“I’ve had SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional running for about a month now, its a good step forward from version 9. As usual its fixed lots of annoyances but created more.” Read More at ImAFish.co.uk.
SuSE 9.1 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“however hardware support is still lacking in some areas and stability isn’t perfect”
i’m sure it’s true for mandrake and fedora
that funny to have some problem and said the distribution is not very stable…
if you think like that none os are stable…
this is the first linux distro i’ve tried that actually supports all the hardware on my old pc. mandrake couldn’t do it, lindows couldn’t… but i’m pretty impressed with my own first impressions of suse.
I realize this is OS news, and i’m not saying posting this article was bad. However, most articles posted here are all the same thing. With this article you would have to know something about SuSe to understand certain parts of it. Most of the reviews on here are just stating that installation was easy and this worked and this didnt work. What’s the point in that? We can all search user forums to figure that stuff out.
I would have liked to have seen more of what Yast2 was about. or what kind of features Suse offers that other distrobutions don’t that would make me want to try it out. This was not a review.
Maybe for these types of articles instead of being called reviews they could be called blogs!
From the article:
“SuSE 9.1 is an improvement but as I said in my opening line its a step forward on one front yet a step back on another. Take 3D for instance with my ATI card not working.”
This is not a SuSE issue, but rather an ATI issue. ATI is behind the curve for providing Linux drivers for their products.
Somehow, I am having the feeling that this release was made in a hurry, resulting in quite a few really bad bugs which should not have made their into the final product. My SuSE 9.1 Pro installation kernel panics whenever I try to mount a XFS partition, YaST could not detect my logitech serial mouse, and left me with a completely garbled screen while trying to probe my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX card (integrated with my nForce2 board). Fedora 1/2, Mandrake do not have any such issues in the same box.
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The GNOME installation sucks, (wierd issues with the theme), KDE is good, look and feel of OpenOffice.org rocks, but I think I’ll go back to Fedora.
“SuSE 9.1 is an improvement but as I said in my opening line its a step forward on one front yet a step back on another. Take 3D for instance with my ATI card not working.”
I have been running ati drivers on suse 9.1 since it came out. All you have to do is download the Suse packaged rpm’s from their ftp site.
Hardware support is the same across all distributions. Hardware support is done at the kernel level and all distros are using the same kernel. Maybe one distro installs with a newer kernel that has more support, but you can’t say that it supports more hardware because you could just as easily upgrade your kernel on any other distribution. Hardware _DETECTION_ is another thing, but hardware _SUPPORT_ is the same, regardless of distribution.
@undeadpenguin
Hardware support is the same across all distributions.
That simply isn’t true. Generally speaking it is, but most distributions add hundreds of patches to the stock kernel that add additional hardware support or change the guts of the kernel. This results in some having more support than others, and some having broken support.
I don’t know about kernel patches adding hardware support being the case a lot of the time. I know that a lot of major distro’s majorly patch the kernel, but I think that drivers are, for the most part, coming from the vanilla kernel. The modules included in a default kernel might be different, but I have to agree with undeadpenguin in saying that’s more of an issue with hardware *detection*.
Speaking of which, I’d like to see a review of all the hardware detection tools. Lets see, there’s YaST, kudzu, Knoppix scripts, gentoo scripts…. How many detection tools are just a series of unnamed scripts?
‘Most of the reviews on here are just stating that installation was easy and this worked and this didnt work.‘
I have noticed this as a general, and disappointing, trend in linux distro reviews. It seems like all the reviews I read say something to the effect of, “This is better than the last release, but I’m not quite sure it’s better than this other distro. It seems like some things are better, and some worse, but, ultimately, they both do the same things every other major distros do. There were some bumps here and there, but I like it! Linux is (almost) ready for the desktop now!”
I guess that’s fine, but it sure would be nice if they actually said something interesting, brought up more meaningful differences between distros, or otherwise had a point.
The Personal edition comes on one CD and is aimed at the first time user for Linux. It has a limited number of packages compared to the Professional and normally contains one program for a certain task, for instance Konqueror (www.konqueror.org) is the only web browser included.
This is untrue: Firfox 8.44 is included on the Personal CD, but it is not installed by default.
“…there were no 3D ATI (www.ati.com) drivers available…”
Not true. SuSE is hosting the driver – not ATI.
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/ATI/suse9…
I have it installed, it’s for kernel 2.6 and it works.
If help is needed then there is the SuSE X mailing list
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-xfree86/
“I had considerable problems installing Xine … I settled for Mplayer thanks to some RPMs found on packman.links2linux.org/”
That site posted an update to Xine a few days ago. It takes care of the problems I had with the previous version – also from packman. But MPlayer from packman works well too.
A site equivalent to Packman but for Fedora is
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/packages.php
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/Linux_376_Release_Notes.html
I believe it’s from ATI, not SuSE.
Exactly – this shouldn’t be called a review, it’s just a list of what you could find out in an hour or so by downloading the free ISO. In order to be a proper review that might tell me something that wouldn’t be so easy to find out myself, far more work is needed.
Were there any bugs or crashes? Do updates apply cleanly without breaking any configuration? Does the package manager get confused if you install a bunch of custom packages? How easy is it to compile software for which there are no RPMS. How long does it take to boot/shut down? What about configuring as a server? How good is the QA – try installing some lesser used packages to see if the quality is consistent.
I am normally a Slackware user, but I was given a copy of Suse 9.1 DVD from a friend who had both sets of media and did not have a DVD drive. I have to admit I am really impressed with Suse. The installation was straight forward, comes with a healthy amount of applications for all kinds of usage from video editing, music editing, guitar tuning, multimedia, web surfing, development, to gamining. It is also the first “user friendly” distro that configured every hardware that I have in my laptop including the SIS Win modem that is installed and firewire card.
Updates. I love YOUR with YAST2. So far updates have been very good and often and automatic. For example, my kernel has been updated twice with no intervention from me.
For the first time in a while I am running a distro other than Slackware. Suse 9.1 has proven to be a great distro to run on laptop.
Jim
Hey, we all love screenshots. Here is a Screeny of my laptop running Suse 9.1
http://www.angelfire.com/ar/jtessiers/sus91.html
What they should do is use these os for a month and than do the review that way you’ll know the strengths and the weaknesses are. There’s too many fly by reviews. They spend one day or two and than give us the reviews instead of going into detail that only a months use would give.
Very nice screenshot,Jimmt. I like your backdrop. That’s cool.
After countless installations of mandrake 10, fedora core 2, suse 9.0 pro, 9.1 pro, and slackware 10 rc2 for the past month…I have to say Fedora and Suse is the best. If your a total newbie dual booting into linux you should get suse because everything is done for you. (The windows mounting, playing mp3/mpeg files) Fedora core 2 seems more stable to me but I had search through forums on how to mount my windows drive, play mp3s, etc. One thing i learned is if you use fedora core 2 go get APT-GET.
Just wanted to say suse 9.1 pro is a great product. 5 CDs…all the software you want are on it and with tools like YAST upgrading is easy.
If you’re going to use SuSE 9.1 and know something about Linux, I wouldn’t bother with the Personal Edition unless you want to hunt down all the missing packages. I tried the free ISO and it doesn’t seem to install GNOME at all (which I prefer as a desktop) and doesn’t come with rsh/rcp, pdksh, slocate, thunderbird or mozilla (!! But you can install MozillaFirebird from the CD – yes, note the capitalisation there for the RPM).
Overall, SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition is probably fine for newbies who’ve not seen a Linux distro before, but if you’ve used the shed-load of stuff that comes with Fedora Core 2, then you’ll miss some packages and should get the Professional Edtion. I’ll stick with FC2 myself.
Well, I’m not an expert, but I have tried several distros in the last months, including some using live cds.
ALL correctly detected my hardware, except for Suse personal.
Suse wasn’t able to detect and/or configure my video, monitor model and network card(a generic intel based card, wich is detected even by windows 98 and all other linux distros)
Some distros I’ve tested recently: Lindows 3.x/4.x, Lycoris,
Red Hat, Debian Woody, Fedora core 1 and 2, Mandrake, Kurumin 2.x(brazilian), Kurumin Kacique 2.x, Connectiva 8 and 9(brazilian),Kalango v1/v2(brazilian), Xandros v1, v2, Xandros personal, Dizinha Linux(brazilian), Knoppix 3.4, Morphix, Lindows Live CD v4, Skolelinux, Peanut,etc.
Back to Knoppix for now and getting ready to re-install Morphix – or maybe try the new free Xandros Personal-.:D