Hari's Corner

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SUSE 10 review

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Fri, Nov 4, 2005 at 19:03 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:20 IST)

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I installed SUSE Linux 10 a few days ago and I must say that I was quite impressed with this distro on the whole. It is one polished, professional Linux distribution with a smooth, painless installation procedure that is very beginner-friendly while at the same time being easily accessible to the expert user who wants to customize the whole process. I for example, needed to customize the partitions manually and also choose not to install a boot loader and it was quite easy to achieve this with the "expert" mode tools during the setup. At the same time, somebody who has a basic system can easily breeze through the installation with the default partitioning scheme. It all depends on the level of expertise and how much control you want over the process. For instance, if you have another Linux installed on your system, I suggest a custom partitioning scheme.

The installation of SUSE is basically a two-step process. First it installs the base system using only the first CD and then you reboot. Once you do and continue the installation by booting into the newly installed system, you get to configure your hardware, locale and system parameters and settings. Once this is done, you get a fully working Linux system. On my system at least, hardware detection was fully automated and I didn't get a single prompt for any settings. Of course, experts can choose to configure their hardware manually as well. It's painless, fast and easy. The downside of SUSE installation is that you need all 5 CDs even for a basic installation because the packages are spread across the CDs and you never know which essential package is on which CD unless you really dig deep to investigate individual package files. This was a definite downside because I was forced to download all 5 CDs before I could install SUSE. Of course, if you choose to buy a boxed set from Novell, you could avoid this hassle.

YaST is the real strength of SUSE, though. It's a fully integrated system configuration tool that does pretty much everything you might need from hardware, software, network configuration, server setup and other system administration. However though it's GUI, you will need to learn it and due to the sheer number of modules, you will need some time to really learn how to use it. On the other hand, a basic desktop user won't really need to do much system administration except software management.

While on the subject of package management, I want to talk a little more on this from the perspective of a Debian user. SUSE uses the RPM system and has a wide variety of packages available, but not surprisingly it comes nowhere close to matching the size of the Debian software repository, which has more than 15,000 official packages. Though this is understandable, I did find it irksome to note that there are no SUSE packages for gFTP and audacity, for instance. As a Debian user who is spoilt on the huge official software repository (not to mention those found on apt-get.org), I found this limitation to be a turn off. On the other hand, the default SUSE package repository is large enough for typical users who may not need all the stuff that I generally use. By the way, there might be SUSE repositories online which have unofficial SUSE packages of software not found in the CDs, but I must admit that I haven't really investigated this aspect yet.

One other minor issue is that the default desktop fonts are a bit odd but that can be easily corrected by installing the Microsoft core TrueType fonts as a patch in the YaST online update module and customizing your fonts.

My impressions? SUSE is very much a desktop oriented distro, but not necessarily limited to the desktop user. It's polished and professional and looks like a complete product. While YaST is excellent overall, the software management part of it is not nearly as convenient or polished as apt-get on Debian. The best part of SUSE 10 is probably that it's hardware detection is great, it's installation is smooth and painless and requires minimum manual intervention by default. That might really encourage users new to Linux to try it out. But if you are an experienced Linux user, particularly with distros like Debian or Slackware and you are used to being in control of your whole system, you might find the limitations of SUSE irksome.

Note: I have also submitted this review at LinuxQuestions.org, where you can find SUSE reviews by other users as well.

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5 comment(s)

  1. Nice review. I, too, found SuSE to be an excellent distro. One note: you could have installed via ftp - but that means you have to have a high speed link, or resign yourself to spending a week installing it!

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Fri, Nov 4, 2005 @ 22:54 IST #
  2. I have a 72 kbps connection. We call it broadband in India. I call it "fraudband." Hehehe. It's consistent, but not fast enough for FTP installation. So I had to download the CDs. Installing locally is a safer method though.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Nov 5, 2005 @ 08:29 IST #
  3. I am installing SUSE Linux 10 at the same time of this posting. this is my first time touching Linux, I am a Windows user, and hope that i can muddle my way through Linux.....

    Comment by IT-Helper (visitor) on Wed, Nov 9, 2005 @ 04:04 IST #
  4. IT-Helper, thanks for dropping by. I hope you found my review useful! :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Nov 9, 2005 @ 13:08 IST #
  5. :-D
    Really short but useful howto.
    Thanks. :-P
    <a href=http://blueoo.com>cobro</a>

    Comment by Larisa (visitor) on Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 16:27 IST #

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