SuSE has always been one of our favorite Linux distributions and this release is no disappointment. It fine-tunes SuSE’s offering and bundles a lot of value into one package. Experienced Linux users will appreciate the powerful bundled tools, while newbies will like the ease of use and stress-free installation. This version comes with five CDs, a DVD, and both user’s and administrator’s guides.
ExtremeTech Review: SuSE Linux Professional 9
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 find YaST too slow for me. It will not even resolve dependencies in some cases. Why should one have to go through the whole YaST routine after doing nothing to the config except just browsing throgh what is available? I also find that getting third party software for SuSE is rather difficult. I gave up on PythonCard on SuSE and decided to get Mandrake instead. But the distro seemed to be solid.
Does anyone know the difference between the 2-DVD and 5-CD SUSE Pro releases? Is one of the DVD’s near empty, because you can surely fit a lot more in ~9 gig than ~3.5. Is it compression?
FWIW, I agree with cb. SUSE 9 Pro is a solid and smooth distro, moreso than MDK for newbies, IMO. But YaST is indeed painfully slow. Third party software repositories are limited, but getting better.
the dvd is double sided
yast is slow but tons of easy to use module save my time alot!
Third party software repositories is ok for me.
on ftp suse u can find additional rpms.
except lindows, xandros i believe suse is the most friendly distro out there.
one thing to complain: too many cds/software. 2 cds is enough for me
Everything about SuSE is really ‘Kool’, but, however much I tried, I couldn’t get my wireless connectivity working.
Spent two full evenings on that, went through all the boards, etc. No avail.
My laptop is a Dell C840 – Dell Truemobile mini-PCI card.
No problems will all other distros…
for that reason alone I deduct a point from my grading system!
“Does anyone know the difference between the 2-DVD and 5-CD SUSE Pro releases.”
Correct as stated by “tetsuo”, the DVD is double sided. I learned there are some significant differences between the 5 CD’s and the DVD in the Pro version. I originally set up our comptuters with the DVD, but had to use the CD’s when I decided to reformat one computer without without having the DVD with me.
The DVD has Firebird, Opera and an old version of Netcape, the CD’s in “Pro” do not. There are many more games on the DVD. Also, some pretty cool scientific, mathematical and other programs that I could not find in the Pro CD install.
Don’t forget that apt-get / Synaptic is available for SUSE. I do not use it all of the time, but it does come in handy.
Overall, I found SUSE Pro 9 great and much more refined then version 8.1. This is another one of the distros that has stuff like Flash and Java set up “out of the box.” Downloading of MS Fonts and nVidia drivers works very well.
I would have to say Suse puts out one of the most solid and thought through distros available… They don’t just cripple a few things and call it new… As well the fact that Yast is built in Qt is one of the most important things…
I Removed everything that had any remote dependancies on gtk or it family of deps aside from glib wich is fine… The only real packages I wanted to rebuild from scratch were sane, SDL and mplayer.
Since the Suse build of KDE and arts had a few deps on either gtk or xmms and wasn’t compiled quite the way I like it so it was completely removed.
I run a Compaq X100 Presario notebook so I use the ATI packaged 3.7 radeon drivers and uninstalled Sax/yast x setup (depended on fvwm wich needed gtk) then removed all XDG menu traces /etc/opt… and /etc/xdg… and any windowsmaker packages)
Then I wrote up a binch of scripts that pull my favorite packages of CVS like all of kde, koffice, kdevelop, mplayer and all the kdeextras like kmplayer and k3b… set all the DO_NOT_COMPILE option for the stuff in kde I don’t like or the unmaintained parts…
I used the newly compiled qt 2.3.2 from suse (from kde.org) that way no deps are broken in yast…
and ofcouse the kernel is upgraded to 2.6.1 so i can get suspend working…
I have been doing embedded linux development for quite a few years now so know pretty much exactly what I want and I’m perfectly happy with that i have now…
i have absolutely no wireless issues at all, the notebook is centrino but i swapped the intel minipci card out for a long rance prism 3 based card that works like a charm (make sure you set the network mode to managed as it defaults to ad hoc by default and not many use that).
-Mike
I tried most of the iso distros in the past 5 years, SUSE is the best overal distribution (it was already better than RedHat on my hardware).
I’m using it every day and I very pleased with it’s stability. (The 5 CD version has Opera!)
Now i’m only going back to Win play games…
Why you don’t just try Slackware if you like to tweak your distro so much? The amount of pain is smaller because slackware provides and enviornment where things can be changed easily. You can even change the ini system if you don’t like it. Give slack a try and see how you like it.
Why remove all of gtk? You must really hate gtk…:)
“Windows has had it for years and there is simply no excuse at this point not to have it in Linux.”
That’s because Microsoft play an active role in its protocols’ development. PPTP is developed by Microsoft while L2TP is jointly developed by Microsoft and Cisco.
I ftp’d 9.0 for a change, i’ve normally bought the boxed set (since 6.4 so i’m a happy user). On the ftp version K3b and KSCD are not working properly. K3b won’t rip off the last track of a CD (its a 0.9CVS version). KSCD (this is an old problem prior to 9.0 which i reported to SUSE) will crash if you play a CD with FreeDB set up and no information for that CD exists.
K3B i’ve been able to resolve by downloading a SUSE rpm from another site that is a real 0.10 version.
Does anyone have the same problems when installing from DVD/CD?
I’ve just read teh review, and stumbled over this comment “We were also surprised to find that the CrossOver products weren’t included in the Wine Rack.” – I must say that since I’ve just bought Wine Rack, I’m 100% certain that Crossover Office and Plugin IS included 🙂
And no, I don’t care about America’s Army (the game that is), if I wan’t play it, then I download it…
Back to work I go 🙂
I hope to see that suse will include yum into the dist. And there should be more apt resp around cos programs from suse ftp is often at least 2 version behind.
I have tried several other distos-Corel 1.0, Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 and the freebie Vector Linux-on my homebuilt Soyo/AMD TBird. SuSE 9.0 beats them all hands down for ease of installation, logical and useable desktop, hassle free wireless connectivity and elegant and straight forward updating. Quicken and Tax Cut are the only reasons left that I haven’t completely transitioned.
Debian is my choice , it’s easy to install and maintain.
There is too much hype on linus comercial distributions.
Debian is my choice , it’s easy to install and maintain.
There is too much hype on linuX comercial distributions.
“”There is too much hype on linuX comercial distributions.””
Nope, there’s just too much hype on Linux. Even at OSNews there’s something like 4 or 5 times as many Linux stories when compared to any other OS. Independent of the worth of the OS (And there are plenty of good things about Linux) I, and at a guess others, am getting pretty bored with the whole hype machine that it seems to have created.
I would not call this article a review. It is mostly fluff and filler for the magazine. I would title this article “Positive results with SUSE 9 Pro”. A real review would go into the day to day usefulness of the distro, and not just the install of it.
I do use SUSE 9 pro, and I would rate it an 9 out of 10 for day to day usefulness. I give it this rating because, some of the configuration tasks are not very intuitive through Yast. Such as, where and how to set proxies if needed, are in the miscilaneous section under rc config files. Once I found that this was where I needed to set the proxies it was easy to use this distro. In addition, to setting proxies there, the user is also required to set proxies for Mozilla, Netscape and Opera independently of the proxies in the rc config area. This is very annoying, it should be universal for all apps once it is set in the config files, but alas it is not so (yet).
While some people do not like SUSE because of Yast, I think it is one of the stongest points in the distro. I think that for the future, SUSE should look into renaming Yast to Configuration Center, or something along those lines. In addition, I think they should also make each applet in Yast less confusing as to it’s purpose.
I’ve tried SuSE and have found I have mixed feelings on it. In some respects it shows a great deal of work on the part of their developpers in really putting things together in an intuitive and professional way. (though I still find things in there that seem like its just thrown together to make SuSE the ‘biggest’ distro out there, some call that ‘bloat’ 😉 Their GUI based tools are pretty good. However, therein also lies some of its problems. I have no objection to availability of graphical tools to get things done, what I really, really hate is being constrained to use them. Example, such as installing the Nvidia kernel patch. Usually, for me, a pretty install thing to do, apply the patch, edit XF86COnfig and bang its good. With SuSE I specifically have to use their Sax2 tool to get it to work right, I don’t like that.
Another thing that turns me off is their lackluster GNOME support. Sorry, GTK based apps and such don’t seem to have the level of attention that KDE has on this distro. Their choice, no problem with that, just not to my liking.
And finally another thing that really turns me off is their license. I’m not so hard-core with this that I’ll insist on calling everything GNU/* and refuse to use NVIDIA drivers, but still this is something I keep in mind. They have manage to turn their linux distro into a non-free product. On top of that, they will not make the terms of that license clear and unambiguous for others to understand. Kind of defeats much of the purpose of using Linux if you ask me.
It doesn’t play DVDs. (I had to go on the web and get a DVD player.)
I couldn’t get my Linksys wireless card to work (no matter what, and I spent a lot of time on it. Linksys is a very common card and should have worked!)
As mentioned…no cross over plugin.
Other than that it works great.
its one of the best on hardware support along with xandros, lindows
Check your wireless card and see if it uses the Broadcom chipset. No Linux distribution can use them since there is no driver for it. Broadcom isn’t the friendliest toward Linux at the moment. Sourceforge is working on one right now called ndiswrapper, but it only works for kernels 2.4.23 or above and the 2.6 series.
I have a WMP11 wireless card that also doesn’t work. v2.0 has a prism chipset and works fine in Linux, but v2.7 and v4.0 switched to Broadcom chipset and no longer functions in Linux due to the absence of said driver.
Does anyone know how I can get rid of Geramik under KDE? Whatever I chabnge, whatever I do, when I’m under KDE Geramik is used as the default GTK+ theme. Its ugly and it hurts my eyes. I would appreciate it if someone could help me, thanks allot.
Marc.
No decent community forums in which SuSE staff participate.
So I went with Xandros instead.
Hey anonymous, you’re right. We had a copy edit error and it should not have said “with the wine rack.” Thanks for catching that, I just fixed it. 🙂