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SuSE 7.3 Professional

Installation: -

I booted from CD1 and was presented with some installation options. There is a choice of Installation, Installation with Safe Settings, Manual Installation, Rescue System (has saved me many times before!) and Memory test. I just chose the normal installation. You can also change the display resolution for the installation at this point.

The installation now searches for a braille display (a very good and possibly unique feature) then the graphical installation starts.


The installer now attempts to detect some of the hardware including USB, mouse, floppy, controllers, hard disks and partitions.

You can now select the language and time zone settings.


You can now choose between a New Install, Update an existing SuSE system or Boot an installed system (very useful!).

SuSE then proceeds to suggest how to partition the disk which you can either accept, modify or reject completely. I modified its suggestions because it had selected Ext2 to format the partitions to by default and I though I would like to try Ext3. Also, by default it creates a boot partition which is not needed anymore and can be included on your main partition.


Now you are presented with a list of the available types of installation. These are Minimum, Minimum graphical, Default, Default with office, All or a detailed package selection for a custom install. I simply selected the Default with office option.


Next is the LILO configuration which is automaticly done (although there is an option of a custom installation). You then need to set the root password and create a main user for the system.


SuSE then presents you wish a summary of what will be done to the system and asks you to confirm the installation before it proceeds to install the system.

It uniquely gives you the time left PER CD that is required which I think is nice.


After CD1 has installed it boots your system (without rebooting – as it should be!) and continues the installation from the other discs that it requires (mine only needed discs 1 and 3).


When the main system installation has completed you can setup the X server and select your monitor, resolution and colour depth. My graphics card (an ATI MACH64) was automatically detected. My monitor (A panasonic PanaSync C1381) however, was not supported and I had to configure it manually. The resolution and colour depth is automatically suggested from the maximum your hardware can display.


SuSE now spends some time writing the configuration.


You can now configure any additional hardware that you have. It attempts to detect and allow you to configure any network cards, printers, modems, ISDN cards, sound cards and TV cards. It detected my network card (a Realtek RTL8139) which I then configured. I then setup a Windows printer using Samba which was REALLY easy. You can simply tell SuSE to search the network for windows machines with printers which you can then select from a list then it will also search for which printer queue to use which can also be selected from a list.

I did not have any other hardware in the machine.


The installation is now complete and your system boots (again, without rebooting).


Software content: -

SuSE has a huge range of software to do anything you can possibly think of on its 7 Cds and 1 DVD.

A small part of the massive range includes KDE 2.1.2, CUPS, Apache, Samba, Squid, Koffice, Star Office 5.2, Netscape 6.1 and Postfix.



My thoughts: -

I love SuSE. I have watched it get consistantly better from version 6.3. It is certainly the most complete distribution I have ever used. In general is is good with hardware except it does have problems with some sound cards (not this time though). I have previously tried to configure a Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 (probably the most common card on the planet) with SuSE and falied terribly because it does not support ISA sound cards. On the other end of the scale I also tried to configure a brand new Creative Sound Blaster Live! which also falied because it is not properly supported in the included SuSE kernel.

There are a few things that I think could be improved for the next version however. I think it would be nice to have a game to play during the installation (like the Debian based distros have). I would also like to see the severely ageing Star Office dropped and replaced with OpenOffice which is both newer and more feature rich. I would also like to see more of an effort made to keep up with new software releases. As SuSE release versions so often they don't have time to update included software in-between which I find quite annoying.


Conclusion: -

If you're looking for a home system I would suggest SuSE 7.3 Personal and if you want a server then use the Pro edition.
This is certainly the best distro currently available. It may not be the most user friendly or user orientated by it certainly is the best all-rounder. Buy it!


Thanks to SuSE UK from providing the LUG with a free subscription to SuSE Linux.


Added:  Thursday, January 31, 2002
Reviewer:  David Johnson
Score:
Related Link:  SuSE UK
hits: 237
Language: eng

  

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Posted by alchemist on Feb 25, 2002 - 11:18 PM
My score:

Having purchased SuSE 7.3 personal edition, and painlessly installing it on my system at home. I was quite impressed with the simplicity of the options I had in front of me. Having cut my teeth on distros such as Redhat & mandrake I knew then, SuSE had me pretty much excited. It was a pleasant surprise, to see that the box set, contained manuals, something I am not used to with a Linux distro, which I thought were well laid out, also a install guide and some stickers to decorate my desktop case, monitor and cat. Choosing partitions and filesystems were quite straight forward, however choosing what partitions and swap size, could have done with a bit of a hint e.g. kernel 4.?.? requires swap = 2.5 X RAM for whatever reason. The same could be said for choosing filesystems what does ext2, 3 or reiserFS have to offer. The package installer was quite easy giving recommended setups, or an opportunity to choose your own, which also lists dependancies. This enabled me to setup my system without some of the bloat associated with SuSE distros. A shame star office is included open office is more resource friendly. I wish I had the option to install abiword? The soundcard I had in my system previously was an Aztech Washington 16, only redhat had recognised this card to date due to the opal chipset. Sadly SuSE never recognised the card after many attempts at playing around with the advanced settings. My graphics card a Voodoo 5 was only recognised as a generic vga card. Not a problem. I decided it was time to part with some cash. I purchased a Soundblaster 5.1. Bingo it was recognised, I could not however install the fonts? Never really used to sound on my system I now can't be without this creature comfort. Reading the manual and playing with SAX I got my video card recognised with 3D acceleration. Modem configuration was simple as I know my pop& smtp config off by heart. My CDre-writer was recognised, however to get KonCD configured I did have to refer to http://www.linuxnewbie.org. - no hardship. For my printer I used Cups and was impressed with the test page it produced. Overall a nice distro, whic can only improve with age, I feel there is a certain solidness to SuSE. I look forward to future distros.
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