posted by J. Scott Edwards on Tue 1st Jul 2003 06:09 UTC
"SuSE Linux 8.2"
It should be noted that I did NOT buy the WalMart PC with SuSE installed
from the factory. There is a PC availabe from WalMart.com with SuSE Linux
pre-installed, but it is more than $199. I bought the $199 PC with
Lycoris pre-installed and I installed
SuSE Linux 8.2 from a box set.
It would have been nicer if the icon for the camera was a camera and/or the icon name was camera or something more obvious than "sda1".
Grip installed and worked fine encoding Ogg Vorbis files, but because the Lame MP3 encoder was not present it could not encode MP3 files. This is due to a legal issue with the proprietary MP3 format and I believe that no one is allowed to distribute executable copies of Lame. I normally build Lame from the source files which can be downloaded from http://lame.sourceforge.net/download/download.html. Although, it isn't terribly difficult, it would be extra work because the default installation does not include developer tools.
I encountered the same problem with playing a DVD with Xine. When I brought it up there was a message on the screen that it may not be able to play all formats due to legal restrictions. This is a major bummer.
And finally I couldn't get it to burn a CD. It thought the burner was reader only and I could not figure out how to change it. Perhaps it would have done better if I had the burner installed during installation. But then people do add burners to their systems afterwards.
One thing I thought was bad about SuSE was the menus, as far as a newcomer to Linux goes, was they were pretty cryptic. Would a newcomer know that he/she needed to select "YaST2" to do system configuration? And having multiple "Control Centers" is confusing to me, none the less to a newbie.
I feel like SuSE Linux is a good system, but for the more expienced user. I'm not sure it would be a good system for a Linux newcomer.
| Version | SuSE Linux 8.2 | |||||
| Installation | Pro-active. The installation gives you a menu of what it's going to do and you have to select the things you want to change. It's easy if you want the default selections, if not you need to know what you want to change. | |||||
| Change Screen Resolution | Yes, then had to log out and back in. Did not have to restart. | |||||
| Word Processing | Yes, OpenOffice was already installed. | |||||
| Mount Data CD | Auto mounted when I clicked on the CD-ROM icon. Could not just eject the disc, but had to right click on CD-ROM and unmount first. | |||||
| Play Audio CD | Yes. | |||||
| Play MP3's | Yes. | |||||
| Play DVD | No, I installed Xine with YaST2 but when I tried to play a DVD it came up with an error message that I didn't have the correct decoder. | |||||
| Play Internet Radio Station | Yes. Automatically brought up XMMS and played. | |||||
| Rip and Encode MP3's | No, I installed Grip with YaST2 and it could rip and encode to Ogg Vorbis format. But since lame was not installed (no doubt due to licensing issues) it could not encode to MP3 format. | |||||
| Burn CD | No, K3B could thought the CD-Writer was a CD-Reader only. | |||||
| Printer | Yes, setup was very simple it found the printer and I clicked on OK. | |||||
| Digital Camera | Yes, a new "disk drive" icon appeared when I plugged in the camera. | |||||
| Scanner | No, I configured the scanner in YaST2 and ran XScanImage and it behaved like it was working. But the output files just had a little tiny square in them. | |||||
| Additonal Software Installation | YaST2, pretty easy. | |||||
| Geek Stuff | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ssh and scp | Yes. | |||||
| vi | Yes. | |||||
| emacs | No. | |||||
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0
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