pre-download questions

hi everybody
i was going to download suse 10 but i found that it an evaluation version i would like to know what does that mean since there was no such thing in mandriva 2006 or fedora core 4 or even mandrake 10.1

the other thing is that the localization is only English and German does that mean that i will not to be able to read any other language or even install it

plus i want the suse 10 live CD before i delete mandriva 2006 so is there such thing

and the last thing is i saw links to download kde and gnome... will i have to install them after suse installation

please pardon me for my very silly questions but that why they called us newbies

i am waiting for your replies

There is no limitation to Evaluation.

Just may not have all the packages included if you bought it (ie. flash player, acrobat etc).

I would go for the eval version. Eval version has all the packaged you'll need for great linux experience. Differences between the retail and eval versions are just minor, some commercial packages are missing and you wont have helpdesk-support from novell.

The OSS version is crippled in many ways and you have to add sources and update many things to get full functionality. The OSS doesn't have acrobat, flash, only a limited number of drivers, and the mp3-support is disabled (well atleast its not working out of the box) and so on...

When you install Suse, you can choose which environment to use KDE or GNOME.
Well if you want, you can install both or go just with textmode only...

And for the language support, you can pretty much select what ever you want.
I have never tried installing with different languages, but thats also possible.

There is also a live version floating around if you really want one.
Novell suse10 downloads - Eval and Live

Thank you very very much onjoo for that detailed reply
but i found that there is only live dvd no cd
please forgive me if i didn't see it
but even using the search [ctrl+f] i didn't find live cd
thanks again

Sorry, i thought you would want a live dvd...
Unfortunately there is no live CD of suse, which seems a bit odd to me. But it's because Suse wants to show everything they've got with that DVD, so it's not just a test version, it's fully operational distro with all packages you'll ever need.

To what purpose do you need the LIVE version?

Ok, I have to say that suse has really wanted to make downloading the distro as hard as possible with all these versions.
I hope that when Suse 10.1 is released (march 2006) things have changed for the right way.
Eval should be named to something else. And i don't even want to go into the mirror/torrent policy , which made downloading and updating impossible when almost every server crashed or was unreachable.

seems like torrents we have the same opinion on this matter
i dodn't like torrents too so here is another vote for ftp

and i definitely want suse to set thing right as you said

i found a live cd of 9.2 so i will download it burn it and see what this os look like
thanks and i hope one day i can help you as you helped me

Suse 10.0 Eval Version just means you download the 5 CDs or 1 DVD and install it from there. The eval version only contains about half of the packages. To get the other half, you just have to add a repository path to your Source Installation.

Just pick a FTP mirror: http://www.novell.com/products/susel...rors_isos.html

And use the path of the mirror similar to this:
servername.com/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/

Just to give you an idea of whats missing. I downloaded 5 CDs, converted them to a DVD for easy install. Tried to install Thunderbird but it wasnt found. The second I added the above inst-source, it found Thunderbird and installed very easily.

Hope this helps explain.