Submitted by On October 6, Novell officially released SUSE Linux 10, the latest edition of its heavily armed desktop operating system. It offers a choice of great-looking desktop environments, a gigantic selection of desktop software and the much-acclaimed YaST setup and configuration program. Read the rest of the review
here.
Review: SUSE Linux 10
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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There is a “summary” section to it – this makes no sense as there wasn’t anything to summarize in the first place. Osnews, stop posting rubbish. This is an order.
Whtas with all the Suse posts!!!??1111
All kidding aside, I’m really thinking of trying Suse out again. I’ve been away from it for awhile.
I wonder which Centrino wireless card he’s using. I have a Centrino wireless in my Dell Inspiron 8600 and SuSE found the card and set it up without any configuring by me when I loaded SuSE 10.
It didn’t work with the IWP2200 and 2100. What chip are you using in your computer?
Mine’s a 2100. SuSE did an auto setup for mine and found it.
Does YaST list the Centrino under Network Card?
It appears that suse could almost pass itself off as Windows–whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is another matter entirely, though.
-bytecoder
Actually, what I said is somewhat inaccurate. Suse plus KDE could almost pass itself off as Windows.
-bytecoder
Wonder if I can get it up and running on my Dell XPS laptop.
Not the best advice in my opinion.
“SUSE Linux 10 comes with a built-in firewall and spam filter, and although it’s hardly necessary on GNU/Linux,”
I would say you can’t have enough.
You’ve misquoted the article, he wasn’t talking about the spam / firewall tools, he was talking about the anti-virus program:
…and although it’s hardly necessary on GNU/Linux, SUSE also includes an anti-virus program
The reason it’s not necessary is that there’s no virus in the wild at the moment for Linux. Really, the anti-virus and spam tools are there if you want to use SuSE 10 Pro as a basic mail-server for a small network that uses Windows clients. For example, you could set it to download everyone’s mail off their POP3 servers using Fetchmail, feed it through SpamAssassin and the virus-checker, and then host it on a lightweight IMAP server like Dovecot. The clients could then use that central machine as their mail server. Outlook Express has actually got great IMAP support.
I know that in SuSE 9.0, YaST had support for configuring Fetchmail, but after that you’re on your own. That’s why Novell has SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), which has far better configuration tools and support. Even so, there are still a lot of people who know enough to muddle along with plain old SuSE Pro for their servers.
Anything is better than Poobuntu
SUSE 10.0 + WINE = Goodbye, Microsoft OS.
SuSE plus KDE offers about 80% of the responsiveness of Windows at best. Firefox, Mozilla and Open Office all start very slowly. Once they start the basics works well, but if you try to access the menu options, even if it’s just to check them out, be prepared for stutters and pauses and some disk thrashing. The fonts in word processors are still ugly no matter what typeface you switch to.
My test machine is a 450 MHz Pentium II with 384 MB RAM. Of course this is a lowly machine by today’s standards. But the same machine runs Windows XP quickly and smoothly and with great reliability. It struggles with SuSE just as it does with many other Linux distributions. But gee, isn’t Linux supposed to be so effing superior and faster than “Windoze”? Where is the faster performance? Where is the efficient, lean and mean code?
Bottom line: SuSE is still bloated and slow for desktop usage. And this is supposed to be one of the better distributions.
Novell is in trouble if they can’t do better than this. The again, they have never been great in software development. NDS is wonderful, but pretty much everything else from Novell is crap. Back when Comdex was still a big deal, Novell reps tried to demonstrate their remote software installation over 10baseT. The demo froze up in front of everyone. Truly, a sucktacular demonstration. I lost any faith I might’ve had in Novell’s software prowess that day, and since then haven’t seen anything to restore it.
What do you get when you add up Novell with Linux? Answer: two big losers.
So… you’re running a 2005 desktop distribution in a ¿7? year old machine and you’re complaining about it not being fast as hell.
Besides that, I remind you Windows XP is now 4 years old and KDE as a desktop runs rings around it. Not really a worthy or fair comparison.
but if you try to access the menu options, even if it’s just to check them out, be prepared for stutters and pauses and some disk thrashing. The fonts in word processors are still ugly no matter what typeface you switch to.
No, you’re just plain lying. I run it with far less memory than you’ve got and guess what? I experience no problems whatsoever!
Novell is in trouble if they can’t do better than this. The again, they have never been great in software development. NDS is wonderful, but pretty much everything else from Novell is crap. Back when Comdex was still a big deal, Novell reps tried to demonstrate their remote….
General rant about Novell. I suppose you made your mind up before you ever used Suse – if you ever did.
The demo froze up in front of everyone.
Of course. That’s never happened to a company like Microsoft whose software is always absolutely ready for any demo…….
Since when does “Linux” refer to KDE/apps? You’re rant doesn’t make any sense.
-bytecoder
Quote: “Once they start the basics works well, but if you try to access the menu options, even if it’s just to check them out, be prepared for stutters and pauses and some disk thrashing”
Disk Thrashing? I’ve never seen that on a Linux distribution yet (usually cos Windows uses the cache and not ram, whereas Linux uses all of the ram before even looking at the cache on the hard drive).
Now – read the Suse website:
http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/sysreqs.html
256mb minimum ram, 512mb recommended. It also says a Pentium 1 to Pentium IV (or AMD equivalent) machine. Take into account, if you want to run it on a Pentium 1, then no X would be recommended I think you’ll find. I didn’t troll the Suse/Novell support forums to confirm this suspicion/expectation.
Quote: “But the same machine runs Windows XP quickly and smoothly and with great reliability.”
Sorry, but this is baloney from my experience. Check out this page for the system requirements for Windows XP:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/howtobuy/system.mspx
Pentium 233 and 128mb ram or higher required (minimum 64mb). The stats for Windows XP show that it seems to have a smaller memory footprint than Suse, but this is to be expected. You’re comparing a brand new state of the art Linux system to a 4 year old operating system. Try comparing the system requirements for Windows XP vs something like Redhat 7.3 please.
Irrespective of this, the system requirements officially published by Microsoft are baloney and totally unrealistic. I have yet to see one reviewer’s review who agreed with these minimum system requirements. General consensus was that it was far, far, far underrated, and that a P3 800mhz or faster with at least 256mb of ram was the real thing. The faster the better. I would agree with this sentiment.
Quote: “Bottom line: SuSE is still bloated and slow for desktop usage. And this is supposed to be one of the better distributions.”
Hey, is that you Steve Ballmer? Sure sounds like you. Are you still doing that monkey dance thing? Try getting an ape suit next time, it suits the dance! If you want to troll fine, your post is nothing but trolling. Some people say not to feed the trolls, I say to feed them – to crocodiles…alligators…sharks…
Quote: “What do you get when you add up Novell with Linux? Answer: two big losers.”
Wow! You can count! I was worried there for a moment…are you related to Grendel? I heard she was a grand troll…
Dave
P3 800mhz or faster with at least 256mb of ram was the real thing. The faster the better. I would agree with this sentiment.
Try using hardware designed and built this century
If you say Crossover Office you may have some credibility. WINE as it is currently is every bit as craptastic as most of the Linux world. Moron. Show me an example where someone can actually use WINE for practical every day usage, or shut up.
“My test machine is a 450 MHz Pentium II with 384 MB RAM. Of course this is a lowly machine by today’s standards. But the same machine runs Windows XP quickly and smoothly and with great reliability.”
Another blatant liar. My 1.4 ghz, 256mb RAM pc doesn’t even handle Windows XP quickly and smoothly, especially after SP2. Try that line on some forum where the users don’t know any better.
Another blatant liar. My 1.4 ghz, 256mb RAM pc doesn’t even handle Windows XP quickly and smoothly, especially after SP2. Try that line on some forum where the users don’t know any better.
Not necessarily. I run Windows XP Pro on a PIII 500 MHz with 256 MB RAM. It runs alright, not nearly as snappy as my 1.8 GHz Athlon XP 2200+ with 1 GB RAM (obviously), but StarOffice, Firefox and numerous other programs run just fine on it.
I do recommend Win2K for computers like that though
My pIII 550 runs win xp just fine as well
and this 1.5 ghz runs winxp just fine, thank you
calling people liars wont make anyone run to linux any faster.
“Another blatant liar. My 1.4 ghz, 256mb RAM pc doesn’t even handle Windows XP quickly and smoothly, especially after SP2. Try that line on some forum where the users don’t know any better.”
Bollocks, I have tried just about every distro there is and everytime I innevitably come back to WinXP (because I refuse to have to use ndiswrapper to get my hardware to work) I find it smooth and fast…_faster_ than Linux, that is for sure, on my 1GHz Pentium M laptop. And don’t even think to call me a troll/liar as I hate Microsoft just as much (if not more) than the next person, but I don’t have tunnel vision like you. I’m waiting for the day where I can leave WinXP behind, as I have no intention of ever using Vista. Luckily I have a Mac laptop as well. Still waiting for Linux to get it’s crap together. I think the waiting will continue for some time yet.
I find it smooth and fast…_faster_ than Linux, that is for sure, on my 1GHz Pentium M laptop.
So you obviously suffer from a big problem of tunnel vision.
To actually compare a Linux desktop to Windows XP, you would have to significantly degrade it, which means no bells and whistles. A LOT of bells and whistles of Linux are just not available in Windows XP.
I mean, if you use KDE : use an ugly (compared to even the default one) XP theme (called Redmond XP I think), kill any virtual desktop, remove fam/gamin, remove session saving, remove anti-aliasing, remove any fancy icon animation (bouncing for example), remove any kioslave support except the smb and file ones, remove your package manager and install everything by googling for your distribution packages, remove … Yes I know, you obtain sth close to unbearable (for a Linux user), but you still have sth more functional than Windows XP. So intentionnally shut down your desktop at least once a week, do not make more than one partition on your USB key (as Windows is unable to do or detect that), always install some software (don’t know what) before you plug your plug-and-play USB device, …
And don’t even think to call me a troll/liar
Actually you are both, or a moron : just choose what suits you best.
You say you have a Mac, and complain about sth not working with *gasp* ndiswrapper on Linux ?
If you can manage to get compatible hardware for your Mac, you should be able to do the same with Linux.
Liars/trolls like you are so obvious it’s not even funny.
“So you obviously suffer from a big problem of tunnel vision.”.
I wont bother with the waste of bandwidth. You needed to resort to personal insults. You are the weakest link, and a Linux biggot. Linux ain’t going nowehere due to this mindset. Session saving affects performance? Maybe on Mars or something, but not on earth.
Suse beats everything on my laptop in terms of getting things work out of box like windows install
Whether good or bad, it is close to windows I agree
Centrino worked out of box but users were not in audio group. Had to change that manually
Vmware 5.0 needed some work. XEN kernel is present but not in GRUB Menu, Even though I did not install GNOME,
it installed so many GNOME files, apps and libs ..that I got fed up removing them (I understand dependencies )
It sucks as I can notice considerable diff in speed compared to Debian. Debian on Vmware works faster than Suse 10.0 on hardware
Suspend to disk worked on 9.3 but in 10.0, when trying to suspend or resume, it messes up my display and hangs up.
It sucks as I can notice considerable diff in speed compared to Debian. Debian on Vmware works faster than Suse 10.0 on hardware.
Same here. OpenSUSE 10 and Debian Sid on separate partitions and Debian really is a lot faster. But … also a lot scrappier as a neat and conventient desktop OS (on which it isn’t focused, to be fair). OpenSUSE 10 is darn awesome, as others say, and I’ve used 6-7 previous versions. I hope it does really well for Novell because it deserves to, imho.
If you think debian is fast, you should try slackware, or another slimmed down distro. I have my slack box set up with gnome and it runs quite a bit faster than ubuntu on the same machine, even though it’s not 64-bit.
-bytecoder
I’m using this now, and Suse 10 is nothing short of awesome. The KDE changes since 9.3 are wonderful, Kontact has got an awful lot better in terms of its neatness, presentation, usability and configuration. In fact, it has never been easier to set up groupware on a client with any PIM client. TaskJuggler’s inclusion is also welcome. What a geat project management tool. I’m speechless as to how good this whole thing is now.
I’ve also got a server running with all the stuff we need in the office and it is running VMWare and all the services we need. All they need to do now is just keep on improving it, add support for stuff like Klik and flesh out the management tools a bit and you will need Windows for less and less and less desktop-wise. I can see they’re serious about their desktop migration now, because it’s really happening.
I saw Suse 10 on sale on Amazon but it says it is the CD version. Does anyone know where I can buy the DVD version?
I haven’t tried SUSE 10 yet, but recent prior boxed releases included both CD and DVD installation disks, where the one DVD contained the package sources and the other was a double-sided DVD containing both the 32-bit and the 64-bit installation.
Version 10 is the same way:
5 CDs (32-bit) and
1 DVD (32 and 64-bit)
I don’t believe they sell boxed sets any other way. Probably just mislabeled at Amazon.
Go for it. 🙂
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon starting with SuSE 9.1. I bought it and methodically purchased upgrades through 9.3. It amazed me on first isntall because of Yast mainly and its progressive polish has been fantastic. I eagerly await KDE 4 because I do not think that the KDE desktop, while extremely powerful, yet matches the polish of Windows XP. The fonts are still grainy, no matter how hard I tweak the antialias and smoothing settings. And things seem oversized. The problem with fonts in Gnome applications is almost maddening. These aren’t SuSE faults but as a premier representative of Linux state of the art, SuSE carries the flag along with Ubuntu and Mandriva. I sure hope KDE 4 really does offer the jaw dropping beauty its developers intend because Vista is, by any measure, gorgeous.
Ive been suse 10.0 sence it came out, Its been pretty good to me for the most part but has some minor annoyances
system AMD 2500 nForce2
1 gig of ram
geforce 6800 using dual screen
soundblaster audigy
1)IF the installer DVD is in the drive when the system is booted up and you tell it to boot from hard drive or even eject the dvd before the dvd boots up the automount system in suse gets all screwed up and becomes neer impossible to mount cds/dvds- cant mount anything as a normal user and root says its mounted but 9/10 it wont be (this may be an issue with my hardware but suse is the only distro that’s done it to me)
2)By default the only MP3 support is via Realplayer 10 and it has an annoying bug of setting my pcm volume to 0 not only when it starts up but shuts down adding addition yast repotiories and downloading xmms and xine players that have mp3 support fixed the problem
3)The yast repositories are really light in software, this is probably couse of the newness of suse10.0. It doesnt bother me to much becouse I perfer to download the newest version from the authers website anyway, but some people may be annoyed
4)It doesnt setup dualscreen for dual-head nvidia cards, but I havnt seen a distro that has. Requires manual setup of xorg.conf file and carefully to avoid screwing up yasts config tools
With that said, I do like the disto overall I find it very snappy, more so then other distros I’ve tried. I’m a kde fan and it does a much better job with kde then most distros IMO. I haven’t tried gnome so can’t comment on how it handles it
Too bad Version 10 suffers from the same dibilitating deficiency that all SUSE products suffer: The complete inability to resolve .local DNS domains..I know that .local was removed from the official RFC years ago, but several security courses are still recommending .local for interal company domains, as it is not routable, and there are thousands of companies ut there that have major deployments using .local.
Novell is pushing thier server (SLES9) and workstation products (NLD9 – Based on SLES9) for business consumption but fail to cater to the needs of companies. This is especailly painful given that EVERY OTHER DISTRO still supports .local DNS resolution.
Unofrtunatly with their server line moving totally to open source, I am going to be forced to recommend to several of my clients that they abandon Novell and move to either Red Hat or Microsoft (they will universally choose MS I’m afraid)..sigh..Novell just doens’t seem to get it…beautiful, powerful products with fatal flaws that should have been fixed years ago..
“Novell is pushing thier server (SLES9) and workstation products (NLD9 – Based on SLES9) for business consumption but fail to cater to the needs of companies.”
Novell has always had a problem with listening. They ignored the needs and requests of their customers in the Netware days. Their customers responded via mass exodus.
If Novell would have put as much time and effort into fixing their own issues as they did bashing their competitors, they would still be a major networking player.
I have been tried/using more distros than i care to remember over a lenght of time.
SuSE was allways lacking behind in performance when compared to Debian,Gentoo..,that’s true.Not that it bothered me that much.Those performance issues are anihilated on X86_64,any distro that has a AMD64 port (there aren’t many who official have one) runs the same performance wise.
SuSE allready had OpenOffice 2.0 in SuSE 9.3 which not many other distros seem to offer even now.Oracle isn’t official supported on many distros either.Same is the case for a lot of other professional Linux applications.That’s for some allready reason enough to only regard Redhat and SuSE and skip the rest.SuSE is very profesional,if you know where to look at.
With Novell AppArmor ({file}system firewall) included and integrated in Yast it’s a breeze to profile binairies,libraries in order to get a “blue-print” of what’s really needed run by for example firefox web-browser.Once firefox is profiled and the rules are enforced you can see (dmesg) all the attempts that have been rejected.Remarkably you don’t notice any fucntion drop while using the browser.
The more complex things get the more error prone and security is more at risk.AppArmor is much easier than a lot similar mandatory access control systems,execept for grsecurity,which has a learning mode too but no GUI.
DVD playback has never been the strenght of any commercial distro.You could for example include powerdvd for Linux and ask the customer to use a serial number included in the box.Not that it helps much.The app will easily used by other non authorised users.But hey that’s the case with MS products from day one and still those products are offred in the same serial number fashion.So why not for some propietary Linux app’s also?
All in all a very easy and secure version.Runs great on a variety of laptops.Has a lot off apps,games,multimedia,flash,java,good hardware support just not DVD playback out of the box.Well would be nice dvd playback but i think i better watch my movies on a 7.1 home cinema system in the living room.SuSE 10 is proudly dual-booted with FreeBSD 6.0 on my box.
I’m a Debian/sid user.
I have a laptop with 128mb of ram (can’t upgrade) and a celeron 400.
Well I just installed opensuse on a pIV, 512mb of ram.
Sincerely, no trolls please, do you think that I’ll be slower by installing opensuse on my laptop than debian ?
p.s.
The reason i’m going to change distro are:
1- tired to do apt-get each day and each day a tons of upgrades and patches (gsteamer there are a lot each day of the same package !)
2- still using gnome 2.10 with sid, tired to wait
(even pkgsrc for netbsd has 2.12, even freebsd, debian…we have to wait)
3-today after an update and reboot it started xdm and xfce (i’m using gnome!)
I’m a Debian/sid user.
I have a laptop with 128mb of ram (can’t upgrade) and a celeron 400.
I would.’t use gnome nor KDE and the like on that laptop but rather fluxbox,xfce,windowmaker,etc.,those are ideal desktop environments for low specced machines with not much ram inside.This way you have more memory avaible for running your applications instead of showing the desktop.When you look at the fluxbox home-page you’ll see with fulxbox you don’t have to lack a pleasantly looking desktop.
p3 @ 500 mhz and 256 mb of ram…….runs xp no prob with all bells and whistles. linux could be a bit zippier perhaps on the same config but i dont know since i havent tried.
p3 @ 500 mhz and 256 mb of ram…….runs xp no prob with all bells and whistles.
Well that machine could run any Linux too with all bells and whistles.But it’s hard to say wether it will be according to you usual experience/expectations.The same is true for XP.
Novell has always had a problem with listening.
To whom?Users who desperately want something back as RFC?Just contact the IETF i would say.Novell complies to standards,and the majority of *professionals* sincerly appreciate that policy.Quite frankly a real security expert would find it a piece of cake to adapt everything to his/her needs.Furthermore it’s far more easy to use a live CD such as Whax or Auditor.
Well I have Suse 10 installed and the speed difference seems negligible to Debian on my PC ( AMD64 3.0G 1Gig Ram ) and other factors … ( like productivity, ease of use, latest features )… outway any 500ms difference in boot time IMO
This might be a different scenario on old hardware
my copy of SUSE 10.0 is still nowhere in sight!