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SuSE 7.1 Professional: what 7.0 should have been...
By Mayank Sarup <Mayank@freeos.com>
The package The package comes with 7 CDs and includes the far more usable single DVD. As always, the DVD installations are very easy and don't require you to be alert to change the CD on time. The excellent technical `handbook' is now, 15 pages richer (though we didn't check to see where). What we did see was that the manual still carries images from the 7.0 release. The usual QuickInstall, configuration and application manuals are available for quick help. Installation You can still choose between the old Yast1 text mode installation and the newer Yast2 interface. The SuSE installation remains the same. It's all very familiar and a little change would have been welcome. Of course comparisons with Mandrake, which has the best installation routine currently, is inevitable. What we desire is the ability to move directly back to any stage of the installation process without having to repeatedly press the `back' button. The integration of GNU parted into their partitioning tool is unnecessarily hyped. This should have ideally facilitated the easy re-sizing of existing partitions but, as we found out, the implementation is far from achieving that goal. It allows you to re-size a partition but only if there are no Linux partitions on your drive. On our test system, which contained several Linux partitions, we created a large Windows partition occupying the free space. The idea was to re-size the Windows partition and create a Linux partition on the free space left. This plan failed because the option to re-size comes up only when the entire space on the drive is occupied by Windows. If Yast2 sees that you already have Linux partitions on your drive, it just assumes that you're going to use those partitions and hence doesn't give you a re-size option. Here again SuSE should learn from Mandrake. The rest of the installation was fairly standard and we didn't encounter any problems there. LILO 21.6 is now included so you are not required to maintain a separate /boot partition as ext2. Now your entire system can be run on ReiserFS. SuSE also has a really cool looking LILO boot up screen. Speaking of ReiserFS, the sponsor banner, which shouted "sponsored by SuSE and MP3.com" at startup, has been replaced by a discreet "Check www.reiserfs.org for sponsor information". So coming back to our review, XFree86 4.0.2, which is included, is a big release as it's the first X release to include support for font anti-aliasing. Match that with KDE 2.1.1 and you get beautiful anti-aliased fonts. Time to say goodbye to those horrible-looking jagged bitmap fonts. You can configure and test it right during the installation. Sax2 did a good job of detecting our graphics hardware, which was a Matrox G400. SuSE has always had the best X support and the comprehensive options available are proof of it. The setup on an 815-based board worked too. Other than graphics hardware, the sound and network cards were detected flawlessly and configured right there during the installation. KDE 2.01 is the default GUI provided. And default does mean a lot here because SuSE has chosen to give GNOME a cold shoulder. The only way to get GNOME to install is to do a detailed selection during installation or do a manual install. We tried the manual install, and guess where SuSE puts GNOME - not the first or even the second CD. GNOME is way down on the third CD! Please guys, we know you prefer and support KDE, but please don't try to ram it down our throats. KDE is an excellent desktop and we'd appreciate it if you let KDE do the talking. Next highlight is the kernel 2.4 and glibc 2.2.0. Both are welcome additions to Linux installation. Good thing here is that full backward compatibility is maintained in spite of the new glibc. None of programs compiled on the older glibc failed to work here. If you're not quite sure about kernel 2.4 then kernel 2.2.18 is also included and can be selected for installation. Post-installation, SuSE did give us a shock. It wiped out all the startup scripts in /sbin/init.d. This isn't as bad because in compliance with the LSB, SuSE had moved the scripts to /etc/init.d. So this wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't over-written the new inittab file with our old, but customised inittab file. In any case there was a README pointing us in the right direction. There's also been a change in the runlevels as part of the LSB compliance, so now runlevel 5 becomes network with XDM instead of runlevel 3 as in previous releases. There weren't any other surprises in store for us except for a pleasant one. Yast2 has been beefed up further. All your hardware and software initialization/installation can be accomplished through Yast. One thing they heard us on was the inclusion of a search utility in Yast2. What they ignored was a better implementation of text mode Yast2. Text mode remains a horrible crude implementation. An interface like Yast1 will be greatly appreciated. Not all of us sit in the GUI, so we would appreciate if some action would be taken here. And where upgrading to SuSE is concerned, upgrades from 6.4 and 7.0 releases of SuSE were smooth and no post-installation problems were detected. Conclusion SuSE 7.1 is definitely the version that should have held the 7.0 tag. We also have no hesitation in calling this a `Must' upgrade. There's a huge amount of software, excellent documentation and a nice user-friendly installation routine packed in this. To sum it up-- go for it!
Other articles by Mayank Sarup
Current Rating: [ 8.28 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 83 ]
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