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| Newer page: | version 10 | Last edited on Monday, May 15, 2006 6:11:33 pm | by CraigBox | |
| Older page: | version 7 | Last edited on Saturday, March 19, 2005 12:06:54 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,60 +1 @@
-As pointed out on the
[Suse
] page, this German LinuxDistribution has never had much of a following in NewZealand
. With the impending push in [Novell] support for [Suse] based products after their purchase by [Novell], and the new availability of a one-CD "personal" edition, I thought I'd give [Suse] a try.
-
-!!! [Suse] 9.1 Personal Edition Review
-
-Craig Box, September 2004
-
-!! Installation
-
-The personal edition of [Suse] comes on one CD, and it seems very positive from the start. Immediately upon boot you get a nice graphical splash screen, allowing you to either continue booting from the hard drive or install Linux, in normal or failsafe mode. It will attempt to automatically detect your screen resolution for the graphical installer, or you can pick one from a list.
-
-When YaST, the [Suse] installer/setup tool loads, the good impressions continue. The installer is very much like the RedHat/FedoraProject installer, with help down the left side and the main options in a larger window on the right. It makes some judgements about your computer and offers a single click install. It detected a [Windows] partition and offered to shrink it and install into the newly created space, which would be an excellent option for new users. On my test machine, a P3-500 laptop with 192[MB] of [RAM], I told it I wanted to manually override this and install to the whole hard drive.
-
-There are some niggles in the installer -- you specify the time zone at this point, and there wasn't one for NewZealand at all! I had to select GMT+12 from an "Etc" list, but this won't account for daylight savings.
-
- ''There is actually an NZ timezone, but it's under Pacific -> Auckland.'' --NeilBertram
-
-At this point I should point out that the functionality available is limited by the fact this is a one CD distribution -- you don't get [GNOME], but [Suse] has always been strongly aligned with [KDE].
-
-The installer claimed it was going to install 1.4Gb of data -- decent compression for a 700mb CD -- and did so in a little over 45 minutes. The slide show was reasonably standard, offering screenshots and soundbites. [KDE] is referred to as "the comfortable desktop" -- a comment on it's well known "resemblance" to MicrosoftWindows, I'm sure. The screenshots looked like they could do with being updated. They advertised Kopete and [Gaim] on the same screen -- while it's nice to have options, it's also nice to have a "best of breed". (The personal edition doesn't even have [Gaim].)
-
-Also, for a Windows user going through this setup, I think I'd like to see projects with less "kooky" names.
-
-After a reboot, YaST continued with it's first boot routine, setting up user accounts and hardware. It complained about <tt>root</tt> as a root password on two counts, being too short and containing the username. It also asked me to create a user account, and I notice it had auto-login on for that user. It also auto-detected the laptop's built in modem.
-
-After about an hour total, I had booted into [Suse].
-
-!! Desktop Experience
-
-Linux is Linux, and as a regular [GNOME] user, it's hard to judge a [KDE] desktop objectively. I'm not sure how much of the issues were [Suse] and how much were [KDE], but as [Suse] are the major sponsor of [KDE] development I assume the two are interconnected somehow.
-
-The desktop is very reminiscent of Knoppix or Mandrake, but after an excellent looking setup routine, the default desktop was disappointing. The main fonts were too small and the OpenOffice fonts were too big. Changing the [KDE] fonts was simple; setting font size to 90% in OpenOffice made them look almost identical (more so than they do on [Fedora]), but it's not something that a normal user will be able to do. It's possibly not even something they'd notice.
-
-Desktop icons give you a nice tooltip, but they need to be single clicked, which isn't immediately clear. I had two of everything popping up straight away.
-
-For a personal edition desktop, it offers litlte more than three games -- Enigma, Freeciv and Frozen Bubble. [KDE] on other distros ships with dozens of little games -- I found it odd that they were all missing. Surely something like the LIRC client could be cleared to make way for Sokoban.
-
-The [Suse] help, built on the [KDE] help center, has a great manual built in, but it seems a little out of date, and it isn't customized for the personal edition.
-
-The desktop sharing stuff in [KDE] looked promising, if not a direct copy of the Remote Assistance feature in Windows. I'm glad to see the mail/contacts/calendar apps compiled into one application but it's hidden in the Office menu below "Document Viewer" and above "Office Suite", yet named "Kontact" and not "Groupware Client" or "Email/Contacts". Overall however the menu structure was far more contained than [Fedora]'s mess, and more manageable than [Knoppix] by virtue of having less packages installed.
-
-As a personal edition I didn't check too far into the console -- AristotlePagaltzis suggests that it's crippled without a [Compiler], but I was trying to use locate(1) and it didn't even have that! Surely it could have done away with something like the LIRC server in favour of a bit more power in the [CLI].
-
-!! Hardware support
-
-YaST has some nice ideas -- it has a "Load Vendor Driver CD" option for example, which would be great if vendors shipped driver CDs, but after the initial detection of the MoDem, I was let down by it saying that it needed the <tt>ltmodem</tt> package which wasn't on the CD. [Suse] 9.1 Personal comes with SunMicrosystems' [Java], AcrobatReader and RealPlayer, so they're obviously happy with licensing software. The lack of internet connectivity meant that, without a network card in the laptop, I couldn't go any further with internet access.
-
-Otherwise, YaST seems like a very clean interface for configuring a system, and isn't just a copy of Control Panel.
-
-Being built on the 2.6 kernel, I would have expected better laptop support as well. Closing the hood seemed to make no effect, either on AC power or on the battery. The [ACPI] options in YaST suggested that there was no [ACPI] support, and [APM] didn't do anything.
-
-Sound "just worked" -- including software mixing in all the applications I tried, including the always tricky RealPlayer. I was very glad to see Noatun dropped in favour of [XMMS].
-
-!! Conclusion
-
-I have only seen little bits of [Mandrake], but from what I have seen, as a [KDE] distribution it rivals [Suse] on every strength, and now that YaST is open source, it could well have everything that [Suse] Personal has to offer. If you're looking for something to give to your Mum, and you're a [KDE] fan, evaluate [Mandrake] along with [Suse].
-
-Personally, I hope the fact that [Suse] is now under the same wing as [Novell]'s [Ximian] team means that we will see some of their great advances and ability to make simple tidy ups to a broken interface applied to the [Suse] desktop.
-
-----
-CategoryReview
+Describe
[SuseReview
] here
.
