Suse 9.1: a Review

Ok. I finally installed that Suse 9.1 DVD Novell. Yes, that free DVD that everyone seemed to want. :D

I installed Suse 9.1 on an ancient P3 600 on 820 intel board and 192MB Ram and nVidia 32MB RivaTNT. Ancient tech. But i was fed up with Mandrake 10. wiped it off the machine and finally installed Suse 9.1 DVD.

I got to tell you, I've used RH, FC1 & 2, Mandrake and the like since 2000 and this was my first crack at Suse. It certainly didn't disappoint.

Installation? Yast? Excellent! It was able to detect every ancient hardware I got. Well, its a rare occasion when linux fails to detect such ancient hardware these days. That was the easy part.

I was able to setup the apps, without trouble. Although I wanted to give the cryptographic filesystem a try, didn't have enough disk space. The machine only had 8GB and 4GB's already running off windoze (i wanted to play games, which is why windoze still exists at all on this machine). Package installation was a breeze. Everything was setup... but I did change KDE to Gnome (just a matter of preference).

Booting? Excellent. No problems and the graphics covering the underlying systems startup is great. :D cool blue with suse logo. GDM did disappoint... didn't look as cool but then, that's just for aesthetics sake so no big problem.

Gnome booted well. All systems enabled. The menus... didn't contain everything I wanted installed... but they were hidden under the “suse menu” which ought to be corrected in future releases. Its hard for a user to just look under three layers of menus for a simple office app. Don't you think? That was my first complaint.

My second complaint was the lack of dvd access. I was playing DVDs that were original and paid for legally. Surely, I have the right as a consumer to be able to play them on my machine? Suse pointed out that there were legal considerations why xine's dvd capability had been disabled and that I should visit the link that they gave me. Unfortunately, the machine didn't have a live Net connection. There are other ways to skin a cat after all (but thats another story).

But, bloody entertainment industry fools, haven't you guys learned from Apple and company? Tech isn't something to be afraid of, its a tool. I digress yet again.

As I was saying, didn't have a chance to run yast on a live internet link. But it used it to install gtk from the dvd. Yast is the package installer/systems control panel thingy and as far as I could tell... runs on text mode (well i've only had suse for 2 days). Which isn't so bad come to think of it. Makes it difficult for a “normal” user to play with. :D you've got to be an experienced/intermediate user to figure out the system or destroy it.

Suse 9.1 is an excellent piece of software. It runs kernel 2.6.4, gnome 2.4 (which isn't so bad) and a whole lot of software that works... including if I may add mono (albeit 0.3).

This is the next best distribution I'd recommend and the first commercial one. The first is still debian of course with its powerful apt! :D