A funny thing happened to my brother-in-law at CompUSA yesterday…he was looking for some blank CD-R
media and took a stroll past the Linux rack on the way to it. There they had SuSE 7.0 Professional
Marked at a penny, so he asks a sales person what the deal is and he scanned the item and sure enough
it was one penny. We are both playing with Linux as time permits us in our lives and generally share
a little knowledge between ourselves at family gathering and such so he buys two figuring I might want
one.
I have tried several distros since my Linux box is more of a toy to me at this point than a link to
the world so I have removed and installed many versions to see what they are made of. So last night I
popped open an Icehouse Beer and sat down to play. What a surprise, my previous experience with SuSE
has been less than impressive (6.1 was my last attempt). SuSE Professional comes with 6 CD’s (7.1 will
be released on Feb 12 with 7 CD’s) and all those CD’s are also on a single DVD. It installs via YaST 2
and, as usual, can boot from the CD-Rom if your system allows.
When I install any distro I always install everything the setup allows because I want all the toys
available to me, so this time was no different. The graphical install was good looking and very easy to
understand. I get to the point of selecting my install options so I, by force of habit, check them all
(except installing the source code which SUSE does allow). This install took about two hours and took 4
of the 6 CD’s, used up 83% of my 4 gig hard drive and put in games, office apps, servers, firewalls, and
loads of configuration utilities…I have never seen that in any other distro! It is a virtual bottomless
toybox for the aspiring Linux geek.
After copying all the files to my hard drive it then goes through and detects the monitor and video card
(which it does very well with the newerXFree86 4.0) and allows custom setting and testing of many color
depths and resolution settings. After that it goes to one screen that auto-detects the printers,
soundcards, network cards and modems. I have no printer or modem hooked up yet, but the soundcard and
both network cards were detected and configured easily.
When the system reboots after all the installation and configuration I log in as a common user and was
very shocked to see a very usefull launch bar at the bottom of the screen, not the typical Linux launch
bars like every other distro I have used, but it had the typical “K” button that open the normal list of
goodies, plus it had a application menu that listed just apps by category plus a menu for just all the
configuration utilities for the system, network, printers, sound and all that other good stuff. I
thought that was a great idea, as it makes SuSE very easy to get around in.
Since I just did this last night, after the install, reboot and 3 or 4 Icehouses later I had to go to
bed so I didn’t get a lot of time to check out the cool new features in detail. But in closing I can
say this:
Linux SuSE 7.0 was the easiest install and configuration I have seen to date after trying about a dozen
makes and versions. It has the most complete software package that installs upon the initial install,
and with anly an evenings experience, appears to be the distro I just may stick with.
