SuSE 6.4 Professional CD Edition
 No problems with installation. Booted directly off the CDROM but I chose to use the older text mode “Yast1” installer rather than the graphical “Yast2”. Quite a lengthy install-process but required very little operator input once started.
X-window configuration was accomplished using “Sax” which correctly identified my ageing ATI Mach 64 graphics card and configured the correct x-server. A good choice of window managers are available and the more popular ones are installed by default. After looking at most of them, I chose KDE but it is the most resource hungry and can reduce a slow machine to a crawl. Upgrading to a new version of the distribution was quite painless. If you have modified one of the configuration files, it is not overwritten but the new one is renamed..
I like the Suse distribution, I have used it since version 6.1. Occupying 6 CDROMs, I think it is the most complete distribution. Most things that you will ever want are already there saving much time downloading from the Internet. One minor criticism is SuSe’s definition of a “minimum” installation doesn’t seem to agree with mine. If you are running on a smallish hard disk, beware! the “full” installation is about 6 gigabytes. Mine ended up at just under 3 gig. although I have another machine with most bits installed and still a useful ammount of free space on its 2.1g disk.
I attempted to replace “inetd”, with “xinetd” because of its vastly improved security features but just could not get the thing to work with the Suse supplied binary. After a day of frusration, I got the latest version from the Xinetd web site , compilled and installed it, and it ran perfectly. I also think that Yast2, the graphical configuration utility, possibly needs more work, some of its options just did nothing.
Overall, I like it. I use one of my two machines to access the Internet, download pictures from my digital camera and view them using Compupic for Linux (Brilliant by the way!), the other machine I use for amateur packet radio, networked to a Windows box using Samba.
Added: Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Reviewer: Frank Johnson
Score: 
Related Link: SuSE UK
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Language: eng
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