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Software and Technology by
Hari
Posted on Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 20:52 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 21:06 IST)
I'm currently downloading SUSE Linux 10, which is a hefty download of 5 CDs. I'm at the second CD and I think it would take a few more days to download the rest of the CDs since I'm on a slow internet connection. I'm quite excited about trying out SUSE because it's a distro I haven't tried before and it would be interesting for a change to try out a "user-friendly" distro as opposed to distros like Slackware or Gentoo, which are supposed to be "power-user" distros.
SUSE will be the fourth distro on my system. I already have Debian, Gentoo and Slackware installed (in that order) and it's probably overkill. But then, I am always itching to experiment and experience something new as far as Linux is concerned and SUSE seems to be the logical choice because it's something completely new to me and should be a good learning experience. Secondly, I have plenty of hard disk space to "kill." This is a time when I can revive my enthusiasm for Linux because it's been quite a while now since I've experimented with Linux. It's always fun to install hardware drivers, configure system settings and config files and just generally play around with a new distro. It brings back all that I've learnt before and reinforces knowledge gained earlier. I believe that without this element of freshness, it's all too easy to allow whatever little Linux knowledge one has gained to rust away.
Why SUSE? For one, I was not interested in yet another "do-it-yourself", manual-configuration type distro like Slackware. I am not really in that kind of experimentation mode. After my unfortunate experience some time back with Arch which messed up my Debian system and caused me quite a bit of data loss, I'm wary of trying out something which has a difficult or tricky installation procedure (that's one trouble with maintaining multiple distros on one system!). At the same time, I'm not a big fan of Fedora either, since I've been there and done that and it wouldn't really be something new to me. In the end, it was a toss up between Mandriva and SUSE and I chose SUSE because I was interested in checking out YaST - the all-in-one system management tool. So SUSE it will be. It will be an interesting exercise to compare SUSE with the other Linux distros that I have experienced so far. In particular I would be keen to see how YaST measures up to Debian's package management system. Keep watching this space for updates!
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