SUSE Linux ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 03:47:28PM -0500, Geoffrey Hunter wrote:
> Today I heard of the SUSE Linux distribution: it is being supported by
> UNISYS on their servers.  Does anybody on this TLUG list know more
> about it and/or have experience using it ?  I got the impression that
> it is a carefully selected set of applications on top of the kernel.
> The acronym is originally German: Systems und Software Engineering.
> I'm interested because my currently used Linux (Mandrake 8.1) has
> several problems:
> a) the only way to get a multi-page file to print is to re-boot,
> b) it hangs up after trying to read/write to a floppy,
> c) only one instance of Mozilla can be run concurrently,
> d) the K-shell is not user-friendly - its Midnight Commander
> emulation has no supporting documentation telling you how to
> change directories, or link the command box to the 2 directory boxes,
> e) it is slow to initialize applications compared with Windows.
>     I ordered the latest Mandrake on the web (for around $25) a couple
> of weeks ago, but it still hasn't arrived, so I'm mostly using Windows
> now to avoid the problems listed above.

Well S.u.S.E. has been around quite a while.  I believe it is pretty
popular, at least in Germany and the surounding areas.

I don't personally have much experience with it.  I tried installing it
about 2 or 3 years ago by downloading the installer and using ftp for
the install.  I was no impressed by the number of questions to which no
defaults or options were given (such as which ftp server and directory
to download from).  Being a Debian user for a few years at that point I
expected much more from a net install.  Even NetBSD has choices for
mirrors to use during the install and it isn't the friendliest to
install.  I suspect a CD/DVD install would have been much more pleasant,
but I didn't have one of those for my experiment.  I didn't get much
past just installing it and poking around at the settings a bit, since
it didn't really appear to offer me any improvements over what I was
already using, and I didn't feel like going back to something using RPM
for the packages having already used RedHat for years before that.

I haven't seen much use of S.u.S.E. in north america, but there
certainly are some users of it around, just not very many.  If you can
get it for free and try it, there is nothing to loose but your time (and
perhaps sanity. :)

Lennart Sorensen
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