{"id":35,"date":"2007-02-14T14:49:23","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T20:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/d2.degen.net\/?p=65"},"modified":"2007-02-14T14:49:23","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T20:49:23","slug":"opensuse-102-%e2%80%93-a-first-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"OpenSUSE 10.2 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A first look"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you know, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been refreshing my experience on the current crop of Linux distros, last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overviewed was Ubuntu 6.10 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you Ubuntu?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/a><\/font>\u00c2\u00a0Moving right along in my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153which Linux Distro is right for me\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Evaluation is SUSE 10.2.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Having not looked at SUSE since before the Novell merger\/acquisition, I expected significant changes. <\/font>After torrenting down the DVD image I threw it into my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153classic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d test system, an old Compaq P3 with 512 MB of RAM. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve used this old beater before for testing, and given Linux\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relatively mild requirements I figured this would be no problem.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Was I in for a surprise.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/span>None of the installation options worked on the P3-733. Not exactly state of the art, but certainly it should have been sufficient. I even put an old NVIDIA MX400 in the system thinking that perhaps the onboard Video was the problem, but nothing.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So over to my Intel Core 2 box. Immediately the installer was up and running. After quickly answering questions about my language and location, I was given the choice of which desktop manager I wanted Gnome or KDE. This was a nice option, one that I have not seen in many new Distros installers lately. I selected Gnome, as I have been using it with most of these Linux evals and wanted to keep things consistent.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Next came partitioning options. SUSE greatly simplifies the process with its prefab selection. There are expert options to go in and modify, but I have to admit, even I was a little intimidated by the way these slices where displayed \u00e2\u20ac\u201c so I let it be and rolled with the defaults.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

A nice progress bar gives a total time remaining, after about 30 minutes, three gigs have been moved and we are ready for reboot. Upon reboot, I was pleased to see that my Vista install had been auto-detected and was intact, something other distros have not picked up correctly.\u00c2\u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Completing the install after reboot, was uneventful. You are giving the opportunity to create some users and setup Novell support options.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/span>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not up on the ins and outs of how Novell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s support options work with SUSE, so I left this blank for now and was able to progress through the installer. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d welcome anyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s input as to what you get\/don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153free\u00e2\u20ac\u009d vs. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pay\u00e2\u20ac\u009d support options.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just as with Ubuntu, driver support was excellent, auto detecting my Video\/Audio and other peripherals like USB drives upon boot. A very OSX looking desktop screen, serves as the default background.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"SUSE<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Also of note is the very different \u00e2\u20ac\u0153start\u00e2\u20ac\u009d menu or application browser, pictured below. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fascinating to see how OS menu systems are moving away form traditional linear designs as they grow more and more conceptualized around tasks, and less about a specific application. This is true of most new modern OSes (Vista, OSX and now here in Linux windows managers.)<\/font><\/p>\n

\"SUSE<\/a><\/font><\/p>\n

Bundled apps were plentiful and featured Open Office and Firefox 2.0. Totem serves that the default media player, but like Fedora and the current Ubuntu it does not default install with many codecs; Ubuntu 7.X plans to support an auto download on demand of unknown\/uninstalled codecs, I was hoping to see that in this refresh of SUSE.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And let me clarify somehting about\u00c2\u00a0this post, as well as the whole\u00c2\u00a0series of Linux Distro overviews,\u00c2\u00a0this is\u00c2\u00a0not indented to be an over-arcing exhaustive review of SUSE, but rather an accumulation of observations I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m making about the current crop of Linux offerings. There are many great sites devoted to much more granular detail than I can get into here. In a future article I will give some recommendations on sources you can draw from for more info.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Overall this is a very impressive offering and should be considered as a free\/low cost PC OS option. Keep watching as I will look at Fedora 6 next in the series.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you know, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been refreshing my experience on the current crop of Linux distros, last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overviewed was Ubuntu 6.10 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you Ubuntu?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c2\u00a0Moving right along in my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153which Linux Distro is right for me\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Evaluation is SUSE 10.2.   Having not looked at SUSE since before the Novell merger\/acquisition, I expected significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linuxunix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.degen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}