Planning to try SuSE

[DragonMage]

My friend just gave me a copy of SuSE. After backuping my mandrake partitions, I am going to try SuSE just for kicks. If it weren't for my persisting problem of combination of X, Nvidia Driver and NForce2 MB cause X to hang after a while, I would not even think about it.. Lemme see if the problem is localized to mandrake or SuSE also..

 

Wish me luck.

[DragonMage]

Update #1:

 

I installed SuSE 8.2 and have been playing it for about a few hours. Here's my impressions so far.

 

1. The installation looks good, but a bit weird.. two reboots? I know that I never run SuSE before, but from slackware, redhat, and mandrake, I haven't encountered a 2 reboot installation before. At least it's better than windows reboot wise :)

 

2. Problem #1. Getting nforce nvnet to work. The driver compiled ok but it doesn't want to insmod unless I --force it. Another problem related to this one, I cannot find a /etc/rc.d/rc.local so I can run it always after reboot. I don't want to run it manually everytime and then go to yast to make sure the network card run.. sigh..

 

3. Problem #2. Monitor.. Why in the world do I have to edit my modeline manually so that I can get 1024x768x24bit color in 85 hz refresh rate? If it weren't for my old mandrake XF86Config file, I wouldn't even know the right modeline..

 

4. Problem #3. Applications.. Too much of them (well what do you expect for 5 cds), but where to get updated SuSE rpms for the newest gaim, openoffice, etc.? How bout the development/test rpms?

 

5. Yast. Mandrake Control Center it ain't.. It's not harder or easier.. just different.. just need a bit getting used to I guess.

 

Anyway.. I don't have any more time to play around with SuSE.. I'm sure it's nice and all, but I'm going back to my mandrake 9.1. It's easier to play around with :)

[mdg]

Dragonmage, do you know where to find iso's for Suse 8.2? I downloaded the evaluation disk to see what it was like and I quite liked it, but I can't find iso's. There are lots of separate files to d/l, but I'm not sure which to choose

[DragonMage]

SuSE has this (unfortunately sucky for some people) policy for not releasing GPL iso either on the net or elsewhere. You have to buy the box pack of either SuSE personal or pro, which can cost you about 30-60 bux depending on the version. The Live ISO is just that.. a live iso, a demo model to speak. After about two months of release, they will give you the option of installing via ftp site (for free). I think the main cause of this is because of YAST, which has proprietary license. However, after you buy the box version, you can install it in multiple computers legally (unlike windows).

 

If you have the bandwidth, you can do ftp install. You can read the ftp installation option from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/README.FTP

Then download the boot floppy / iso from

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ft...nt_mirrors.html

 

Be warned however, that so far, the newest version that is available via ftp install is 8.1, not 8.2. I don't think that includes YAST and proprietary software usually included in SuSE box set .

[mdg]

OK, thanks, I'll try the 8.1 version with FTP. I'm not going to shell out $50 just to try it out. That might come at a later stage

[jlc]

I ran SuSE a lot, one of the big problems that sends me away is apt-get and urpmi. You can use apt-get with SuSE, but don't expect to do it at a decent speed. There is one site and it runs at about 10k! That pretty much sucks. Others complain about there config files too. Other than that, it's pretty nice.