Suse 10 Review

[Byron Sonne]

> I am surprised that he only went as low as a 466 MHz processor. I didn't think 
> Suse would have set the hardware "bar" so high.

I've been a pretty loyal SuSE user for years now, and you are right. 
I've tried it on some older hardware and it wasn't so hot, not in gui 
mode... but cli has never been a real problem. That sounds like an 
interesting issue. But I think it's a given that it's a bloated distro, 
meant for higher end stuff. If I wanted to run Debian, I'd be running 
Debian. I've put in my time on slack and many, many others, now I want 
to be spoiled. And on a good amd64 system with a gig of decent ram, 
neither of which are very expensive anymore, it is a thing of beauty ;) 
This is not the distro you drop on your linksys router.

The hardware detection on my rig was near flawless, certainly better 
than windows or my wife's osx box. Things aren't perfect mind you, was a 
  somewhat of a bitch getting multimedia codecs and shit working... 
somethings are just not there or hard to find/tweak. I also 
underestimated how confused I would be with problems stemming from 
keeping two strains of libs, 32bit and 64, and when one or the other, or 
both, were needed or even appropriate to install. But everything I've 
ever done in 32 bit I can do now after a few weeks of learning. Bought 
some cheap $50 Hauppauge USB video capture dongle which didn't work too 
well at first, and with a retardedly easy driver recompile from the 
project site (module is km_usbvision?) things clicked, and it's working.

I was expecting serious issues with vmware and running windows guests, 
as theres some programs I just can't get (and am too lazy to write) for 
linux. Mostly stuff to do with my Icom scanner, controlling it through 
the serial port. Well, running the 5.5 beta still and no issues 
whatsoever. That made me very happy.

Stupidest thing so far? I installed the OpenSuSE 10 version, or free, or 
whatever the heck it's called, and cvs & cvsup wasn't there. Had to wait 
and find an install site. What the hell is that? A few other obvious 
things were missing too. Novell I suspect is going to screw this pooch, 
I just hope the germans can hold it together :)

Cheers,
B

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