Found a review of SuSE today that I felt was worth a look. Linux Gazette’s own Edgar Howell shares his own experiences with the 9.2 version of the SuSE distribution.
Installation was a snap as was configuring software and running needed updates after the install. The only real ‘extra work’ that was involved was setting up an HP Printer under YaST. Looks like we have a winning distro here folks, I might have to setup a partition myself and take this version of SuSE for a test drive.
Early in October SuSE’s latest was released but it was the very last weekend of October when I finally had the time to check it out. In a word: nice.
Not wanting to endanger a functional system, the first install was to a second drive that I let SuSE partition. After that worked, I updated 9.0 on the big drive. Other than the problems you expect when a boot loader on the other drive gets in the way of an installation procedure that wants to reboot in the middle of the installation process, things went extremely smoothly.
A Clean Install
It didn’t take even an hour to install to the drive turned over to SuSE – about 10 minutes of answering questions with the mouse and then the usual inserting and removing of CDs. By pretty much just taking the defaults and only getting picky when it really made a difference (like the hostname), SuSE’s installation procedure produced a very usable system.
The swap file was 500+ MB, about the size of RAM. Less than 2 GB of the rest was used for the installed software, leaving over 1.5 GB available. This was basically what I have come to know as SuSE’s standard office system: KDE with Open Office and, of course, Konqueror.
