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Project: Linux  Articles
Review: SuSE 7.0 Professional
By Mayank Sarup <mayank@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2000-10-31 09:44:44 EST by )
All said and done, SuSE is a very good distribution. Newbies will like it
for its clean installation and its user-friendliness while
more advanced users will enjoy tinkering with the huge amount of
software made available. If you haven't tried it yet, you might want
to grab this latest release. You will certainly change your mind.
SuSE 7 has been out for a while now but I was able to obtain a copy for
myself only a few weeks back. SuSE is one of the leading Linux
distributions. SuSE does lag in market share as compared to Red Hat but
that is definitely not a function of it's quality. This is a very
high quality distribution that you must definitely check out. SuSE 7.0 comes in two different editions, the Personal and Professional
Pack. I worked with the latter whose box (which by the way weights 2.5
kgs!) is loaded with software and manuals. The professional edition,
that I have reviewed here, contains 6 CD's, 4 manuals and for good
measure a DVD which contains the contents of all 6 CD's. These 4 manuals really steal the show. There's an installation manual
that's more like a illustrated guide to installing SuSE with screen shots
and bubble dialog boxes explaining everything. Then comes the
configuration manual that will help you configure your system. Next
comes the Applications manual which deals with some of the software
that's included. Useful how-to's on configuring your scanner and
CD-Writer are included in this one. I would have liked that the CD-writer
to have been automatically configured like Mandrake does but the process
is nicely documented so it really isn't a problem. There's even a
tutorial on using the GIMP graphics editor. The professional edition ships with one more manual, the SuSE Technical
Handbook. This is a great reference for newbies and slightly more
advanced users. Linux generally lacks good documentation for newbies but
the handbook is clear, concise and quite detailed. Newbies are always on
the lookout for good books to learn from and it's great to see SuSE
making an effort at addressing this need. Probably one of the best
reasons to choose the professional version over the personal one is this
handbook. Lets now move on to the installation. The familiar Yast2 GUI setup is
here again with its 8 step installation process. The good old linuxrc
text-based installation is still there if you need it and it does seem
to run much quicker, especially if you want to do a customized
installation. Newbies should stick to the friendlier Yast2 GUI
installation. The installation is easy with context help available. The
defaults should work for most people. A really nifty feature is the
ability to save the settings of the installation and re-use them when
installing on another machine. SuSE ships with a colossal number of packages and you may have a hard
time choosing from over 1800 applications. If you were looking to fill
up some space on your monster I-should-be-on-a-server hard drive then
SuSE has a solution, a full install that will take up 6.5GB. There's a huge amount of software here and you've got plenty of
alternatives. Don't want sendmail? Well, there's postfix. StarOffice a
little too bloated? Then maybe you could try Abiword. Wanna try running
Windows applications, you could use WINE or Vmware. Since I was already running SuSE 6.4 on my system I first tried the
upgrade. That went off smoothly enough and I was soon running SuSE 7.
All packages were detected and upgraded. Next, I tried a clean
installation which went off smoothly as well. I chose the default with
office install which is just the default installation with StarOffice on
top. No problems here either. Post-installation hardware detection worked great except for the sound
card. My sound card, an Ensoniq AudioPCI, was detected but there was
some problem loading the modules. I couldn't figure out the problem and
subsequent installations didn't fix it. SuSE Linux also includes the
commercial version of the OSS modules. I was eager to try these out but
they don't support PCI sound cards. Everything else however worked fine. The network card was detected and configured. Printer setup was a snap,
I was able to setup a remote windows printer and also print a test page
in a jiffy. Samba printing was something that didn't quite work right,
at least for me, in version 6.4 but in 7.0 it worked straight out of the
box. Once I booted into the system, it was a different story. If you're
expecting something really revolutionary then you're likely to be
disappointed. The kernel is 2.2.16 with the usual bunch of patches to
support USB and ReiserFS. These two were there in the previous versions
too. I've been using Reiser for a while now and it works really well. SuSE 7.0 includes XFree86 4.0 but some reason it installed XFree86 3 as
well. More weirdness awaits, running the SuSE X configuration tool Sax
will configure the system to use XFree86 3 but to use XFree86 4 you need
to use sax2. Sax2 however did not quite work. By default it would start
up in some weird refresh rate and resolution combination leaving me
staring at a blank screen and the blinking green light on the monitor.
The Ctrl-Alt-- combination brought down the screen to a saner resolution
after which I was able to reconfigure X. There were a few other minor
annoyances but on the whole everything worked fine after that. I would
have preferred if XFree86 4.0.1 was included, which incidentally was
released more than a month before SuSE 7.0 was out and is included in
the latest Red Hat release. The SuSE ftp server did have XFree86-4.0.1
when I checked last, so if you have ultra fast net connection, go get
it! Once you have X setup and running properly you might want to check out
the various window managers included. My personal favorite, WindowMaker
was one of them along with some 20 applets to keep you busy. Also
included was a late beta of KDE2 which was worth seeing. Yast2 has been beefed up and there's a lot more that you can do with it.
You hardly need to use yast anymore. All hardware setup can be done
here. There's Install/Remove programs which you can use to manage the
huge collection of software that ships with SuSE 7. A built in search
tool would have been a useful feature. That would have been much better
than putting the different software packages into cryptic categories
like pay and ap. Also if there was some way of knowing which CD a
package was in, it would make life easier. Yast2 is great if you use the
GUI version, but, the console mode yast2 has quite clumsy navigation and
is a pain to use. I really wish that SuSE had put some more work into
the console mode yast. All said and done, SuSE is a great distribution. Newbies will like it
for its clean installation as its user-friendliness. There's also a huge
amount of software here to keep anyone busy for a while. But is version
7 really a quantum leap? Not really. If you go out and grab a SuSE 7 CD
then you'll will get the latest and greatest packages but I would
probably have called this version 6.7. On the whole however it makes for
a good Linux distribution, especially if you are a first time Linux user.
SuSE.com
Other articles by Mayank Sarup
Current Rating: [ 7.06 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 16 ]
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