SuSE 9.3 Professional

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hyperspace
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SuSE 9.3 Professional

Post by hyperspace »

Anyone tried SuSE 9.3?
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purrkur
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Post by purrkur »

Yes I have. At work we support Suse (the server version) which is in version 9.0 but I have also played around with 9.3.

For an RPM distro it is pretty good. It is easy to set up and the Yast2 configuration tool that Suse has is very good in my opinion and can fix most configuration issues.

However, I must once again say that I don't really like distro's that sell you a certain version and when you want new stuff you will have to buy another version from the company (a la RedHat, Suse, Mandriva (or whatever they are called today)). I think that is a "Windows" way of doing it and I don't like it because it is unnecessary. Or let me clear that up a bit. I don't mind that for a server setup where you want to know what you have installed and once things are running the way you want, you don't want the system doing version changes that may break your configs, but for desktop use it sucks pretty bad.

I also don't like that they don't provide standard tools that take care of dependencies and such. Sure, there are many third party tools that do that (yum, apt for RPM and so) but I would like all these RPM based distros to pick a tool and run with it as standard. I have on occasion seen articles on the net comparing rpm to apt but that comparison can never be correct because they are not the same thing. In Debian and related distros the rpm part is called dpkg. Apt is simply the software that takes care of dependencies and other related work (sitting on top of dpkg).

So what are you looking for? A distro to run on your BP6? If yes then I would like to inform you that I still want to do the "Debian on BP6" howto I have mentioned before. Debian is more of a "install once, upgrade forever type of distro which is more suited to Desktop use than the RPM ones (IMHO). Debian is not as easy as the pay-for-desktop distros out there but it is still good enough and actually pretty easy if you have somebody to ask for help once you run into "how should I do this" type of issue (which I hope I can take care of as well with help from Phaedrus and others). With Debian you will also learn stuff while you necessarily won't with the easy-desktop-distros.

In any case, the way I see it, the best way forward to use the BP6 in the future would be with Linux. The next version of Windows will probably not even run on the BP6. In terms of Windows, I think W2k is the best version of that OS to run on the BP6 and Microsoft is already telling the market that they are cutting off development for it (for instance, want to run IE7 when it comes out? Sorry, you'll have to upgrade to XP).

If you want an easy, free distro right now then I would suggest Ubuntu or Kubuntu, depending on wether you want to run Gnome or KDE as your main desktop. That is a Debian related distro that is built for ease of use.
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hyperspace
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Post by hyperspace »

Currently, I have XP, Fedora, SuSE and Slack on one of my systems (BP6s). I have XP, Win2KPro and Mandrake (Mandriva) on another. I tried Ubuntu Live CD. Slack was the first distro that came up to a command prompt after installing (nice surprise!). I want to replace Fedora or SuSE with Debian.

I like working from the command prompt best. You learn more about what is going on and have greater control over what will happen. It easier to repair/recover from the command prompt, as well.

I started using SunOS in the early '90s when MS was starting to wrap everything in GUI. I like UNIX best, but work with Windows alot due to the MS (marketed) mainstream direction. Maybe this will change over time. :D

Can you tell me which of the 14 CDs one must download to install Debian?
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Post by purrkur »

hyperspace wrote:Currently, I have XP, Fedora, SuSE and Slack on one of my systems (BP6s). I have XP, Win2KPro and Mandrake (Mandriva) on another. I tried Ubuntu Live CD. Slack was the first distro that came up to a command prompt after installing (nice surprise!). I want to replace Fedora or SuSE with Debian.
Whoa! How do you ever get anything done? Just trying to decide on what OS to run must be hard :)
hyperspace wrote:I like working from the command prompt best. You learn more about what is going on and have greater control over what will happen. It easier to repair/recover from the command prompt, as well.
Ah, Nice. There is a way of telling Linux not to start X as default. It might vary between distro's a bit but it is usually easy to get around. For me, X Windows is a program. I don't want it started by default either. Running a "startx" command is pretty easy in my opinion.
hyperspace wrote:I started using SunOS in the early '90s when MS was starting to wrap everything in GUI. I like UNIX best, but work with Windows alot due to the MS (marketed) mainstream direction. Maybe this will change over time. :D
I think most of us work with Windows one way or another. I personally work with Solaris, Windows and Linux at work so I know what you mean.
hyperspace wrote:Can you tell me which of the 14 CDs one must download to install Debian?
That is the beauty of Debian. You don't need those CD's at all! Click on this link to get a net installation ISO (180 MB) that contains the installation tools and a basic setup. That way you can do a minimal install and then just add the things you want (not the things somebody else who builds a distro thinks that you want). After doing the basic setup, the rest of the installation takes place through the net.
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hyperspace
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Post by hyperspace »

purrkur wrote:Whoa! How do you ever get anything done? Just trying to decide on what OS to run must be hard :)
Mostly switch between XP and one of the distros. Been tyring to find out which Linux distro is the most wireless savvy.
purrkur wrote:Ah, Nice. There is a way of telling Linux not to start X as default. It might vary between distro's a bit but it is usually easy to get around. For me, X Windows is a program. I don't want it started by default either. Running a "startx" command is pretty easy in my opinion.
Slack uses startx from the command prompt.
purrkur wrote:I think most of us work with Windows one way or another. I personally work with Solaris, Windows and Linux at work so I know what you mean.
Our main server (RS6000) at the hospital/clinic I work at, uses AIX but clients are Windows. The AIX box requires AD, so we have a Windows 2000 Server and we use Novell for logins and resource sharing (files, printers, etc.).
purrkur wrote:That is the beauty of Debian. You don't need those CD's at all! Click on this link to get a net installation ISO (180 MB) that contains the installation tools and a basic setup. That way you can do a minimal install and then just add the things you want (not the things somebody else who builds a distro thinks that you want). After doing the basic setup, the rest of the installation takes place through the net.
Downloading as I type. Thanx, purrkur !
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Post by purrkur »

hyperspace wrote:Mostly switch between XP and one of the distros. Been tyring to find out which Linux distro is the most wireless savvy.
Ah. Good one. I think the easiest thing to do is to check the supported hardware by the different distros and then choose a wireless NIC according to that. But it is hard though because sometimes they only support WEP but not WPA and so on. A bit of a pain really. Then there is another way of doing it which is using using the Windows drivers through ndiswrapper.
hyperspace wrote:Slack uses startx from the command prompt.
Actually, all of them can, it is just a matter of adjusting it that way, there are three available programs for starting X at boot called xdm, kdm and gdm and the one you use will most of the time depend on if you are running some X window manager like Fluxbox or Windowmaker (xdm), KDE (kdm) or Gnome (gdm). What I usually look for is to check and see if I can find what runlevel is being specified at boot in the file /etc/inittab. However, neither Debian or Gentoo use it that way but I am sure that RedHat and Mandriva do. If that doesn't work then I will usually just rename the xdm/kdm/gdm startup files in the /etc/init.d/rc[0-6].d directories (depending on what runlevel is defined). The files are usually called something like "S89xdm" and what I will do is to rename the file so the "S" becomes lowercase. When the computer boots up the startup file isn't found and therefore the GUI will not start by default. However, in many distros, doing a single number change in /etc/inittab is enough.
hyperspace wrote:Our main server (RS6000) at the hospital/clinic I work at, uses AIX but clients are Windows. The AIX box requires AD, so we have a Windows 2000 Server and we use Novell for logins and resource sharing (files, printers, etc.).
I look into my crystal ball and I see....Linux in your future! It is not really a secret that both IBM and Novell are now pushing Linux fulltime. I have heard of instances where IBM has replaced their own AIX with Linux and of course Novell is trying their best to migrate their customers from their old stuff to Novell. From what I have heard, they are doing a pretty decent job migrating customers without too much pain.
hyperspace wrote:Downloading as I type. Thanx, purrkur !
Cool! and you are welcome! Let me know if and when you have any questions! Oh, and Btw, if you do have any questions, please start a new thread so we deal with one issue per thread. It will make it easy to follow and easy to find as well.

Cheers!
2x533MHz@544MHz, 2.0V
640MB PC100 memory
Realtek RTL-8139 NIC
Maxtor 6Y080L0 80GB hdd
Debian Linux stable with 2.4.8 kernel
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