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December 07, 2003

Angels in America ...

Is the screwiest damn thing I've ever seen...

Posted by ed at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

The battle known as suse 9.0

Okay, so I've heard great things about the SuSE Linux distro over the past few months. After hearing that SuSE had been purchased by Novell, my interest grew even more. After all, the last time I tried SuSE Linux was back in 2000 and it had to make some leaps and bounds since that time.

Last night I decided it was time to give SuSE a try. I installed a spare 15GB HD in my machine and downloaded SuSE 9.0 from a mirror site. The download was about 7.1GB total and took about 15 hours to download from one of those .edu sites. I created a boot disk using the boot.iso and proceeded to install SuSE on my machine.

Man, I wish that I hadn't.

Maybe it's just me, but I really don't like YaST. Yes, I'm sure there are many SuSE and YaST enthusiasts out there that would tell me that YaST is the best thing since sliced bread. But my problem is that I've become very attached to the simplicity of APT and Synaptic. Not only that, I've also grown to love GNOME over the past couple of years. I personally won't use KDE. I don't like the layout, the bright colors, and all of the eye candy. It's almost too much sensory overload.

But, being the Linux enthusiast that I am, I thought to myself "OK ... I'm going to install APT on here and make my way through SuSE to see what it can do". Now, granted that the APT4RPM project is for both Fedora and SuSE, I found it *MUCH* easier to install on Fedora than I did on SuSE.

Keep in mind that neither distro comes with APT and Synaptic. All I have to do on Fedora is download APT from FreshRPMS and do an update, followed by an install of Synaptic. In SuSE, which is by default an RPM based distro, I have to download a huge number of files, work through all kinds of dependancies, and I can't even use APT to install Synaptic. Worst of all, I couldn't even get Synaptic to load, even though I had all of the GTK libraries loaded.

While I may not like it, YaST is a good program for new users trying to navigate hardware and software in Linux. YaST is well layed out and makes sense when using it. The part that I don't like is the configuration pages within YaST, which seem to be inconsistant and don't offer a large variety of options.

My other gripe with SuSE is that it didn't have drivers for my monitor (which is over 4 years old) and didn't have the proper drivers for my USB wireless Logitec mouse. I'm not the only person that was having issues with their mouse drivers either. A friend of mine had installed SuSE today as well and ran into a problem where his mouse wasn't even detected. The worst part about this? It was a generic two button PS/2 mouse. It had no bells, no whistles, just a regular run of the mill mouse. SuSE couldn't detect it. He also had problems getting his network card to get an address from DHCP.

Granted that some or all of his problems might have been due to a faulty install, but that brings me to my last gripe about SuSE: the install. I have NEVER in my LIFE seen a more complicated GUI Linux distribution installer. I guess I've been spoiled by Red Hat's Anaconda installer, but the YaST installer for SuSE really needs some WoRK. It just doesn't make much sense to me how it's all layed out. Maybe SuSE should just remove YaST from the install portion of their Linux distribution and use something a little simpler like Anaconda.

Yeah, I think Linux is ready for the desktop. Do I think that all Linux distributions are ready for the desktop? Nope. This just goes to prove it. Now, when Novell gets their hands on SuSE and puts Ximian to work with the SuSE developers, I think that you'll start seeing some really interesting things come out of SuSE and GNOME. In the mean time, I think I'll try downloading and installing Lycoris Linux to see what's changed on it since I've used it last. I've heard that it has some great groundwork for Linux on the desktop.

Posted by ed at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)