| First look: SUSE 10 -- where's the dot-one? |
by Alan Canton (Oct. 18, 2005)
After a long, slow download from impacted servers, I've got the new SUSE 10 running.
The install went well, except that it wouldn't boot from the hard disk! That's because I had my machine's BIOS drive-configuration for my SATA drives set to "PATA legacy" on the secondary channel... which turned the CD-ROM into something from the black lagoon as far as SUSE was concerned. It would boot from the Install CD, but not from the hard disk after installation. Changing the BIOS did the trick (it had been set to "legacy," because when I first got the machine two years ago, I installed Slackware 9.1 with a 2.4 kernel without SATA compatibility.)
Except for the above problem, the hardware identification is excellent. However, the software integration isn't.
The system is lacking in video and pdf integration with Firefox. That's a nice way to say it just does not work. For me and others (but for some reason, not everyone from what I read on the boards) pdf files won't display in Firefox, nor will mpg video. However, Flash works OK. Go figure. I'm no newbie, and I know what I'm doing... but obviously, I don't know enough to figure out why Acrobat Reader won't get loaded as a plugin (nppdf.so) with SUSE 10 and Firefox 1.07.
I installed Apache, PHP, and MySQL via the YaST system and it went OK for the most part. For some reason, SUSE makes you install the Bind DNS server when you install Apache. When I started up the httpd service via YaST, it wiped out my resolv.conf file for some reason... which means that I was "off the net." I had to reboot so that DHCP from my router would re-build it (there might be a better way, but I'm not sure). I'm sure it was Bind that "took out" resolv.conf, and I still don't understand why SUSE installs it with Apache2. Fortunately, this was a one-time issue and there have been no problems since.
I've never used SUSE before, and one thing I don't like about SUSE is that it does not have "official" repositories like you find in the Debian world. What you get on the CD is pretty much what you install and will live with, and if you want to get new versions of things, you get them from unofficial (untested?) 3rd party repositories.
One thing I find to be a huge drawback with SUSE is the community. First, their IRC #suse is a zoo. Make sure you wear your asbestos undies before getting on there. There are a bunch of young guys who flood the channel with obscenities and insults, and who abuse the medium (not unlike #debian and TOTALLY UNLIKE the mature and responsible attitude found on #kanotix... which is wonderful community of helpful folks). Also, there is a lack of depth in the SUSE community at large. You go to the web boards or the Usenet newsgroup and find a lot of folks who have the same problem you have, and there is no one there with the background in Linux to solve the problem. And some of them are simple, such as setting permissions, or using "./" in a non-path directory to run a script.
SUSE's very fine YaST admin system has created a layer of abstraction and this, in turn, has attracted a lot of newbie users. However you still can't do everything via YaST, and SUSE has still not achieved the ease-of-install-and-configure of complex applications that WinXP has. There are still some things best done at the command line.
So when things go wrong, they tend to stay wrong for a while, due to the lack of a large group of users with a deep understanding of Linux. (The acroread/FF problem is a case in point. This would have been solved in a day in the Debian world. It's been going on for a week in SUSE-land.)
One dragon that the SUSE folks have finally slayed and buried is the long-standing charge that SUSE was a slug. Not this version -- SUSE 10 is very fast. The KDE screens snap in place and applications load quickly, even hogs like the Konqueror file manager and OpenOffice2. As a desktop workhorse, SUSE 10 is a joy to use.
I thought Novell was going to "get it right" with their new OpenSUSE 10 version, and become a serious contender to Red Hat in the small business community, who can't afford the "real thing" called "Novell Linux." (As I understand it, the entire Novell business model is still up in the air as to how OpenSUSE.org is going to fit into the great scheme of things.) And I still think Novell has that ability, but this version of SUSE, even though it went through a number of release candidates, feels like it was rushed out by the development team.
This is the first effort in "openness" from Novell, and it's a good one, all in all. But this is a dot-zero release, and it looks and acts like one in many respects. I'm looking forward to the dot-one version, where I hope the "fit and finish" is done to a higher standard... along the lines of my favorite distro, Kanotix.
About the author: Alan Canton is the president of Adams-Blake Company of Fair Oaks, Calif., which provides the JAYA123 Web-based back office application for small and mid-size businesses.
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