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| SUSE LINUX Professional 9.1 Reviewed |
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Product: SUSE LINUX 9.1
Available: Now
Cost: Personal $69.95, Professional $179.95
Free Download: FTP Edition
Verdict: 9/10
Summary: It isn't perfect, but SUSE LINUX is a worthy Linux desktop operating system that holds its own against its desktop competitors. Be sure to pay the extra $100 for the Professional edition unless you are certain that Personal is for you.
Website: http://www.suse.net.au/
SUSE LINUX has been around for a long time, and the developers at SUSE have always prided themselves on the user-friendliness of their distribution. SUSE LINUX 9.1 is the first version of the company's consumer product line to be released following its acquisition by Novell last year, and is described as being "more than just an alternative to Windows". SUSE has always been a general-purpose distribution with packages and tools for servers as well as desktops. Given the importance being placed by Novell on desktop Linux, how does SUSE LINUX 9.1 compare to its specifically desktop-oriented commercial rivals, Lycoris Desktop/LX, Xandros Desktop and Lindows Linspire? SUSE kindly sent us a copy of their latest release so we could find out.
What's In the Box?
SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal Edition
1 Installation CD
1 Live Evaluation CD
Printed Installation Guide
SUSE pamphlets, support card and Gecko sticker
SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional Edition
5 Installation CDs
1 double-sided Installation DVD (x86 and IA64)
1 double-sided Sources DVD (x86 and IA64)
1 iAnywhere SQL Anywhere Studio 9 (Developer Edition) CD
Printed User Guide
Printed Administration Guide
SUSE pamphlets, support card and Gecko sticker
Core Technology and Applications
Linux Kernel 2.6.4
Xfree86 4.4 RC2 (the last GPL version)
KDE 3.2.1
Gnome 2.4.2 (libraries in Personal edition, full desktop environment in Professional edition)
OpenOffice 1.1.1 Native Widget Framework version
Kontact 0.8.1
Ximian Evolution 1.4.6 (in Professional edition)
Primary Hardware Configurations Tested
Dell Dimension 8100
Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz
512Mb RDRAM
60Gb Maxtor IDE hard drive
4x NEC DVD-ROM
40x/12x/2x LG CD-RW
64Mb NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra AGP 4x
19" Dell monitor
Creative SoundBlaster Live! OEM
3Com 10/100 Network Card
Windows ME
IBM Personal Computer 300GL
Intel Celeron 500MHz
256Mb PC133 SDRAM
10Gb IBM IDE hard drive
24x Matshita CD-ROM
32Mb NVIDIA TNT2-M64 PCI
17" Compaq V75 monitor
On-board Intel i810 (AC-97) sound
Realtek RT8139-compatible 10/100 Network Card
Windows 2000 Professional
Compaq Evo N115
AMD Duron 1GHz
128Mb DDR-SDRAM
10Gb IBM IDE hard drive
24x internal CD-ROM
Integrated AGP video controller (shared)
14.1" TFT screen
On-board AC-97 sound
On-board 10/100-network interface
On-board Conexant HSF winmodem
Windows XP Professional
Personal and Professional
SUSE LINUX 9.1 comes in two flavours: Personal and Professional. The Personal edition is designed for Windows users who are making the move to Linux for the first time, and comes with a single Installation CD-ROM, plus a bootable Live CD and a printed installation manual. The Professional edition is designed for more experienced users, and comes with five installation CDs, two double-sided DVDs - one containing 32-bit and 64-bit installation packages, the other containing the source code for all of the open source packages - and two thick manuals, a User Guide and an Administration Guide.
For this release, SUSE has dropped the Recommended Retail Price for the Personal edition to $69.95 (US$29.95 MSRP internationally), and raised the RRP for the Professional edition slightly to $179.95 (US$89.95). The drop in price for the Personal edition makes SUSE LINUX particularly attractive for users looking for a distribution for the first time, because it is cheaper up-front than similar entry-level products from Lycoris (US$40), Xandros ($US$39) and Linspire (US$50), while the Professional edition justifies its hefty price with a wealth of applications, including a number of useful commercial applications.
Installation
SUSE LINUX uses the custom-developed YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) for installation, and provides a comprehensive installation experience for new and experienced users. The installer is fairly straightforward in most cases, but is too complicated for new users and has some rather peculiar bugs that should have been straightened out before the products were released. Despite these issues, YaST is simple enough to be workable for most users, especially those who have installed Windows before.
The installation is virtually identical for both editions, although the Personal edition lacks an upgrade option (and, incidentally, a repair option; however, this is a bug, not a feature). The entire boot process is graphical, from the CD-ROM boot menu on. SUSE has included a handy "Boot from Hard Drive" entry on its installation menu and has selected it by default; this prevents users from accidentally starting the installation process, and is especially useful when the Professional edition installer reboots during the package installation phase.
SUSE has tried hard to automate as much of the initial installation as possible. Following the unavoidable language selection screen, the installer automatically scans the computer and presents the user with a list of "suggestions", including the installation mode, partitioning, package selection and more. The user can either accept these suggestions as is or modify them individually. This is a very easy and intuitive system when it works, but YaST has a few quirks that take some getting used to. The most peculiar quirk I found related to the partitioning suggestion on one of my test computers. YaST can resize both FAT32 and NTFS partitions, and tries to automatically suggest a resizing scheme that leaves enough free space to install the new operating system. On most computers I tested SUSE LINUX on, this worked fine, but on this particular machine, YaST failed to allocate enough space from the Windows partition to install its own package selection suggestion (about 1.5Gb), despite the fact that there was over 40Gb of free space! Both the Personal and Professional editions exhibited this behaviour - at least it was consistent.
The workaround for this particular problem was to change YaST's partitioning suggestions by clicking on the headline and then selecting "Base partition setup on this proposal". The process wasn't as easy as it first appeared, as YaST had listed the partition as being mounted on /windows/C - not an unreasonable thing to do in and of itself - but refused to let me resize it until I had manually unmounted it. This when the system was not yet installed! In the end, I had to go back and select "Create custom partition setup" instead, and do of all the work myself.
The other oddity related to a logical FAT32 partition I have on another of my test computers that I use to transfer files between Linux and Windows. YaST simply would not mount the partition, either during or after installation, although I can manually mount the partition.
Other than these problems, the pre-installation configuration was fairly straight-forward, and the only change I had to make to the various suggestions was to configure the correct time zone, something SUSE will find hard to ever automate.
Despite the advertised ability of the installer to resize NTFS partitions, I deliberately avoided resizing any NTFS partitions, as there had been numerous reports of errors relating to NTFS resizing in SUSE LINUX 9.1, and other distributions, due to an adjustment in the way the 2.6 versions of the Linux kernel reports partitioning sizes. These errors generally result in Windows no longer being bootable. SUSE have subsequently released a patch for this problem; however, the fact this bug was not detected during the beta process is an indication that the company needs to beef up its Quality Assurance process. The bug is very unfortunate, as Windows XP uses the NTFS file system by default, and this problem may scare many potential new users into staying with Windows for the time being.
nce its suggestions have been modified and accepted, YaST prompts the user to ensure that they wish to proceed, and then begins the installation. A slide show is provided to keep the user entertained while the packages are installed. The slides in the Personal edition are the same as those in the Professional edition, and thus on occasion have little relevance to reality. For example, a slide describing the Gnome desktop environment is included, but Gnome itself is not. It strikes me as odd that SUSE would fail to add this finishing touch to the Personal edition. The other peculiarity during the package installation relates to a reboot after the first CD has been installed. In both editions, YaST restarts the computer without prompting the user. Although the installation process continues immediately after booting from the newly installed SUSE boot loader, the fact that YaST does not inform the user before rebooting is extremely confusing.
Following the package installation - up to 4 CD changes later if you are installing from the Professional CD-ROMs - SUSE prompts you to configure a number of basic settings, including setting the root password, setting up the network or dial-up settings, an optional online update, adding a standard user, and hardware configuration. This part of the installation was uneventful except for two small eccentricities, both relating to the way SUSE deals with users and passwords. Firstly, SUSE still uses DES encryption for the users and passwords database by default, and this limits the length of user names and passwords to eight characters. To change to the more modern MD5 encryption, which, aside from offering the benefits of more robust encryption, also allows far longer user names and passwords, the user needs to click the "Expert" button when entering their root password, and change the appropriate setting. While it is commendable that SUSE allows users to choose their encryption settings, the default setting should be the more modern MD5 encryption option. Secondly, while SUSE include options for network-based authentication via LDAP and NIS, they have failed to give users the option of enabling SMB (Windows) authentication at installation time. Instead, users must configure this setting after the installation, which seems to be a remarkable oversight on SUSE's part.
The post-install configuration process is far too complicated for the new users that the Personal edition is targeted at, especially the Device Configuration step at the very end. I suggest that SUSE remove the online update, release notes and device configuration steps from the next release of the Personal edition. The default encryption for passwords should also be altered to MD5, and the Expert option should be removed. While this will reduce the functionality of the installer, it will also reduce the total number of installation steps from 10 to seven, two of which will remain completely automated. The user will, of course, still be able to configure the missing or incorrect settings using the YaST control panel following the conclusion of the installation.
Despite its quirks, YaST is a commendable installation tool, and achieves a good balance between ease of use and flexibility, at least for more experienced users. Hopefully SUSE can sort out the bugs for the next release. For the Personal edition, YaST needs some serious work to make it more approachable for first-timers - and please, include some banners that make sense! Desktop-oriented distributions like Xandros and Linspire in particular have streamlined their installers to make them dead simple - although not necessarily as flexible - and SUSE could improve the chances of new users successfully navigating the installation process by emulating their rivals' efforts. For the Professional edition, SUSE needs to concentrate on fixing the oversights and bugs that crop up from time to time.
On the Desktop
The developers at SUSE have spent a considerable amount of time trying to make SUSE LINUX 9.1 as functional and as pleasant to work with as possible, and for the most they have succeeded brilliantly. However, there are a number of issues that they have failed to adequately address, and the lacklustre support for Gnome in the Professional edition unfortunately lessens the impact of their otherwise excellent efforts.
The default desktop in SUSE LINUX 9.1 is KDE 3.2.1. SUSE has chosen to follow Lycoris by including a number of colourful desktop backgrounds of various natural environments, including mountains and streams. The default style for the Professional edition is Thin Keramik, which thankfully lacks much of the over-the-top bloat that afflicts Keramik itself and has caused many distributions to move to the newer Plastik style, which is the default in the Personal edition. Combined with a custom window decoration and the Crystal SVG icon set, the KDE desktop is a pleasure to look at and interact with.
SUSE have further enhanced the desktop experience by trying to make Gnome applications and OpenOffice.org look and feel similar to the KDE desktop and its applications. Gnome applications also look and feel similar to their QT-based counterparts when they are run under KDE. This theme integration is especially clever - the widget style that is used when Gnome applications are loaded under KDE is independent of whatever style has been selected for use inside of Gnome itself. Unfortunately, the Gnome theme is still a little out of place - for some reason SUSE has based the Gnome-under-KDE theme on Keramik, rather than Thin Keramik or Plastik, depending on the edition. In addition, KDE seems to be afflicted by a bug that stops it recognising the various XMMS components as a single entity; thus attempting to minimise XMMS in fact only removes the main window from the screen. Despite this small issue, the main problem with the Gnome-under-KDE theme concept remains its implementation, not minor bugs in KDE. Hopefully SUSE will update their Gnome-under-KDE themes for the next release. The developers should consider integrating the GTK-QT Theme Engine, a new FreeDesktop.org technology that dynamically adjusts the GTK theme to fit the current QT theme. The theme engine is extremely unstable at present, so alternatively SUSE may choose to update their static Gnome-under-KDE widget themes to match the default KDE themes for each edition. GTK themes based on Thin Keramik and Plastik have been available on KDE-Look.org for some time, and it would be good to see them in the next release of SUSE LINUX, assuming they are stable enough.
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."
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