Novell’s latest release of SUSE Linux, SUSE 9.3, demonstrates Novell’s continuing commitment to delivering polished, off-the-shelf Linux distributions for the desktop and professional markets. October 2004, which is when the previous version of SUSE Linux was released, seems like only yesterday. So what’s new–and, perhaps, why should people care?
SUSE 9.3: More, Better, Faster, Now!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Eugenia, I don’t want to sound harsh, but that title “SUSE 9.3: More, Better, Faster, Now!” sounds like unreflected advertisement…
Maybe it is, but it is not my title, it’s the article’s title. Your complaints to the original author please.
If I wasn’t so happy with my distro this would probably be next on my list. They hold themselvs to a good standard.
Could we not assume that editors, in their capacity as dictators of the overall tone of a publication, might excercise some kind of ‘editorial influence’ over the hyperbolic tendencies of their contributing writers? Isn’t editing, by definition, an editor’s job?
Out of all the distro’s, SUSE’s the only one I trust, and I cant wait until i get to play with it (and with mono)
What is faster in this release?
What’s faster? The money flying out of your wallet. Also probably both Gnome and Kde. Maybe the speed at which Sax2 breaks your X-config.
I’ve been running 9.2 since it came out. It is very nice. Can’t wait to try out 9.3.
For when you get pissed off enough at the system, I’m sure SuSE has also hard-coded an assembler-optimized “rm -rf /” routine into the kernel. 🙂
This is not a contributing editor. It’s a link to another article, at another site. Again, if you have a problem with editing, email the editor in chief of that site, not this one.
9.2 slower than 9.1
9.1 than 9.0 and so on
After 8.x releases Suse getting slower and more buggy then the previous one (in my opinion)
Sorry, only real numbers exist in my world, not so many amateurish “internet reviews” (they are lie so much)
Gentoo is fast (if I trust real user on Gentoo) and my Slackware
Don’t take them personally. Do you want it to say: SUSE 9.3 released. Not very exciting.
I have been using Suse 9.3 since it came out. I find it extremely useful and a well polished distribution. The Beagle desktop search that comes with it is very useful. The extra multimedia packs that I downloaded from Suse’s online update site worked like a charm. I have no complaints. The Gnome Desktop and the KDE desktop work really well for what they are at their current state.
Overall I trust Suse for my daily tasks with my Linux box, which is a rather inexpensive Shuttle machine. I recommend this to anyone who is fed up with the “pro” distros coming out from other camps. It’s pure Linux power at your fingertips. A perfect way to augment your intelligence at the ultimate level.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=322&slide=8…
What’s faster? The money flying out of your wallet. Also probably both Gnome and Kde. Maybe the speed at which Sax2 breaks your X-config.
Heheh
, love it dude 
– after the stress/arguments in the Mike Dell thread, this made good reading tonight – cheers.
I am running Suse 9.3 and it will be a free download so it doesnt cost you anything but some distros are worth paying for. I installed in on my averatec 3260 laptop and everything but the card reader worked on the install. Everyone talks about speed that is only nano seconds: gimp still cranks out the large size of pictures in seconds. The only thing I didn’t like about the distro is the video players are crippled. I used Mepis on my last laptop and it had all kinds of problems installing on this one. I am not a geek and I need as much of the OS working out of the box. I liked Mepis and will keep it on my desktops I see no reason to change it. But Suse did a wonderful job on this release.
You failed to mention a couple of big gotchas! At least they are big issues for me.
JFS has been removed from the installation tool. This really annoyed me, as I use JFS. PostgreSQL is difficult to install. Again, a problem because I use postgres too.
If you want to use JFS, you either have to have the partition already formatted and tell SuSE install to use it as it stands (not tested), or you have to install with something different, and then go back and reformat and replace everything after the install. This is quite a pain if you wanted / to be JFS.
I found, after googling about this for a while, a message that seems to indicate SuSE/Novell had some “technical” problems with JFS on install. Instead of fixing it, they removed the feature. And, they don’t mention it anywhere that I’ve found.
It really disappoints me to see SuSE take the low road on this. Why didn’t they just fix the problem. 9.2 allowed JFS installation. This means they broke something going from 9.2 to 9.3, and instead of fixing it, they removed the ability to use JFS at install time.
It also more difficult to find and install postgres with 9.3 (and 9.2, though 9.2 was easier than 9.3). Even searching for postgres (and various cases and abbreviations) in 9.3 failed to find them. They are on the CD and/or DVD, but the yast installer doesn’t find them. Only the client libs.
Is this Novell’s way of trying to “encourage” people to buy Novell desktop or enterprise versions, by crippling the installation of SuSE professional? Sure, the programs are there, as advertised, but the ability to install them seems to be hindered.
Overall, I was sorely disappointed by 9.3’s installation. I wish I wouldn’t have spent the money to buy it. Instead of being able to install it and start working, I’ve had to waste time installing what it would let me, and then go through the files on the CD or DVD and install a few things manually. I haven’t decided yet if I am going to continue with my plans of returning my primary servers to SuSE.
For the record, I’ve been a SuSE user since 1997 or 1998. At one point I had the “subscription” (anyone remember those? great idea, but the implementation wasn’t that reliable), and regularly purchased the new releases (or at least every other release). SuSE ran my servers at home, and my server at a colo (until very recently, when I replaced the SuSE 8 with another distro as a test). I actually purchased 9.2, and then 9.3, as I was preparing to return to SuSE on my server.
It’s going to be free? For an actual install disk, or am I going to have to do the FTP install thing. If it’s really free I may just try it. Back in the days when I was distro hunting I dropped 50-80 bucks more than once. This must’ve been around the 7.1-8.0 era.
As mentioned before, I had major problems with Sax, and I found the community side majorly lacking both in terms of support forums and non-distro packages. I also didn’t like Yast or Sax which are, as far as I can tell, the only big exclusives elements of this distro. Needless to say, I felt I’d wasted my hard-earned. (What really cheesed me off is that they stopped including the swanky plastic case badge stickers in the box, replacing them with regular suse stickers. It was the final straw)
Offtopic here, but what’s up with the pop-ups in the review link? I get one everytime I click to go to the next page. Is there a way to stop these things, because the Firefox blocker isn’t able to catch them.
pop-ups? can’t see any. and that’s with netscape 7.1.
by the way, i think suse is the best commercial linux distribution out there
Yeah, SUSE has started getting a free ISO release since Novell bought them out. Personally I think Novell is positioning things so SUSE is the enthusiast’s cutting edge distro and NLD is the polished supported serious-use-ready release, like FC / RHEL…interesting strategy.
I have been a SuSE linux user since the 6.3 days. In my opinion, 8.0 was the best of these releases. I have been running 9.3 for a week now and find that it runs “as fast” as 8.0. Interprocess calls are much faster than the versions between 8.1 through 9.2. Currently I have had only two problems with 9.3, if you change the monitor type with yast, xdm will become the login screen. A quick vi session on /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager will fix this. Secondly, wireless and or multiple nic sources needs some work. On my laptop, if I want to use the wireless card I have to shutdown the internal nic (eth0) and restart the wireless card (eth1). And the following are still issues for me, but they are getting better.
1.Decent 3D support for ATI
2.The need to play DVDs and now MP3s out of the box. (Or at least add the support for DVD via yast updates)
3.Fine tune wireless nic support
If it weren’t for the first two issues, I would have no reason to have Windows on my IBM A31p laptop at all.
Craig
@GSY: These are bugs, not intention. OK, the JFS thing which I cannot reproduce since I don’t have 9.3 is embarassing, but the PostgreSQL thing sounds quite harmless. And no, this was not intentionally done in order to force people to buy more expensive editions. Think a while and you will see that it cannot be like that because bugs like these actually lead to the opposite.
@bman08: This release will, as always, be available for FTP installation about 2-3 months after the release. 9.2 was additionally available as DVD image and it will probably be the same for 9.3.
@snaker: In order to get more complete multimedia support, open YaST -> Software -> Installation source -> Add -> FTP and add the following:
Protocol: FTP
Server: packman.iu-bremen.de
Directory on the server: suse/9.3
Authentication: Anonymous
Afterwards you can install additional software from the independent packman.links2linux.org repository using YaST. Choose libxine1 and update kaffeine. You can also install MPlayer, if you wish.
1. Actually ATI 3D support worked pretty well in this distro. Always had problems with ATI on my laptop as well. Just search the Suse support database for fglrx. There is good step by step instruction on how to get it running. It worked like a charm.
3. Dunno whether you mean problems with resolving hostnames when using wlan and dhcp. But again there is a manual in the support database on how to make dhcpd write resolv.conf when having two NICs. Worked for me.
Hope to have helped.
BTW: Suse 9.3 is a really nice distribution ready for doing real work out of the box. And in the end this is what most people really want from their OS.
I am back to running win xp at the moment but i say when i go
back to linux it will be suse, it is the best LINUX !!!!
I will give props to a new live cd distro called ATMISSION
it is just like running a dist on your hard drive.
G.W.
JFS missing from install option is not a bug, it was a deliberate act to remove a feature due to a problem instead of fixing the problem.
The postgres problem has been there since 9.2, albeit if you searched long enough you could at least get to it in 9.2. The fact that it is worse now, and still an issue, tells me it is not a simple bug. If it were a bug, it would have been fixed between 9.2 and 9.3. Or so you would think, from someone as professional as SuSE.
You are correct – issues such as this would not endear me to upgrade to a different version. My servers ran SuSE 8 for a long while. I had a fairly significant amount of time in various configurations and layouts, including a dynamically generated “virtual” server (basically just chroot). In the end, I needed some things SuSE 8 did not have, and it finally became a big enough issue I ended up moving to another distro (not the least of which was a smaller footprint, 90 meg vs SuSE’s 300 meg base install w/SSHD).
I was at the point of returning to SuSE when I got 9.2. Then 9.3 became available before I had finished setting things up with 9.2, so I bought that, hoping to have at least the postgres issue fixed at time of install. [An unplanned colo move forced me to totally scrap my 9.2 deployment and then resume it, that and a busy schedule is why 9.2 never got deployed before 9.3 came out.]
I’m not denying SuSE 9.3 will probably be very good. But, I also know if we do not hold SuSE and Novell up to the higher standard we have come to expect from SuSE over the years, then they will get sloppy. I view these issues with 9.3 to be just such sloppiness.
As a consultant, my name and reputation directly relate to the technologies, products, distros, decisions, etc. that I make and suggest to my clients. Until recently (6 months to a year), SuSE has always been an easy choice, one that I usually did not have to worry about.
I have no doubt that SuSE, especially with Novell, will tackle these issues, and more. They have the man power, and hopefully Novell has the determination to see this through. I am hoping that holding them accountable for the delivery of the quality product we know SuSE has been and can be, that they will rise to the occasion and make 9.4 (or 10.0) the way it should be.
I’ve tried SUSE 9.1 , 9.2 and 9.3 and every time I make the conclusion it’s not worthy spending 5 CDs . This time I’m determined this was the last time .No more CDs .There are so many distros to bother with this one . Obviously SUSE is not for me and my tastes .Anyway I think It’s a good distro for beginers .Peace .
The article is a bit skewed. I would have liked to see a better analysis. It appears that the author simply installed Suse. Were any benchmarks run ? What 64bit apps were tested ? Was it used as webserver ? If so how it did perform ?
Despite some minor remarks made by some regarding jfs and postgresql SuSE 9.3 is a polished and stable distro.The only one i can buy in a not online-store and comes with two hand-books which cover a lot of topics to get you on the road with a variety of things.For the peeps who would like to play their legally bought encrypted dvd’s this link might be interesting:http://www.saunalahti.fi/~pirisisi/tips/Linux/dvdplay/
Can hardly wait for SuSE 9.4 (10?).
I haven´t tried the x86 version but the amd64 version was a bit buggy. Nothing major but a lot of small issues here and there. I’m back on gentoo now which is faster anyway.
Nothing major but a lot of small issues here and there. I’m back on gentoo now which is faster anyway.
I don’t know wether you installed from an official dvd or not.I’m running SuSE 9.3 now 1 week on a AMD64 3000+ and don’t experience any issues even minor ones so far.Before SuSE i have ran a whole pletora of Linux distros ,gentoo included.I can’t say Gentoo is faster from my experiences.Latest and greatest fluxbox or xfce4 doesn’t run any different with either distro.
1. one will not be able to start OO.org 2.0 beta if bug-buddy crashes. So each time bb crashed OO.org crashed too. This is most stupid thing I have seen to date in 9.3 bug reporting software is so buggy that it will prevent the application to start. It is impossible to install OO.org 2.0 beta without bug-buddy (Gonome app on KDE jeezz). There are other apps that have similar mechanism, but there is a choice of installing disabling it. SuSE decided to make crashing combo OO.org with bug-buddy.
resolution: install OO.org from openoffice web site wiyhout bug-buddy
2. GRUB editor from YAST is gone after first edit.
resolution edit GRUB with any editor of choice instead of YAST
3. after installing latest nVidia, KDE will freeze each few hours, nothing in the logs
resolution: go back to SuSE nVIDIA or install kernel from kernel.org with the latest nVidia.
4. during installation YAST installer shows that ssh is disabled, however this is not the case, not configured ssh with root logging option is running
5. there is no way of configuring services during installation
6. for the money there is no free support even for 30 days except installation support. Pretty rediculous.
7. definitely not “faster” or “better”. If “more” then troubles.
WEll, 9.3 on i386 is “faster” and “better” as each release has been. I haven’t had any trouble on three installations so far. It’s a good distro for “beginner” and “advanced” user as nothing is sacrificed. I manaully edit as much of the system as I want…when lazy, Yast is nice.
nVidia driver is great (installed from NVIDIA).
I guess it’s all a matter of personal preference, so isn’t that what Linux is all about?
Tell me why do you think 9.3 is faster? With 9.2 I had 2.6.11.7 kernel (1.2MB size). KDE 3.4, Xorg 6.8.2, minimum services running. You are talking about subjective feelings that I dont care. There is nothing in 9.3 that would make it theoretically faster: ReiserFS4, KDE compiled with gcc4. It has more services running and boot time will not change until SuSE changes it from sequential to parallel.
In terms of speed there is no difference unless you have not customized OS (9.2 or 9.3).
The biggest problem is that YAST claims during installation that ssh is disabled. that is no the case, not configured services are running, and during installation there is no way of stopping or configuring these services: ssh, portmapper,nfs,postfix. Why do I need to run these? The first thing is to disable configure these services, however because not configured are useless why SuSE starts these services at all?
Hi cdr…
I agree that the system as a whole would not be faster…however what it appears that they have done is make the “feel” faster. For instance, Yast comes up much faster for most modules. The boot-up is faster than before (however I haven’t measured it…it’s subjective)..they seem to have changed boot ORDER on some items and that might have made a difference.
As far as the other things, it’s an incrimental improvement. For instance, my scanner now works out of the box where I had to mess with a bunch of files before. That is the “better” part.
I hope that the ssh comment was directed at someone else as I didn’t comment about ssh…I use ssh all the time and it seems that ssh doesn’t start until you decide to use it, but I have not confirmed that.
Sorry, but I can’t help it…I was going to “let it go” but I can’t. The comment above my original comment, if it means anything at all, is hard to decipher. Of course, it could be a drug-damaged mind, or no mind at all. But the profanity is really childish and meaningless. I’m getting the impression that there are many very “little”-minded people who visit this site. It’s too bad…and sad.
“I hope that the ssh comment was directed at someone else as I didn’t comment about ssh…I use ssh all the time and it seems that ssh doesn’t start until you decide to use it, but I have not confirmed that”
No:
1. it was general statement (about ssh)
2. ssh starts automatically after installation though is not configured. This is bad design.
I’ve been running 9.3 on my AMD64 300+ for a week or two now.
No bugs that I’ve noticed yet.
I tried it on a whim, just to see what it’s like now. I hadn’t used SuSE in a few years. I’ve got to say that it is very slick, and YaST is a nice tool. I especially like being able to run YaST in text mode remotely through an ssh session.
Hi, OK…you are correct. This is an issue I think with many Linux distributions…turning too many services ON by default, and I agree that it’s not the best policy….trying too hard to make things “easy” for everyone and make everything work at installation. I agree, some of these features should be “off” by default.
You could go through the list, summarized very nicely through Yast runlevel (or whatever they call it now) module and turn on and off all of the deamons that you want, but I agree that many of the “on”s should be “off”s by default. Good point.
To Douglas, yeah…I do the same thing…I remotely administer ALL of my machines through ssh and use the yast text mode a lot. My daughter will be on her computer in her room and I’ll do a software update from down here and she never knows that it’s happening!!!
What happened to the Anonymous dork who is illiterate?
He should listen to a symphony, read some classic literature, or write a systematic theology or something. Then his brain might start working…
See ya, folks..
“I’m back on gentoo now which is faster anyway.”
I don’t know why it is that when any distro review is posted on this site, that there always has to be some sort of comment about gentoo, and how it’s better. I’ve tried gentoo, and it’s not in the same league as SuSE or RedHat. Before you start flaming, and posting all kinds of replies to this, stop and think about it for a minute. Most users of gentoo want to turn all the knobs and flip all the switches to eek out that last little CPU tick of performance that they don’t feel the other mainstram distros give them. SuSE / RedHat users just want to install the distribution and have it work out of the box.. and do updates via point and click, and have the patches installed as quickly as possible. They definitely do NOT want to emerge the world for 3 days waiting for everything to compile and update. I want to USE my computer, not have it grind away compiling the latest KDE and / or GNOME release for hours upon hours (if not more).
Again, if this is you, SuSE or RedHat aren’t for you anyways. I used to be like that (I’ve been a linux user since RedHat 3), but not anymore, and I suspect that most people out there aren’t either.
Anyways, I’ve read with interest some of the posts about SuSE’s latest releases. I’ve upgraded 2 machines from 9.2 to 9.3 (one is a Dell D600 laptop, the other is an Athlon64 based system). Speed is of course subjective, and I do feel that 9.3 is much faster than 9.2, but the 9.3 release is MUCH better at hardware detection than the 9.2 release for me. A larger percentage was detected with 9.3 vs 9.2 — my scanner was detected correctly, my printer loaded the correct driver this time. The only things I had to download manually were the ATI and NVidia drivers — which were expected — and the driver for my Logitech QuickCam Pro. Add the repository sources for add-on software from http://ftp.gwdg.de/linux/suse/ and you should have a solid desktop Linux environment up and running quickly. Suspend on the laptop works like a champ (again out of the box), setting up services and hardware with YaST is, in a word, easy.. and with the exception of Mandrake’s control center, I don’t think that I’ve seen anything remotely close.
I’ve also tried some ‘other’ distributions on these 2 hosts and none .. I repeat, none … have been as stable, and performed as well, as SuSE has. RedHat gave me constant kernel panics (especially on the laptop), Mandrake wouldn’t install without several command line parms passed on both machines. Yes, 9.3 has its issues (the returning to xdm for a login screen when installing the NVidia driver is one of them) but on the whole, the out of the box experience is much better than any other linux distribution out there that I’ve tried. I’m sure that the intent of the distro is directed towards people like me .. people that want everything to work out of the box, and who don’t want to tweak .conf files just get a few percent increase in speed.
Now if it would only suupport my wireless card. The new Mandriva does but that distro is rather buggy. SuSE, while a very nice distro does not support my wireless card. And i’ve been fighting with ndiswrapper to get it to work but it’s still been nothing but problems.
I have taken a while to jump in here… Here goes anyway. I think everyone appreciates that the editor of the other site may have chosen the title poorly by some tastes. I think the original question was why this title was also used for the OSNews post.
Perhaps it would have avoided such disputes if the title had not been copied directly as the OSNews article title but instead included below in the text. Would this be possible in future, or is it policy that article headings == the title of the linked article?
I don’t know why it is that when any distro review is posted on this site, that there always has to be some sort of comment about gentoo, and how it’s better. I’ve tried gentoo, and it’s not in the same league as SuSE or RedHat. Before you start flaming, and posting all kinds of replies to this, stop and think about it for a minute. Most users of gentoo want to turn all the knobs and flip all the switches to eek out that last little CPU tick of performance that they don’t feel the other mainstram distros give them.
I don’t usually do that, I have sane settings for my system. Suse have their X11 patched with the compose cache patches so it should be more responsive but it wasn’t. My kde 3.4 desktop in gentoo is faster. I tried tweaking suse with prelink, kernel-patches, xorg.conf and KDE-settings etc. but it still wouldn’t be as responsive. In suse there was a slight delay for apps like konqueror and konsole to launch while they launch immediately in gentoo. This might be because gentoo’s gcc has symbol visibility support and suse’s doesn’t.
Redrawing of konqueror when I moved a another windows over it fast where also slower in suse. I don’t understand why because gentoo and suse uses the same version of X11 and the same version of nvidia’s binary drivers.
I know that gentoo is not or everyone but I,ll stick with it for now even if I don’t like the fact that I have to compile everything. And i’m not trying to flame or anything.
I don’t have this problems:
oo.org starts in 3sec (first time 6sec), terminal window in ~1 sec (ANSI colored prompt with current time, current path and user name), kate (notepad) ~1 sec, FF 2 sec + 2 sec for page load (first time 2sec longer). No slowdowns with window redraw (latest nvidia) in KDE 3.4. All on 3GHz AMD64 (and 64-bit SuSE) slightly OCed to 3.2GHz.
So in general no need for gentoo.
I did not get the popups at the article which someone else mentioned, but I was thrown off by the ad down the side “Linux Reference Center (sponsored by microsoft)”.
What a joke!
Sure, these sites need to make money, but I’ve just put that site in my dns block list. Sorry.
I have a problem with my wireless nic in 9.3. It installs and works fine. But when I reboot it is unavailable. Yast still has the original entry for my wireless nic plus a new one, not configured. If I remove the original entry and restart yast and configure the new entry then I’m back online. At least until next reboot. Any ideas?
Oh yeah, to Eugenia: There is no indication of what is your wording and what is copy pasted from an article. A pair of quotation marks might do the job. And perhaps some blurb about where its taken from.
oo.org starts in 3sec (first time 6sec), terminal window in ~1 sec (ANSI colored prompt with current time, current path and user name), kate (notepad) ~1 sec, FF 2 sec + 2 sec for page load (first time 2sec longer). No slowdowns with window redraw (latest nvidia) in KDE 3.4. All on 3GHz AMD64 (and 64-bit SuSE) slightly OCed to 3.2GHz.
Yes, the delays in suse where below 1 second but but still not immediately when I click on something like I’m used to. This is on a 3500+ (2,2ghz).
And where did you get a 3ghz AMD64? The fastest AMD ships today is at 2,6ghz.
sorry this is ADM64 3000 (so 1.8GHz)
No I don’t see delays, terminal window, kate opens instantly
I doubt that oo.org can open on the same machine (1.8 GHz) “instantly”. So there is no delays suggested by someoneon similarly equipped box.
sorry this is ADM64 3000 (so 1.8GHz)
I have a AMD64 3000 (2.0GHz).It’s running at 2.0GHz out of the box,it’s a socket 754 though.The AMD64 2800+ (socket 754) runs by default at 1.8GHz.So i guess you have a socket939 mobo,where the AMD64 3000+ indeed runs by default at 1.8GHz.The L2 cache is by all above equall:512KB.
yes this is socket 939 and AMD64 3000 (default clock at 1.8GHz, running at 2.1 GHz), however my point was that there are no slowdowns. I don’t have problems suggested above. Only slow part is boot process. It takes 45sec with minimum services running, however SuSE does start all services sequentially (as most of linux distros) so there is not much that can be done. In general I dont think speed is the issue. SuSE has other problems however. I think that this upgrade should be called 9.2.1 not 9.3
Only slow part is boot process. It takes 45sec with minimum services running
Yes i do experience the same “slow” boot process.Well at least they have included a more stylish boot-screen:-).Although i said in a previous post not having faced any problems,now the only minor thing is the kde backtrace app (equiv: MS error report) showing up now and than when i close kderadio or tvtime.I think this has something to do with the high-performance style liquid.
I think that this upgrade should be called 9.2.1 not 9.3
Yes,although i don’t regret i bought the box,the whole deal is more mature and polished,but doesn’t meet the high standard people can expect from Novell on all fronts.