Darkelve Posted June 18, 2004 Report Share Posted June 18, 2004 (edited) SuSe 9.1 Professional: Novell's first steps in Open Source Background Reviewer is a 26-year old male webmaster. Without real programming knowledge, he has discovered GNU/Linux about 2 years ago and has been distro-hopping ever since. Currently, SuSe 9.1 Pro has found its place on his home desktop, next to Windows XP for gaming. Introduction This review will focus on my experience with SuSe 9.1 professional, which I have been running on my home desktop now for over a month. Aside from the standard things you would expect in a review, I will also make a few personal comments on SuSe, Novell and Linux in general. These are just feedback, there is no political agenda behind it, keep that in mind when you are writing your flames. The beginning: 'bad' hardware, good information, good marketing The distro that has been on my desktop for the longest is Mandrake Linux. I was particularly happy with 9.2 and 10.0 would have probably continued using 10.0 were it not for hardware. You see, we had a wireless home network set up for Windows and I bought a piece of hardware (Intel Pro/Wireless USB wireless access device) which I could not get to work. Now Linux without internet access is not much fun and much less efficient than it could be. So with pain in my heart, I bought a new piece of software from Linksys, a Wireless Ethernet Bridge, which I could just plug into my ethernet card. After some initial hassle (had to set up the router in Windows) I got it running - in Windows. Sadly, with Mandrake 10 I could not get it set up and to add to the problem, the network section of the Control Panel was very confusing to me. Then I discovered that Debian-based distro's (Mepis - Xandros - Linspire; not Knoppix though) would set it up correctly. I started to download a few LiveCD's of the internet until I came across SuSe 9.1 LiveCD. A thing happened I did not ever imagine possible: it detected all of my hardware correctly! I know now that if I had 'shopped smart' for hardware other distros would work fine as well, but it seemed that here it was: the promised land where everything will work. Next thing on my list was to go to the SuSe website. I wanted to know exactly what I was going to buy and what I would get for it and I must commend SuSe on this point: their product section was the most complete and most helpful of all the distro websites I encountered yet. It was especially nice to see Linux strong points being marketed so well. The SuSe 9.1 Pro review I found on MadPenguin confirmed my choice to buy the Pro version. I am a poweruser and it seemed like 9.1 Personal lacked just too much for anyone but the complete newbie. When I went to the shop, the first day SuSe was available, there were a few nice surprises. First, there were around twenty SuSe boxes on the floor when I picked up mine, no doubt reserved for other people like me eager to get our hands on SuSe 9.1 the soonest. Belgium is a small country and this was just one of the stores (Het Computerwinkeltje) 4 divisions. It was nice to see the interest in SuSe/Linux. What was also nice was the box, which must have cost a fortune to manufacture: high-quality carton, very professional looking, glossed, ... shiny and professional all over. The box contains 5 CD-Roms, 2 DVD's, 2 printed manuals: 'User Guide' and 'administration guide', a product folder, a registration/support folder and a Gecko sticker (which now adorns my computer case). Well, that was it, I thought. But when I was waiting for the bus to come in front of the shop, I turned around. A large window sticker was staring at me, bearing the SuSe logo, accompanied by the text 'SuSe: the Linux experts' underneath. Nice to see someone finally giving greater attention to visibility. Installation The installation wenth quite smooth, but not without bumps. First of all, the installer does an excellent job in making sure that you can be as concise or as detailled as you wish and go back at about any point. One of the weaker points of the installer, in my opinion, is the 'advanced' software selection. The choices it gives you are not entirely logic. And selecting packages by hand or selecting groups of packages could make the difference between a 45-minute install or a (nearly) 2 hour install. I have to admit that I reinstalled several times, just to be sure to have a clean install and get right as much as possible from the start. Another annoyance is that it reboots at one point of the installation and, after the reboot, continues with another part. Every distro I used except SuSe let you partition your drive, configure your hardware, select and install software, add your passwords and user data and then reboot. With SuSe, after the install, there was no reboot. Instead, I immediately got a login screen. Which confused me so much I rebooted anyway, just to be sure. Really annoying was having to switch back and forth between five CD's. Gets tiring after a while. I tried the DVD to see if that would hold everything on those five CD's, but no luck apparently. Installation: 3,5/5 Hardware detection Well, what can I say. It detecting everything, flawlessy. The only reason I am not giving it a 5 is because my sound card was not detected until I rebooted and logged into KDE for the second time. Hardware detection: 4,5/5 Performance Startup is quite fast, but I expect still a little longer than competing distro's who are using the new 2.6 kernel. Especially something called 'coldplug' takes a long time to finish. The overall responsiveness is excellent, but SuSe feels a little less responsive than Mandrake 10CE did on this same machine. Browsing sometimes goes blazingly fast, other times quite slow. Perhaps this is related to my wireless setup somehow. The improved speed at which windows are drawn, resized and moved the first thing you notice. In fact, the first thing you notice in any distro that uses the 2.6 kernel. It is too bad that Yast seems to be so heavy that whenever you have to start it, the performance of other applications (especially media players) suffers a bit from that. Performance: 4/5 Stability My box did not experience a single crash yet. I did have a couple of apps crashed, e.g. amaroK when choosing analysers although that misteriously seems to have been solved (through a certain online update, perhaps ?). I did have screen freezes when using the nvidia 3D driver with certain games though. A post on the nVidia Linux forum got me a helpful reply about how to solve this. Setting AGPart to 1 made the games a little slower, but working and nothing froze or crashed any longer. By the way, it does not matter if you can 'ssh' into the system to kill X. To the newbie user and to me also, firstly we do not recognize this problem and secondly we have no idea what to do about it or (sometimes) the means (laptop, other networked PC) to do so. Users will -justly- experience it as a crash and be disappointed by it. Nevertheless, since this is mostly nVidia's 'problem', I am giving SuSe a '5' for stability. Stability: 5/5 Software SuSe Linux 9.1 Pro is literally PACKED with software. You will be hard pressed to find a distribution which comes with such a selection of quality software in different categories. Me being an oldie gamer, I especially appreciated 'Return of the Amazon Queen' and 'Beneath a steel Sky' be included. But it seems that no matter what kind of software you want to use, it will very likely be on those 5 CD's. As was the case for me with Mozilla FireFox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Also, demo versions of TextMaker, PlanMaker and MainActor are included on the CD's. TextMaker seems especially nice for older systems you want to recycle, since it is really careful with resources. It feels really nice to have the choice to pick between so many applications to write this review. I am writing this in AbiWord right now. Normally I use OpenOffice but I wanted to try something else. AbiWord feels great. More quality choice means more power to the user. Thoroughly disappointing though, is the broken DVD support. Basically, SuSe gives you Kaffeine based on a 'broken' version of Xine. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Novell/SuSe could not have provided DVD playback, just like Linspire does. Nevermind I would have to pay a little extra. Make it work, damn it! So I went to the trouble of downloading Mplayer and Plugins from Packman's website. Mplayer does a great job with DVD and about any movie format, by the way. Software selection really deserves a 5, but without working DVD, it cannot be perfect, now can it? Software selection: 4,5/5 Yast and Novell Yast deserves a separate place. SuSe is right to say YAST is one of their best trump cards. It actually lets you configure about everything with much ease. The learning curve for installing or removing applications is also reduced by it. But the most impressive thing about Yast is probably its online update and the SuSe Watcher tool, which sits in your panel, warns you about security warnings and updates and is able among others to install and update software or even install an entire new kernel (like I did yesterday because of the kernel exploit that was discovered). As you might know (or not), Novell has decided to release Yast under the GPL. Novell is contributing in many ways to Open Source. The company seems to have undergone a real metamorphosis. But if there is anything you cannot say about them, it is that these guys sit still. Their marketing, from the SuSe box and the window sticker to their websites and product folders, their behaviour in the legal IBM vs. SCO-spat, their business cases, ... everything about them looks and feels professional. Support I had an issue with my monitor. KDE told me it 'did not report its X and Y size'. So I used my 60-day support to email SuSe. They replied back to me within 2 days, with exact instructions what to fill in and how to do it. Being a bit worried about the task at hand, I posted on the forums at SuSeLinuxSupport to check if this was correct. Community support should not be underestimated: my problems about nvidia 3D driver, my monitor and installing Mplayer were all answered within a week. Helpful support. Free support. Support that makes you feel like giving something back, like writing a review or such. ;) Price Compared to Windows, this is acually a no-brainer. The included software by itself makes such a huge difference the balance can only be positive for Linux. I will leave TCO issues to people who understand all these three-letter-words. Compared to other distros, the price is a bit on the high side, but you do get a lot for your money. It certainly is not an unfair price, but might be an issue for countries or people with less financial power. I give a 4, only because similar offerings from other vendors cost a bit less. Price: 4/5 User-friendliness Here, Linux has made great progress over the last 2 years. Especially KDE 3.2 is worth mentioning here, where many small but important improvement were made. Still, a few 'quirks' remain to exist, like opening 67 different windows when selecting a bunch of image files and expecting to get a slideshow, or at least get all files opened into one program. Gnome 2.4.2, I cannot speak for it, since I do not really use it. Seems nice and feels logical, but I'm really used to KDE, which feels logical and familiar. Also, sometimes when new programs are installed, they appear in strange submenu's, like 'Internet -> More Programs -> aMsn' while 'Internet->Chat' would have been a far more logical option. Usability in SuSe 9.1 Pro gets a 4 from me and in my book, that means 'excellent'. User-friendliness: 4/5 Conclusion SuSe is a great distribution that is probably not for everyone, but will still be able to satisfy many, many users. It is stable, packed with software, performs well, is very user-friendly, and has excellent tools for using your system on a day-to-day basis. It is probably not quite ready yet for the total newbie, but it certainly is for the more advanced user ('Power User'). Of course, that depends on your needs. If all you need is a browser, e-mail, a word processor and chat, then I do not expect anyone to have too much trouble using it. Downsides: the strange behaviour when installing and the 'broken' DVD playback. And finally, with the professionalism they show now and being backed by the Novell company, great things can be expected from the next versions of SuSe. All in all, a great distro that is definitely worth looking into. Final rating: 4,5/5 A final note: keeping friends with your neighbours Software developers and companies should realize that what they are doing can have a serious impact on the work of others. I was considering buying WineX, but because of my 'troubles' with the nVidia driver, I decided not to. That is a prospective sale loss for WineX and this is unfair. It is also unfair for SuSe when SuSe 'crashes/freezes' because of buggy drivers. The same thing with SuSe providing a broken Kaffeine/Xine version. About the best invitation you can give to someone to switch to something else. I am certain many have left Kaffeine for MPlayer because of this. Which is not really fair to Kaffeine/Xine developers. And I am sure there are many more examples. Developers and companies, respect the work of others please and think about what consequences your behaviour has for them. Edited June 19, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarissi Posted June 19, 2004 Report Share Posted June 19, 2004 Nice review. The DVDs are double sided. One is the 64 bit version. This explains the higher pricing of the Pro version: you get both 32 bit and 64 bit in one package. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted June 19, 2004 Report Share Posted June 19, 2004 Interesting review. I have been dithering about between the two. I tried suse 9 on an old laptop with cd's from a linux magazine. I also found the installation worked better than MD which i always problems getting the monitor to work. As a business user rather than an IT type person I am more interested in getting things working than playing about with all the bell's and whistles. I don't actua;l;y want to spend all my time playing with computer unless I have to. I will until I get it doing what I want then I start to lose interest. In a similar vein the crappy manuals you get with the MD box are pretty useless unless everything works properly at the installation stage. I also bought the definitive manual which was not much better. I'm quite capable of working my way through and getting things to work, which I did, I just found it irritating at the beginning. I am told that the manuals with the suse pro version are good but haven't seen them yet. On the other hand windows is difficult for the first wee while till you get used to it so learning another operating system is not that difficult. Sad as it may be it's the office suites that interest me, every time I get disheartened I look at the cost if I were to use Ms office and realise that for the same money I can get a whole spanking new computer with linux on it and all the office stuff I could possibly want and have change. Actually i would rather keep what I have and buy a new mountain bike but I suppose i should prioritise sensibly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted June 19, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 19, 2004 In a similar vein the crappy manuals you get with the MD box are pretty useless unless everything works properly at the installation stage. I also bought the definitive manual which was not much better. Manuals are good, but IMO nothing more. I think especially the 'administrator' guide is worth it, the 'user' guide well, most things I knew already and it is a bit brief as well. It's good to have as a reference, I guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted June 20, 2004 Report Share Posted June 20, 2004 If you don't know the basics manuals are incredibly useful to begin with, sure you quickly outgrow them as you use the system think of it like a reading prmer, once you can read a dictionary is useful up until then you don't even know what it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted June 21, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 If you don't know the basics manuals are incredibly useful to begin with, sure you quickly outgrow them as you use the system think of it like a reading prmer, once you can read a dictionary is useful up until then you don't even know what it is. Yes, but I was talking more about the fact that some parts are a little outdated (e.g. describe something in a way the old SuSe's would have done it and it's different right now). Plus the fact that I would like if they went a little more in-depth sometimes. Should've mention that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted June 21, 2004 Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 Sorry I misunderstood. I have been disparaged on this very forum for lamenting the lack of manuals. As people point out there is a computer based manual with md which is great if you have the thing working in the first place and know where to look and what you want to know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted June 21, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 (edited) Sorry I misunderstood. I have been disparaged on this very forum for lamenting the lack of manuals. As people point out there is a computer based manual with md which is great if you have the thing working in the first place and know where to look and what you want to know. Xandros put a PDF of their user guide on their desktop, as a shortcut. Linspire has these 'Flash tutorials'. You would think the first thing a person new to Mandrake/Linux would want to see, is an explanation about how to use their system in the first place. Also, I don't understand why Mandrake charges for the 'Definite guide to...'; if it helps people get more out of their system and stick with Mandrake, they should just include it in the box. Edited June 21, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted June 22, 2004 Report Share Posted June 22, 2004 Also, I don't understand why Mandrake charges for the 'Definite guide to...'; if it helps people get more out of their system and stick with Mandrake, they should just include it in the box. hear hear! especially with the power pack, it feels a bit of a rip off as one of the reasons I bought the power pack was because I wanted a manual. I was expecting the kind of tome you get for windows. Having said that designing a manual for newbies must be incredibly difficult as they range from needing basic primers to more detailed text books. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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