SuSe Linux 9 experience

[Mac the Knife]

This isn't meant to be an exhaustive or detailed review - just some remarks I thought might be interesting after a month or so of use. Note that I don't run many games, so can't comment about that side of it. I'm not a REAL techie so please forgive errors & omissions.

SuSe Linux 9 follows on from SuSe Linux 8, which I have been using intermittently for the last year or so. Although I found SuSe 8 fun to play with there was never really any question of moving moving to it as a main OS. Installation was fairly painless and the troublesome X Window configuration much easier. Unfairly, I was running it on a Pentium II/230MHz/256MB and found it slow and fiddly to configure. I had a bit of knowledge of Linux having tinkered with various earlier distros (Corel, Slackware) and considerable DOS/Win9.x experience but I had to spend a lot of time poking in books and HOWTOs and on the Web before everything was up and running smoothly and all the machines could see and talk to each other on my home network.

The versions of OpenOffice and StarOffice were clunky and idiosyncratic and (crucially) had trouble opening Powerpoint presentations. Without a good graphics/photoediting package I couldn't do much. I though Konqueror a clumsy web browser and the early Opera not much better.

SuSe 9 on a PIII/800MHz/256MB is a whole other ball-game (still unfair compared to XP on an Athlon 2700+ though faster than Win98 on the same machine). Installation is quick, the wizards slick and if I hadn't been interfacing to a M$ network I'd have been up and running in less time than it takes to install Windows. The user's Windows drives (this is a dual boot system using GRUB) are now found and mounted automatically - a great convenience. The KDE 3.1 desktop (I haven't used GNOME much) and general interface is graphically gorgeous, much more Windows like and easy to navigate. OpenOffice 1.1.0 is a huge improvement and in many ways better than Office 97 - no more trouble working with Office files, though presentations with heavy graphics content take quite a while to convert. Ximian Evolution is a great email client and a vastly superior Outlook substitute.

Konqueror is now a reasonable browser, though I prefer Opera or the superb Mozilla. As a file manipulator I still find Konqueror clumsy and inferior to Windows Explorer. Midnight Commander, though beloved by Linux gurus, has to be the clunkiest file tool I've ever used - even early versions of PCTools did it better - though the interface has improved a bit.

I'm still struggling with photoediting/image manipulation - I'm so used to Paint Shop Pro that transitioning to the GIMP is painful. The whole approach is very different and though the GIMP is very powerful (it can do some things easily that are tricky in Paint Shop Pro) it still feels clumsy - presumably I'll get used to it. There is no equivalent to Irfanview (though Irfan tells me that it works under WINE and he is planning a port) and sorting large numbers of images is a chore (or I just haven't found the right app).

As far as bundled software goes the main problem is sorting through the sheer amount of stuff that you get! F'rinstance, there's an excellent Palm desktop buried in the mass. It can be difficult to decide which of dozens of apps for a particular task (such as CD writing) you are most comfortable with and work well for you.

The equivalent to the Start menu works well as it is, but is almost impossible to configure to your liking - I'm told that KDE 3.2 will fix this.

Surprisingly, for such a network orientated OS, interfacing smoothly to a Windows network is not so easy. Samba and LISa/ResLISA are still difficult to set up (for a newbie) and involve a lot of arcane fiddling with configuration files that could easily have been managed with a wizard. But perhaps they figured that anyone on a network would have a tame sysadmin!

Graphics drivers are the biggest pain, only NVidia have consistently backed Linux and other manufacturers support is spotty. Suse provide basic drivers for common cards that may or may not be enough. Matrox have finally released a driver for the Parhelia line that works well with my G450, but although 1024 x 768 x 24 is perfect I'm still trying to get 800 x 600 and dual-display working on my 17" monitors (it should but doesn't yet). Prospective users would do well to check driver availability and match the card to the OS rather than vice-versa. This is where the Mac has the advantage of course - when you've only got Mac hardware then it's easy to make sure that the Mac OS can handle it!

Most of my irritations have been due to engrained Windows habits and being used to the sloppy M$ default security model, but for the first-time user, not over-encumbered by Micro$haft habits, SuSe 9 would be eminently usable. So I guess Linux has finally really come to the desktop.

The kicker of course is that you get the OS, Office and a whole slew of other stuff for less than 10% of what you'd normally pay (for the M$ package). Spread this across a few machines in a small office environment and the cost shrinks proportionately. Pretty much a no-brainer if I had a small business.

So, Mr. Average Joe, if you are considering buying a computer, give some thought towards putting the money that you would have spent on the OS/apps/antivirus/firewalls into simply getting better hardware and running SuSe Linux 9.

[goates]

I've never tried SUSE but it does sound like it's really close to being usable by everyone. The biggest problem now is getting hardware support so you don't have to worry so much about what will work and what won't.

I've had Red Hat running on my computer along side WindowsXP, but haven't been able to switch completely yet. Too many games will only run under windows and there isn't a decent flight sim yet for Linux, although there is one being developed. Unfortunately Red Hat is discontinuing the desktop version and will only be supporting their enterprise linux systems (note that this does include a workstation edition) and is moving the desktop version over to Fedora Core. Fedora is basically just Red Hat with all trademarks removed and the newest versions of the included software. Fedora Release 1 is definitely not ready for the average user. I had trouble even getting it to see my video card (an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) while Red Hat didn't have a problem at all. The next release of Fedora is looking a little better, but most users should look elsewhere for now.

I have tried Mandrake in the past but not recently. Has anyone around here tried it?

Also, for somone new to Linux, the CD based Knoppix or Gnoppix might make good intros. They run from the CD so you don't have to reformat your hard drive.

goates

[Mac the Knife]

Hmmm....I hope my little review didn't put people off Linux, I was just recounting my off-the-cuff thoughts as I thought I made clear.

I should say that on SuSe 9 installed cleanly on the very first run. It found every one of my devices (including my extra Promise Ultra66 IDE controller) without prompting or errors and booted cleanly first shot. There was none of the tinkering with X Window that I'd had to do with previous Linuxes to get the mouse working or anything. The install has a HUGE database of hardware and will find most things unless it's something very esoteric (and if it is there's almost always an answer on the Net).

It didn't recognise the G450 video card, but installed a very workable driver that it thought would be OK and it was - I even had 800x600. Dual display works but obviously not any of the Matrox Windows-specific goodies - otherwise tiptop. Only when I installed Matrox's own beta driver did I lose 800x600 and I'm sure it's just a misconfigured file - I can't be bothered to fix it right now 'cos it isn't a big problem. As the number of Linux users increases it makes more and more sense for hardware sellers to include Linux drivers and many now do. And as the previously often wildly different distros converge on a common Linux architecture this becomes easier for them.

My networking problems are certainly less than trying to get WfWG (Windows 3.11) up and about on a par with Windows 95 - the answers were certainly easier to find and editing simple text configuration files is a lot easier (and less dangerous) than poking around in a single monolithic and cryptic Registry. Being impatient if I can't do something I usually plunge in and do a quick hack - as I read the HOWTO's more carefully I often discover that all I actually needed to do was add an extra line to a configuration file.

Goates, there's no need to reformat your hard drive at all. Most modern distros will automatically shift Windows partitions up a bit and make their own partition using some of your free space. Linux is much leaner than the Micro$haft hog and needs far less space. The only caveat is that Linux can't (yet) read NTFS volumes directly so it may not see your Windows partition. My easy solution is to keep all my datafiles on a separate FAT32 partition - that way both OSes can see and use them.

Gotta say again, if I'd been a first time user I'd probably never have noticed many of the little things I mention and would have plunged straight into doing all the stuff most people do with their PCs quite effortlessly. Freedom from viruses, worms, hacks and M$'s authoritarian greed is a good feeling too.

The new Linuxes coming out are are a big leap from the previous generation and SuSe 9 is a peach.

[swh]

Mac,

Whats it like on non intel hardware, looking at putting linux on either my Sun SS5 or the dual proc sun E250 for Kylix programming in my spare time.

Edit : still learning to spell ....

[Tinstaafl]

I usually lean towards Debian based distros. I like the .deb package system compared to .rpm. It's a cow to install from the Debian disks compared to the other, more slick distros. Roll on the next release!

I had Corel Linux dual booting on a PII laptop but tried others too. I'm yet to reinstall Linux on to it following a reformat. I can't find a solution to needing to use an external monitor after the screen died.

I have Mandrake 9 on an old Pentium 166. It took damn near 24 hrs to install & runs rather slowly. I haven't HDPARM'd the HD yet. Knoppix didn't seem to like it.

I've been looking for a distro for my new laptop. Knoppix worked rather well. Wasn't game to try the beta Knoppix HD install though. Hadn't backed up my data recently. Just got a copy of Xandros which is also Debian based. Have yet to burn the .ISOs.

[Mac the Knife]

swh - I don't know. Linux was originally designed for the x86 architecture but there are many ports to other platforms including SPARC. Sun is currently very hot on Linux - http://wwws.sun.com/software/linux/ I just had a quick Google and there's plenty of stuff for you to look at.

SuSe has SUSE LINUX 7.3 for Sun Microsystems' SPARC architecture downloadable - see http://www.suse.com/us/company/press/press_releases/archive02/SUN_linux.html

Let's stay on track with Linux for the average Joe or the mods will quite rightly get pi**ed off.

Tinny - I think a lot of people like you (and me) loaded an older distro on older hardware a couple of years ago to try out - found it slow and hard to set up and lost interest. The new kernel and distros on up-to-date hardware is a completely different proposition.

[goates]

Mac - I know you can just move the partitions around with most new distros. This is still more than a little intimidating for most people though and that is where the CD based distros come in. You can introduce people to Linux without having to mess with their existing data.

goates

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

swh
Wats it like on non intel hardware, looking at putting linux on either my Sun SS5

It does depend to some extent whether you are looking to use your SS5 as a workstation or server (but don't get too hung up on that) but IMNSHO the cleanest and easiest "free" unix to put onto Sun kit is NetBSD NetBSD/sparc (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc/) and www.netbsd.org (http://www.netbsd.org/).
(which also runs, BTW, on almost any hardware that you can think of :cool: ... ) It installs very easily and comes with a version of XFree86 that's already customised to run with Sun's graphics adapters. You should be able to get an SS5 fully installed in under 5 minutes :E

or the dual proc sun E250 for Kylix programming in my spare time.
Where did you manage get one of those from :cool:

Please get back to me if you want any more info on gettign NetBSD to play :ok:

/RTFM

[Edited to add sparc-port URL]

[swh]

RTFM,

Can pick up the sun hardware fairly cheap, I have also got solaris 9, but need to have linux to run Kylix.

Looking for a stable kernel for cross platform win/linux software developmemt.

Good to see they seem to be more stable and easy to use/install, SGI and Sun now are embracing linux and other open source software.

Mac,

Thanks for the link, will chck it out to see it it supports the 64 bit CPU's

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

swh,
Thanks for the link, will chck it out to see it it supports the 64 bit CPU's
Ah, in that case you may want to checkout the sparc64 port... you should be able to figure out the URL :)
but need to have linux to run Kylix
There's linux compatability support, of course. Haven't played with it myself, but may be sufficient for your needs...

/RTFM

OK, it's www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/ (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/)

[frankpdunn]

I had a play with Sun's new Java Desktop System this week, it's SUSE 8.1 with a "proper" integrated look and feel - uses GNOME basically. It hung together pretty well, what was interesting was that you could get quite low down in configuration options within the GUI. And no it wasn't YAST, tho' YAST was there. Includes StarOffice 7, mail app was based on Evolution.

[RobAnt]

Just an update on SuSE. They have been acquired lock stock and barrel by Novell. This gives them both a tremendous market advantage, and I'm sure we'll be seeing more from them in the not too distant future.

SuSE now have access to Novell's enormous market place, and Novell now have a 100% desktop to server environment upon which to build - neatly sidestepping Microsoft most of the way.

Blimey, even MS Office isn't safe now!

RobAnt
+

[Mac the Knife]

Well, Office certainly isn't safe (in any sense of the word) - additionally, IBM wants to migrate Office to Linux http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/13/HNlinuxoffice_1.html

And with Codeweavers' CrossOver Office you can run OfficeXP, 2000 and '97 (and PhotoShop, AutoCAD, PaintShop Pro, Lotus Notes, Outlook and a whole stack of other things under Linux.

SuSe's Wine Rack http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/winerack/ bundles CrossOver Office, CrossOver Plugin and WineX all together for a reasonable price. You can even run Internet Explorer if you're a retro masochist.

Mind you, OpenOffice is now getting so good that the need for M$'s clunky and expensive behemoth is moot, to say the least. And Ximian Evolution puts Outlook in the shade.

And with regards to my moans about missing Irfanview, I discovered gThumb tucked away in my Suse 9 distro. It isn't as slick as Irfan's masterwork but does essentially the same job. That's one of the problems - there's often an app. somewhere that does exactly what you need but no-one tells you about it (no commercial advertisements) - you just have to find out for yourself.

And for the more adventurous, Warren Woodford's MEPIS Debian distro http://www.mepis.org/ looks very very nice indeed. At $9.95 it's probably the bargain of the century (apart from Manhattan Island that is...).

Linux really seems to be exploding now (the new 2.6 kernel is very serious stuff) and the M$ code leak can only add petrol to the flames. How pleasant to see choice coming back into the OS game.

[Chaffers]

I've been playing around with Linux (JDS especially) quite a bit recently, should be installing and testing the latest version of Mandrake in the next day or so, hence I'll add my thoughts / problems / experiences then.

[Mac the Knife]

I found this helpful.

"One of the biggest difficulties in migrating from Windows to Linux is the lack of knowledge about comparable software. Newbies usually search for Linux analogs of Windows software, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they often don't know too much about Windows :). This list of Linux equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software is based on our own experience and on the information obtained from the visitors of this page (thanks!)."

http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/table.shtml

[Mac the Knife]

There is an excellent review of the various free and commercial Linux distributions at http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5886901845.html

Three that I will be investigating

I know a couple of people who run Vector Linux http://www.vectorlinux.com/ on old machines like 32MB/133Hz and it seems to work remarkably well - don't retire that old hoss yet!

Mepis Linux http://www.mepis.org/ is free, Debian based and visually stunning - excellent reviews, liveCD so you can test it before installing it.

Xandros Desktop OS version 2 http://www.xandros.com/ is a beautiful distro and includes Codeweavers' Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin so you can run most Windows apps (IE, Media Player, Office, PhotoShop, Visio, etc) directly.

The review above is very worth reading.

Finally (non-Linux), The OpenCD http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/ provides a good selection of free open source software for Windows. Any of the selection, particularly OpenOffice 1.1 (a full fledged M$ compatible office suite) is worth the 5 quid (GB pounds) asking price.

[Tinstaafl]

I've recently found a great live Linux distro optimised for recovery/repair duties. It's called System Rescue & can be found at

http://www.sysresccd.org

It has a range of useful tools including graphical partitioners (that can handle NTFS), NTFS file format support, partition imagers, even ACPI.

I'm very impressed!

[Mac the Knife]

Good review of SuSE 9.1 at

http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=126

Should be in my hot little hands on monday....

Where the sticky gone ???

I see SCOX is at $5.15 now....not long before the end...

[Evo]

Mac, it hadn't had a new post in two months and I figured that anybody who was interested had already seen it. I wanted to clear some space at the top for the free software thread, which I think is more relevant to most PPRuNers. By all means feel free to link this thread from there. If you feel like refreshing this thread for 9.1 I may sticky it again for a bit.

As for SCO, I couldn't possibly comment ;)

[Evo]

Charlie

If you can beg or borrow a broadband connection somewhere, SuSE do a very good 'live' CD - just download, burn to a CD-R and boot from the CD. It lets you try out SuSE Linux without needing to involve your hard disk. If you don't like it, you just bin the CD and that's that. No partitioning, dual booting or anything else.

If you do like it, and would like to buy a copy of SuSE, then I would go for the personal edition. As a beginner, you will need few, if any, of the extras offered by the Pro version, and if you get hooked then you can very easily upgrade. Install is excellent, and SuSE offer something called YOU (YaST Online Update, where YaST is Yet Another Setup Tool :) ) which works very well for updates. Security is excellent, although you do have the freedom to make it less so. I'm still on SuSE v9 at home and work, but i'm very happy indeed with it.

One thing that I frequently say is that if you have only used Windows, Linux is a bit different. While both offer the usual sort of point'n'click interface, underneath are decades of differing views about what constitutes an operating system. However, Linux has made great strides in usability over the last few years (the first time I installed SuSE, probably six years ago, it suddenly lapsed into German and popped up a dialogue box saying "Achtung! ..... Ja, Nein?". I clicked "Ja" and it formatted my hard disk. D'oh). Stick with it, ask questions - here or elsewhere, there are some very helpful Linux newbie forums - and I hope you enjoy! One day you'll find yourself wondering why people spend hundreds of pounds on another operating system...

[Evo]

OK - I don't really know details for the pieces of software that you mention, other than Lotus support for Linux is not great (despite all the money IBM spend advertising Linux!). However, there is a great piece of software called VMWare which allows you to run a Windows 'virtual machine' from within Linux (you can boot Windows in a window on a Linux machine, and run native Windows software in that - I use it to run Office XP and Lotus Notes on my Linux PC at work). Highly recommended.

Virus protection isn't needed at present - there are proof-of-concept viruses that will infect Linux, but none of them are a problem in the wild. The Linux security model means that, assuming you are sensible, trojans are not an issue because general users don't have permission to do anything damaging to the machine. Security holes are more of a problem (as are trojans that exploit them) but are still rare for personal use - most holes are in software that is of professional interest, web servers and the like. These can be patched using YaST online update. The "out of the box" security settings seem very good in SuSE 9, although I haven't explored them in detail.

Finally, Linux is free - you're just paying SuSE for the cost of the CD and for customer support. You can use one set of disks to install on as many PCs as you like, although support options may be more limited. If you want customer support for multiple PCs they may ask for more money.

[Mac the Knife]

Well Charlie S - Evo has answered pretty much all the points you raised. Laptops used to be a bit iffy with Linux since they often have non-standard hardware for which drivers can be hard to find. That said, on a older laptop like yours 9.1 will probably have the drivers anyway.

I replaced 9.0 on one of my machines with 9.1 and was a bit miffed when the upgrade didn't go as smoothly as I expected. Nathing drastic, far better than trying to "upgrade" Windows but enough to be annoying. Saved my HOME and did a clean reinstall which fixed everything up (except OpenGL on my Matrox P650 card). nVidia are the only people who have really solid Linux drivers and support.

Was it worth going from 9.0 to 9.1 - not really. I don't notice any real speed increase, KDE 3.2 is better than 3.1, but 3.1 worked just fine anyway. A couple of utility apps that I liked seem to be broken by the new kernel* but everything else runs just fine.

*I probably just need to recompile them using an older library.

I still don't think much of Konqueror as a web browser, in spite of a lot of improvements and I would suggest that you download and install Firefox (rather than the oldish version of Mozilla that SuSE include).

As regards running Windows programs you might consider downloading/ordering Codeweavers Crossover Office - at $29 it isn't cheap, but it does let you run a LOT of Windows programs under Linux. Otherwise you can see how you get along with Wine (which I've used very little).

Keep us posted and

Welcome to the free world!

[122.45]

I have been using Linux on and off for a few years now, but recently it has really started to be a realistic replacement for Windows. I am using Mandrake Linux, with OpenOffice, and it does just about everything I need. It does take a bit of getting used to, but it's better than it was.

[amanoffewwords]

Thought I might revive this thread since I decided to wipe my laptop of anything Micro$oft in favour of a linux distro.

I have a copy of suse 8, wanted to download 9.3 but even on my 1mb bband it was quoting over 7hrs download (3.1gb) - so instead I went for what seems to be the in-distro of the moment - Ubuntu (700Mb).

And wow, what a sleek installation, what a nice interface and a very very usable system - and so far (fingers crossed) my laptop is not crashing like it was before (probably due to a trojan or something).

In short, if you're looking for an easy way in to Linux try Ubuntu - more info here:

http://distrowatch.com/

Download links:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu

[Mac the Knife]

Ubuntu is indeed an excellent distro....

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

I am proud to say that Ubuntu is South African inspired and led - Mark Shuttleworth (S.A. astronaut and coder) has been the chief architect of the concept of Ubuntu Linux.

Guadalinex is a Debian based GNU/Linux distribution promoted by the government of Andalusia (Spain). It's used in schools, public libraries, centers for elderly people and special info centers on over 100,000 PCs. Recently, Guadalinex announced that the next version would be based on Ubuntu.

See http://www.ubuntulinux.org/guadalinex for a translation of their justification.

[ORAC]

Got SUSE 9.1, installed a Wi-Fi card and cannot get ndisWrapper to work. Drivers are installed but cannot get any further. :(

[Terrey]

I put Mepis in an old laptop. Wow ! I have never used Linux before and found the installation great. It even found my Netgear wi-fi Pcmica card and worked straight off. It also has heaps of software bundled with it .

:ok:

[Tinstaafl]

I use Kanotix Linux. It's a Knoppix derived distribution compiled for later generations of Intel processors (i686 & later) & other hardware. Kanotix is more amenable to HD installations than Knoppix. It has even managed to get my laptop's winmodem working, something most other distributions I've tried failed to do.

Knoppix, in turn is a Debian based distribution optimised for running from a CD-Rom (ie it doesn't need to be installed to a HD) with renowned hardware detection.

[Mac the Knife]

Welcome to Linux freedom!

See

http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/suse/security/2003/08/msg00125.html

which addresses exactly your question.

Mac

Linux User # 302442