Anything goes - Review of Novell's SLED 10 michael7 - 28.06.2006, 18:21 Uhr Titel: Review of Novell's SLED 10
I am not a distro basher. I don't like to read those my-distro-is-better-than-your-distro posts as I have great respect for all the people around this planet who labor long and hard to build Linux distros and open source applications, most of whom will never receive a penny for their work.
I use Kanotix as my regular distro because I think it's superb, but I have other distros installed on this box-- Suse 10.1, Mandriva 2006, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, Fedora Core 5 and Mepis (3.4-3). All are fully functional, I learned a lot by tweaking them and I think that they are good, too.
For those of you who share my affection for all things Linux, I commend it to you. I found it rather powerful.
Here are a few excerpts:
"First thing I did, obviously, was to start up Xgl. I anticipated a lot of die-hard console work, endless hours of Google searching, and configuration file after configuration file. However, none of this. The effects as well as Xgl itself can easily be turned on and off via configuration dialog, which also automagically installs and enables Ati/nVIDIA drivers for you. When Xgl is started, it reloads X for you."
"The effects do not slow down this machine at all. Where Vista's effects sometimes skip a few frames or slighlty bog down the computer, SLED's effects have none of those problems at all."
"Xgl is by far not the most impressive feature of SLED 10. The most impressive feature is its complete lack of, what I call, 'ducktape' feeling. Virtually all distributions I have tried gave me the direct feeling I was using a product stitched together by ducktape; group A did something, group B as well, and group C stitched those two together with ducktape. SLED, however, feels as if the parts are surgically sewn together, after which a plastic surgeon hid the stitches. A huge step forward for desktop Linux."
"Of course it is difficult to draw any conclusions after only such a short time of usage, but already I can confidently say that this release candidate outshines Windows Vista's beta; SLED provides fancy effects without slowing the computer down and also gives you advanced search capabilities in a well-integrated fashion. I'd even go as far as to say that even Apple should be worried; SLED has all the bling and integration at the application level that the MacOS offers; however, SLED can be installed on computers most people already have. And that's an advantage. A huge one, at that."
piper - 28.06.2006, 19:38 Uhr Titel: RE: Review of Novell
I too, share your thoughts on linux and have many distro's that I boot to. Kanotix is my # 1, but it is fun and adventurous to try other's. I will give this a try. Danke michael7
michael7 - 28.06.2006, 20:43 Uhr Titel: Buffalo and Chicken Wings
piper,
I'll be in Buffalo in September. Is the Anchor Bar still serving Buffalo wings?
michael
piper - 28.06.2006, 21:11 Uhr Titel: Re: Buffalo and Chicken Wings
michael7 hat folgendes geschrieben::
piper,
I'll be in Buffalo in September. Is the Anchor Bar still serving Buffalo wings?
michael
hehe, oh yeah, You bet they do !!!!
nemesis - 28.06.2006, 21:18 Uhr Titel: RE: Review of Novell
I gave Suse 10.1 a try over the weekend (primarily to give XGL a try). It looks like a pretty good distro, if you want want to put a lot of time and learning into it. Some of the things I liked and disliked about Suse: (This is based on a trial of about 8 hours total over 2 days.)
Cons:
If you plan to install to hd, don't waste your time downloading the LiveDVD. I found this out the hard way. It doesn't come with a handy dandy installer, that I could find either on the disk or through Google.
The installation took me almost an hour and a half. I guess the 6 minute Kanotix way spoiled me on this.
MP3 support is limited. I could have probably recompiled kdemultimedia (the Fedora 3 way) or found another work around to enable this, but for what I wanted out of the distro, this was a litlte too much.
XGL work well, as long as I was using Gnome. I tried to get it to work through KDE (using countless how-tos) and the closest I got was a desktop where the icons didn't work and had no working panel (basically useless). I don't care for Gnome too much, but the XGL effects were pretty cool. I did have a few configuration errors show up when I enabled XGL, but I didn't notice immediate performance issues. After running XGL for a while (couple hours) I did notice the system slow down a lot (as if something was using a lot of CPU. Didn't really take the time to investigate). One of the How-tos I used to get XGL going made a good point. Basically install it, show it off, play with it for a while. After a couple minutes, when it's not 'new' any more, what good is it??
Some how or another, not sure what happened, but when I logged back into Kanotix and started up Firefox (used same home partition for both) I lost my themes and extensions. They were all still there, they just wouldn't load (something to do with a chrome error). After trying everything from tweaking, removing, googling, and cursing, it finally took purging (even tried backing up and reinstalling from scratch then restoring profile from backup), reinstalling, and sifting through 1507 extensions to find my 6 favorite that I couldn't remember the names of (you better believe I remember the names now), to get firefox back the way I have to have it.
Relearning package management. Apt is just so much easier (first thing I did was install apt-rpm). I don't think I'm saying this because it is what I know. I started out on Fedora using RPM, and just never could quite get the hang of it, whereas with Kanotix and apt, I had it down in the first few hours. There were no default repositories in Suse, either. I had to google just to find repositories to add so that I could use Yast package manager.
Almost forgot about my adventures with fglrx installation. Only took about 3 hours of googling, tweaking, rpming, more tweaking, and finally begging it to work, before I could get it to work, and please don't ask me for help, because I have no idea how I did it.
Pros:
Yast2 is a great configuration tool, especially in todays GUI world. Just about anything I could think of, from configuring my wireless networking to installing new packages, can be done through Yast. My only problem with it, I started on the CL and just couldn't get out of the CL frame of mind. In my opinion, yast makes Suse a great distro for people wishing to cross over from Windows, but fear the CL.
The initial look and feel is just 'right'. I can't put it any better than that. As soon a you boot up, you get a 'I think I'm going to like this' feeling. Like the previous review said, it doesn't have that 'ducktape feel' to it.
Final Conclusion: If I were just starting out in Linux and knew nothing about it, or God forbid, something happened and we lost Kanotix, Suse 10.1 would definately be the first distro I would look at for a primary. But as long as we have the BEST distro, why bother putting time and effort into learning, tweaking, configuring anything less?
slh - 29.06.2006, 01:15 Uhr Titel: RE: Review of Novell
YaST2 may look convenient at first sight, but beware if you need to set up something slightly non standard, YaST2 will overwrite your manual changes each time it runs SuSEconfig (yes, you can fine tune this behaviour as well, but soon you'll realize that the price you pay for keeping the GUI tool is not worth the efforts to keep it away from your mission critical stuff).
schnorrer - 29.06.2006, 07:59 Uhr Titel: RE: Review of Novell
Yast2 is namly a one-time setup tool.since it changed form yast to the gui-based yast2.
sure most settings will overwritten, but sometimes the hand optimized settings are only commented, some stettings are backuped.
I had a look at the source of YaST2, and found parts of it are called rekourseively, some iterated ond other parts are called both ways. Awfull programming style. An other evil is some of YaST2 parts will call YaST2 a second time in a new shell. This Parts wil allways owerwruite all settings done before.
Conclusion: Install SUSE one time using YaST2 getting SuSe to run. All other settings should made by hand with an editor and never touch YaST2 a second time.
