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.