fast and beautifully crafted. Looks more polished than my 8.1 and seems a bit faster too because some setting are saved on harddisk it loads faster next boots 🙂
Fonts are better renderred and accessible from the start. OpenOffice (or is it soffice 😉 works with antialiased fonts but Kword has more fonts (+- 50 fonts half of them ttf) and runs much faster. One font is not properly rendered tho 🙁
Icons are slightly better than 8.1 and bigger is some menus (like in Control Centre it comes with back button -> more polished than my stock KDE 3.1.1 :-).
“Start” menu is much cleaner and icons look sharper (few icons in some sub-menues are missing tho -> just like stock KDE 3.1.1 :-).
Windows decoration is slightly better than 8.1 but windows borders are still rather tight tho (rather difficult to resize using ps2 mouse :-(.
My linux and windows partitions (reiserfs, ext2 and fat32) are automatically mounted and accessible -> this is way much better than Knoppix. I can copy some goodies from this CD setup to my linux. My ntfs partition is not mounted tho 🙁
I did notice only one glitch during the installation of my C80 printer. Althogh it is detected and properly configured. After I turned it on its USB hotplug detect a new hardware but somewhat slow in saving the setups 🙁 Other hardware are detected including scanner. Integrated sound works in stereo, video card, monitor specs, mouse, keyboard, CD writer, DVD, the only thing left unconfigured (seems detected tho) is my webcam 🙁
There are some other goodies, just try it to find out yourself.
Have fun 🙂
I tried the live eval of 8.1. Seemed ok. I figured I’d then try the net install and check it out before spending the cash on the boxed version at the store.
I made a mixed drive of FreeBSD and Suse on my secondary drive. The primary drive was my Win2k drive. I set the Suse/BSD as my boot drive. When it installed, it messed with the boot sector on my Windows drive. No, I have no idea why it did that. NO, I was NOT amused. If anything it should have played with the drive it was on and left the others alone since at that point, the BIOS reported the Suse/BSD drive as primary.
Once it was up and running, I TRIED the Yast update. I clicked on the icon, and waited, and waited, and waited. I left for an hour and came back to, well, nothing. I tried this again after shutting down and doing some other stuff for a couple of hours, same deal. Someone mentioned using other mirrors for it, but I had no idea how to do that. Shouldn’t this tool at the very least download a list of mirrors and then ask me which one I want to use?
So the question is, does 8.2 fix these issues? The Boot sector thing REALLY annoyed me and was quite inexcuseable in my opinion. The fact the the Yast update tool was useless killed it. From what I’ve heard, that’s the basic tool used in just about everything. I may be wrong about that, but it never worked long enough for me to find out.
Needless to say, Suse lasted <1 week on that system. Which is a shame, since the live eval seemed to find just about everything in my system and set it up properly ( some issues with the GF4 card, but that seemed to be Nvidia licensing issues from what the screen message said ).
Actually BSD messed up my disk labels, partitions you name it. It also refused to install on an extended partition.
What did I use to fix it?…actually I used SuSE