“A new SuSE is always interesting in the way that life-threatening sports are interesting. It might seem to be going along just fine, but in an instant disaster can strike. So it was with the usual wariness that I put Suse 8.1 on a machine here. Nor was it just any old machine — it was the one my wife uses. “ Read the review at LinuxAndMain. OSNews published recently a review of SuSE 8.1 PRO. In the meantime, SuSE posted a “live CD” version of SuSE 8.1 ready to be downloaded, burned and run by everyone.
Impressions of SuSE 8.1
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve never done an upgrade with SuSE, despite the fact that it has been the big Linux distro I’ve used for a long time. I just like to start clean. So, I don’t know, but can understand the problems that could be encountered in doing that.
I agree with him (as Eugenia saw just by looking at screenshots) about the interface of package selection – they have complicated it…or at least added too many views…package selection in 8.0 was better, I think, and should have left that way. There was nothing wrong with it.
Aside from that, I cannot agree with the reviewer on almost all other issues of importance. True, overall, I like 8.1 more than 8.0, but 8.0 definitely did not suck. The reviewer seems to have a generally bad impression of SuSE due to the problem of upgrading, which I understand is the type of thing that could put one in that frame of mind. Yet, the overall impression he gives of SuSE is not a true reflection of it, in my opinion. It is a very solid Linux distro.
I will have to agree with the reviewer that the Packager is just “awful”, as he says. He is better than I am on English, so his paragraph about it, explains the Packager situation pretty well. The packager allows you to do crazy things, it is “powerful” in that sense, but at the end, it doesn’t solve the actual problems, in fact, it complicates them.
The Linux & Main link comes up blank… Linux & Main links often come up blank. Even clicking the link from the main page http://www.linuxandmain.com/index.php the review comes up blank.
Reviewers and technical pubs perform a valuable service… still, it seems a tad ironic to criticize other people’s products, when one’s own online publication does not post reliably.
Try a few times. It is loading ok here.
Alice: are you using Mozilla? The linuxandmain server might not like it if you are using the pipelining option. (Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Proxy) If you are using it. try turning it off and see if that helps.
I also cann’t use this linuxandmain-Link (Opera 6.03/Linux). There just comes rubbuish on the screen. But I think the problem is by the linuxadmin server…
I am also using Opera 6.03 and (Mandrake) Linux 9 as we speak. And I am even behind a firewall. But the site works fine for me. Weird…
I’m getting the rubbish using opera 6.05 on windows also.
I’m OS X and the link worked for me and I posted. Seeing these other posts, I decided to try the link again. LOL, now OS X cannot recognize what kind of file it is! Something’s gone haywire.
I just rebooted on WindowsXP, IE 6 does have the same problem you guys are seeing. Send an email to the webmaster…
I just tried a couple other links on Linux and Main and got the same problem on all of them. I think it’s pretty safe to say at this point it’s not a browser/platform problem. Although, I tried to open Linuxandmain.com with IE and it asked me if I wanted to download a linuxandmain file. ::shrugs:: I can wait.
I am on FreeBSD with Opera 6.03 and I have no problem to view this link.
IE 6 and Phoenix 0.3 couldn’t display for me. One was blank, the other was garbled.
Now it’s working okay.
The webmaster has just fixed it. He emailed me back a few moments ago.
we got hammered by /. on monday and were trying to use jpcache to cache pages. it worked for a little while, then started shipping garbage. we’ve turned it off now, though, so all should be well; if you get the garbage, hit reload.
dep
Your reviews are excellent… Please keep them coming.
Tonight.
It was supposed to go live on Monday, but I postponed for reasons that I will explain in the article.
I don’t know about SuSE 8.1, but I sure do agree with his comment about Midnight Commander! I *love* that program1 I always install it when trying a new distribution because to me, there is no easier way to fix broken XF86Config files. It really should be installed by default, IMHO.
Starts with bad opinion about SuSE and goes further to bad one about KDE 3.0. Every change he doesn’t understand is bad (Lilo->Grub, like his famous kaddressbook disagreement). He joshes Postfix because he runs sendmail. ReiserFS is bad because he doesn’t trust it. SaX2 of course couldn’t outplay the XF86Config created by an expert (guess who). In summary, not worth reading.
Hurrah, now I can read it.
I appreciate the comments on the ‘potholes’. My practice has always been to never trust upgrading an operating system- alway start clean. Windblows, Linux, Mac, it doesn’t matter- operating system upgrades simply are not reliable, and even if things seem to work OK, you’re still loaded with bales of trashy bytes and cruft.
It is not a light decision to do a major upgrade, and given the fast pace of Linux and Open Source development, I think it’s going to be painful for a long time. This was more than an OS upgrade- EVERYTHING was upgraded- KDE, Gnome, etc. That’s a lot for one sitting. The fact that it worked as painlessly as it did is a real testament to the quality of the various products- can you imagine trying to do this on winblows? Upgrade the OS, and MS Office, and Internet Exploder, and all your anti-virus and Norton Utilities, etc….. such a one-shot upgrade would not even be possible.
Hence the reason why I like the way Redhat has done their package management in Redhat 8.0
btw. If you are still running it, the sluggishness of the configuration applications is due to Redhat moving all their tools to Python 2.2 + GTK2, thus allowing them to write one lot of configuration tools that run on both the Itanium and i386 without any modification.
[i]The problem is, I don’t see where GRUB is an improvement on lilo
Seems like he has never installed a new kernel, reboot and find himself
staring at a ‘LI’, just because he forgot to re-run lilo before the reboot.
I’ve done it.. Numerous times too
Where did that bold come from? I’m getting too tired I think.
I’ve installed SuSE 8.1 in under 25 minutes
and I like the new way you can select options
from one window. You can see all options at once and if you do not like it you can simply change them.
I’ve tried at least 4 other distros but no one
delivered me that kind of flexibility.
Also SuSE offers an optimized kernel for my
AMD Athlon processor so I do not need to compile
one for myself.
I especially enjoy the new KDE which is really beautiful.
Also the ReiserFS is much performanter for small files
and at operations on directories
(all directory entries are stored in one btree and therefore these kind of operations are extremely fast)
but for reading larger files (10 megs) it degrades in performance compared to ext2.
Some things could be made better – for example the firewall2 script which is buggy. But all in all
SuSE 8.1 offers a really good working and
playing platform.
I am so happy. I downloaded the live evaluation version. It is the first version to get the sound working on my HP ZT1150 notebook. The others would get it into an endless loop and I would have to reboot.
I am overnighting my copy.
If anybody else has had similar problems with sound I encourage you to give SuSE a try. Fonts don’t look as good as RedHat though, but the Professional version is a third of the price of Redhat.
I’d have to agree, there’s nothing wrong with SuSE for most people. The reviewers potholes seem more like cracks in the pavement. On the other hand, here’s a real pothole story.
I’ve yet to get 8.1 pro to work on my machine with a Promise Fast-Trak SX6000 ide raid contoller. I can get it to install by adding these options to the manual install: linux ide0=0x1f0, 0x3f6,14 ide1=0x170,0x376,15, ide2=0 ide3=0 ide4=0 ide5=0 ide6=0 ide7=0 ide8=0 ide9=0 and then after the boot sequence, load the i2o drivers and away I go on with the rest of the install. The problem is that after the install finishes, reboots, and is well into loading drivers, including the i2o ones, it can’t find the boot volume for VFS or whatever it was (can’t remember exactly). Funny thing is my SuSE 8.0 pro installs without a hitch – no manual kernel parameters or drivers needed.
Redhat 8.0 on the other hand, is unable to even let me load the drivers manually which is ironic because the i2o drivers display a “Copyright Redhat” notice when loaded under SuSE. I’m only given the choice of loading SCSI or network drivers manually under Redhat. What’s with that?
SuSE is the kind of distribution that uses what’s latest and greatest. In my case I lost the ability to use a driver that worked automatically in the previous version because of a kernel upgrade. I’m disappointed a little but I haven’t given up yet. I’m back on SuSE 8.0 for now and if I can figure out what’s going wrong with the install, I’ll try loading SuSE 8.1 again. All I can say is hey der hey!
My god what a “#$”#$”#$ing whiner Dennis is. This has to be one of the most biased reviews I have ever seen. WAAaaaAAh !!! I am used to another distro and why can’t all the other distros be just like me favorite. Waaaaaaaaah !!!