http://www.osnews.com/story/8699/Review_SuSE_Linux_9_2_LiveCD Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:29:28 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I downloaded all of them, DVD, KDE CD and Gnome CD.
The LiveDVD was a complete fiasco: I got "kernel panic, out of memory" every time I tried (I have 256 MB of RAM and 700 MB swap, not a lot, I know, but Knoppix DVD 2003 works fine on the same box)
The 2 Live CDs did work, but everything was slow as hell.
Now I know that with the actual distro everything will be fine but, having bought every previous release of SuSE Pro, this time around I am not terribly motivated, because 9.1 and 9.2 look like twin brothers.
Besides 9.1 is very stable now, after months of bugfixes and updates. I don't want to start all over again. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Um, with all this talk about 9.2 Professional coming out, is there not going to be a Personal edition for people who don't pay $90 and whom don't need Apache, etc.? Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You were a great distribution. RIP. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree with you. But you can (allegedly) get a version of SUSE Professional at http://www.pctech101.com/suse92.php for $11.99 and free shipping. That's next to nothing. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? They are one of the best KDE distros. I'm disappointed they will be Gnome now

Anyway, I wish they would improve the installation of programs to just copy Xandros/Networks, it's way too complicated as is....meta packages are ALWAYS nicer than 1000s of tiny packages.. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? With the official release being four days away, I just don't see the point of reviewing a LiveCD, which is more or less just for evaluation purposes. I agree that it should probably work better than it did (QC?!), but why not wait and do a review of a complete install of SUSE 9.2 Pro? A review of the LiveCD is pretty much pointless....in my opinion of course. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is there Suse 9.2 LiveCD availabe for AMD64 ??? Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? They aren't going to be Gnome now. They are still very much a KDE distro. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's supposed to be included on the LiveCD DVD. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > you can (allegedly) get a version of SUSE Professional for $11.99

For such prize it must be a pirate copy. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? into splash screens!

If I want to open in Gnome Nautilus _browser_ I must search through many menus instead of clicking at Nautiuls at the main menu.
One big fault.

And many other: no dbus, no hal, poor versions (gqview 1.4.0!, gnome 2.6! announced at the latest gnome!!), only poor quality subfs for memory sticks. Knock knock Suse, we have freedesktop.org!
And this after playing around 30 minutes at work.
Btw, boottimes are horrible, terrible, feels like fly to moon with an old car.
Continues at Desktop: to much daemons by default and Gnome's/KDE's speed in 9.2 really sucks.

bye bye community, business as usual, bye bye suse!

sad, we have only slackware, gentoo, debian and fedora now...

ps: oh, you don't have a DVD-ROM? Than forget to install Thunderbird Mail and a lot of other popular programs, really! Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "For such prize it must be a pirate copy."

Of course it is. Last release season they flooded linuxiso.org with spam. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? But I must say I was rather dissapointed. It didn't detect any sensors on my Travelmate 4501LCi, nor was it able to configure dri properly. ACPI and Speedstep didn't work either.

Of course there are good things about SuSE. It was able to detect my Intel 2200BG (Centrino) WiFi card and receive a dhcp-lease at boottime. And then there's also this very nice looking (but somewhat bloated) desktop. Put together really well imo.

Conclusion: Not sufficient for an out-of-the-box distro. I think a distro like SuSE should be able to detect and setup ALL hardware. I know this might not be the fault of SuSE or Linux, but the fault of the hardware vendors, but still, I do expect it to work out-of-the-box.

Btw. SuSE 9.2 personal WILL be available for download free of charge. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? if suse 9.2 is so bad immagine how can be NLD.... Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "You were a great distribution. RIP."

Care to elaborate? Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? bye bye community, business as usual, bye bye suse!

sad, we have only slackware, gentoo, debian and fedora now...

Oh you know, Novell releasing the source to YaST, releasing Personal for free and talking about releasing SUSE 9.2 Pro for free download (ISOs and everything) is going against the community and shunning them in someway??? And I heard the free download thing straight from a representative of Novell at www.linuxquestions.org, where there is now a SUSE site.

Every day of me viewing idiotic statements by complete morons on these forums causes me to die a little more inside. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have yet to see Suse detect and configure my fairly new Samsung 955df. I get a black screen with a floating no signal from my monitor. This is true for the live cd and for the real install 9.1 and 9.2. When I consider how every other distribution livecd I've tried (morphix, Knoppix,Gnoppix, Mepis, Mandrake) has had no problem it makes me wonder about the whole distribution. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? its not a pirate copy its the live cd evaluation discs that you can download. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have the same monitor, though it's about 3 years old. I have no problems getting it recognized in SUSE 8.0-9.1. The only thing I have to do is manually add 1600x1200 to the resolution list in SAX2, otherwise I'm stuck at 1280x1024. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Live CDs are not called Professional and there are only two. If you press "order" you see that you can get either 5 CDs or 2 DVDs *separately*. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Please provide details of at least a "few" of the too many sites since this seems like a blanket statement -- born more out of "everyone's using firefox" syndrome.

My office's intranet site has IE specific javascript that shows pop-up menus but firefox (even the RC1 version) cannot handle them. Konqueror has no problem doing that!

So, please try and be more specific when you say "too-man sites". At least all sites that safari can handle are handled very well by konqueror, thank you! Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? you posted on a wrong news discussion Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Have you seen OSDir's tours of SUSE 9.2 KDE here http://osdir.com/shots/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=158&sli..., and Gnome here http://osdir.com/shots/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=159&sli... Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Every day of me viewing idiotic statements by complete morons on these forums causes me to die a little more inside."

Rude, maybe we should get you to neowin then we will be happy. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm having a dickens of a time getting Gentoo reinstalled. What Gnome-centric distros are there that are easily maintained and have a good source of updated packages? I hate having to wait til a new release comes out to get a newer Gnome. I know about garnome but it has never worked well for me. I'm a FreeBSD guy and I like never having to reinstall. Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? have you consider ubuntu? Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? as anonymous said, Ubuntu. It comes with Gnome 2.8 - D-Bus/HAL is great. It's been rock-solid for me so far. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't believe ubuntu has an open, rolling development distro, though, so you'd be stuck between releases. Debian sid / experimental or Mandrake Cooker fit the description; or Rawhide, I don't know how feasible running that as a day-to-day distro is, though, any Fedora people want to comment? Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was able to edit the xconfig manually in 9.1 and get it working but I still don't understand why it has a problem. If not the monitor then perhaps the combination with my other hardware. Nonetheless I have installed dozens of versions and distributions on the same setup and only Suse 9.1 and 9.2 failing to give me a working xsession. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 01:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I fully agree with you this time. Ubuntu is more akin to a (closed) commercial distro than to Debian. You must wait for their releases, whilst Debian, in a sense, "releases every day" (as anybody who has ever used Sid knows).
Also, with Ubuntu you are stuck with their (rather limited) repositories. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I downloaded it at a very fast speed. (Gotta love torrents) Burned... And through it in my IBM T23.

Results for me?

WORKED GREAT! Never used Suse before... Got YasT running my wireless card in under 5 minutes.

The only negative I had was how often my CDROM was spinning, sounded like it was going to fly out and kill me. But all and all it looks wonderful.

I'm very excited over Novell's work with Linux. I keep up with them on a constant basis now. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Never have i used such crap, half the time it got my internet connection up and the other half it wouldnt let me connect, open office wouldnt work, i could not mount my usb mp3 player/hardrive really anoying since it detected it. there were to many problems to use it for anything but a demo to show you what they have, but it failed there to since now i dont have any desire to buy suse 9.2. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? the USB hotplugging problem is finally going to be fixed in 9.2? I know that myself and alot of people were pissed to find out that it was a big problem in 9.1. Had to disable supermount, enter stuff in fstab and other workarounds, but never worked like it should've. Sucked royally and it was very shocking for many a suse user because it worked beautifully in 9.0 Fri, 29 Oct 2004 03:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I download kde live one and i like it has best hardware detect I seen in linux where pick up all my hardware on all of pcs and 2 of my pc would not run linux with out patch a lot area of linux like e.g video card and wireless kb but suse 9.2 it pick them all up and even my printer and scanner what is amazing bad part about it is open office does work, Can,t network with windows pc, and it,s hard to get it mount hard disc and other cd rom drivers. but good parts are gui look good, fast, really stable, easy to use and media programs work really good. It is so easy to use I give copy to one of friends who has issue useing linux and has issue do same tasks in windows and after playing with hour he love it. He was burn copys, and was playing with yash. at room I use for media and printing Fri, 29 Oct 2004 03:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "you can (allegedly) get a version of SUSE Professional for $11.99

For such prize it must be a pirate copy."

You can't "pirate" GPL stuff - it's perfectly legal to redistribute the Pro version, the money SUSE charge is just for the packaging, manuals, support etc; you can;t charge more than the cost of CD-R's and postage, but you can sell it.

They don't offer it for download as they'd prefer people to buy it. But PCTech101 only need to buy one copy to be allowed to redistribute.

SLES9 actually had a "not for redistribution notice" but 9.1 Pro didn't.

Anyway, if Novell do what they're threatening, Pro will be free soon, as it will be the "community" version like Fedora.

You can usually get SUSE Pro from eBay for under $12 anyway. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 06:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What Gnome-centric distros are there that are easily maintained and have a good source of updated packages?

Go here : http://www.slackware.com
Install what you get on the two CD. Don't forget gnome
Then, go there http://www.dropline.net
Works better if you install over net. All you have to do from that point is to click on the update icon
Simple Fri, 29 Oct 2004 07:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > You can't "pirate" GPL stuff

SUSE 9.2 Pro does not only include GPL stuff (neither LGPL, BSD, Artistic or other Free Software licenses), there are also commercial applications included (those missing from the FTP version).

> it's perfectly legal to redistribute the Pro version

With SUSE's authorization, but I doubt it in this case.

> you can;t charge more than the cost of CD-R's and postage, but you can sell it.

You want to tell me this offer is non-commercial and the vendor doesn't want to make profit!? :-O

> But PCTech101 only need to buy one copy to be allowed to redistribute.

Again wrong, see above.

> Anyway, if Novell do what they're threatening, Pro will be free soon

If murder would be allowed tomorrow your today's kill would be still illegal.

> You can usually get SUSE Pro from eBay for under $12 anyway.

Pirate copies or complete used boxes? What does this change? Fri, 29 Oct 2004 07:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The GNOME version of the SuSE Live CD is really poorly made.

The ~/Desktop directory contains some (useless) items from KDE, so while you have GNOME's Trash folder on the desktop, you also get another one from KDE. This is also the reason why you see "Computer" (from GNOME) and "My Computer" (from SuSEfied KDE). So the desktop is a complete mess.

Also, the SuSE update monitor is KDE-based, so you have kdeinit running in the background and taking up lots of memory (and memory is really valuable when you run a LiveCD).

I feel dissapointed. I would expect something better from a company like Novell. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 07:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Kernel panic, PUNT.

System is a stable Dell server 400SC. First version of Linux that crashed hard on startup. Way to go SUSE. Back to Solaris. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I tryed the Gnome version and i am very disaponted.
the desktop is a mess. It is much slower than knoppix or Ubuntu. I am defenetly going to istall a Debian based distro. Libranet, Ubuntu or Linspire ..... whatever supports multimedia the best (Digicam etc) Fri, 29 Oct 2004 12:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is there an FTP install available of SUSE 9.2 yet, and in case of yes where? Tried to install MDK 10.1 from FTP last night but the install failed, some FTP errors/timeout somewere after 90% :-( So I wondered perhaps I should try SUSE instead.

How does SUSE 9.2 compare to MDK 10.1 speedwise, I have heard MDK is quite snappy but nothing on SUSE? Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... (version 6.1.1) neither the SuSE Live DVD, nor the new Mandrake Move 2.0 CD work: the first ends up with a kernel panic on startup, the second starts with completely distorted graphics (bad resolution). Just as a curiosity, as running live CDs/DVDs on VPC isn't a vital issue, anyway.

Hopefully, both SuSE 9.2 (Personal) and Mandrake 10.1 (Official) *will* run on VPC - won't they...? :-) Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > you can;t charge more than the cost of CD-R's and postage

Yes, you can. I can download a linux distro, rename it "MySplendidLinux" and charge $1.000.000 for the binaries.
However, if you follow the GPL, I don't think you can sell the source code for more than media and postage.

The difference between the commercial and downloadable sets is usually that the commercial sets have additional non-free stuff (like BRU and others) and free-as-in-beer but not freely distributable stuff (I think RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader and others fit that description).

So before you buy a commercial set and start distributing the isos, check the license for each CD. Most of the time the first X are GLP and the rest aren't.

- Peder Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just out of curiosity, why didn't you leave the MDK installation sitting there and retry later when the FTP site wasn't so busy? It shouldn't just die if it loses the server, it'll let you choose to retry or stop or just skip the packages...if it didn't, that's probably a bug, so file it Fri, 29 Oct 2004 17:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not quite sure what happend, but it returned to the package selection screen. As I had some mails to send I had to reboot to my old 10,0 install(Nice to have a brand new hdd to play with:-) Wanted to reinstall today, but the installer let me "upgrade" from the 10.1 install which failed. Had to manually install user and set root password, and all the packages was not installed, but I'm up and running now.

As a side note, SUSE 9.2 are not available for FTP install yet. So I have to try it another time. I considered trying Gentoo, but I couldn't get any of the live CD's to boot so that's anotherone for later:-) Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Slackware is not .. I repeat not Gnome-centric. In fact Patrick has said he will most likely be removing Gnome (or already has) from the main distro. Thus you will have to use Dropline to get gnome working. A distro isnt gnome-centric if you have to jump through hoops to get the desktop installed.

Ubuntu and Fedora are Gnome-centric .. IE they install it as the default desktop. Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry, but straight copies of SUSE 9.2 Pro are not legal because they contain some non GPL software, such as macromedia flash, realplayer, and textmaker... They cannot be redistributed without permission from the copyright holder Fri, 29 Oct 2004 20:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? weird one, pity you weren't around to see exactly what happened :/ Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You probably only needed to change your default gateway so that it would point to the router on the wireless subnet. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 16:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? here's my take on the successive SuSE failures :

http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=pan.2004.11.01.05.29.56.2...

"R.I.P SuSE GMBH
---------------

Down in the early days of Linux, when all was fine, a couple students
in Erlangen created a download service at their UNI , to download linux
floppy images and dd/rawrite them to a set of floppies. I believe they
started with the SLS or MCC Interim distro's. The Students sold the
floppy sets to anyone who wanted one for a small margin.

Later on they rolled into the creating and rolling, even programming
your own Distro, and a firm called SuSE Engineerung GMBH was started in
Erlangen, south Germany. Soon the SuSE linux Distro was also available
on CD and with the most due respect, these same students started a fine
Open Source Software company based on Linux. Well not all was open
source in the beginning, SuSE created its own management tool, called
YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool).
..
..
"

Story is longer as 8000 chars, so follow the url for the complete analysis Sat, 06 Nov 2004 23:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments