I have to say that SUSE 9.2 is the absolute worst distribution I have ever used in my life.

Fdisk states that my /dev/hdb1 is a 60 GB partition. When I do a du -h /home it tells me I have used 1 GB. mount tells me I currently have /dev/hdb1 mounted as /home.

Can someone explain to me why Konqueror and Nautilus are both convinced that I have no space left in my /home partition and that it is only a 1 GB partition.

Now on to the other screw-ups Novell has slipped into this distro.

All of the KDE apps crash running in Gnome. Ubuntu runs KDE apps perfectly fine, and it isn't even a KDE distro.

Popular applications like Thunderbird and packages such as imlib-dev are nowhere to be found.

gcc won't compile a bloody thing for me on this distro....unlike every single other distro I have used to date. Everything has errors or else the compiled apps won't run.

KDE is absolutly unbearable....it takes about 3 minutes to start. Compare this to MEPIS' 20 seconds for KDE to start....well, the times speak for themselves.

I had to download all the updates 3 TIMES!!!! because the md5sums were all wrong on them (all from different servers).

I loved SuSE, it was an awesome distro. Then along comes Novell, and SUSE 9.1 started to slip. Now THIS??? From the reviews I have read of their Novell Linux Desktop they didn't do much better than with his buggy piece of crap distro. Where does Novell get off charging people for something that is of absolutly horrible quality...something that doesn't even compare to the distros I can download for free?? Well....time to see if I can fix this bloody partition thing with Knoppix....if this doesn't work I am switching back to Ubuntu.

Hm ... this is not a very optimistic thing to read. I was just about to buy 9.2 update to my 9.1 Pro but now - naturally - I am a bit hesitant. Did anybody else have the same or similar experience?

I'm having alot of locking apps, like search for files just turns white and sits there. If on line update has trouble connecting to a server, it wont shut down nor will the computer restart. sometimes i get the bad checksums and others i dont, cant imagine why. one update, for prismGT wireless lan wont download from any of the 6 servers i tried. it wouldn't connect to my wireless automatically, which the free version as well as the live cd did. im quite the newbie, so i dont know much, but the free version was working alot better than this.

I've had all the issues mentioned above and then some. I returned to Slackware and Ubuntu after about two weeks of frustration.

Well, I'm back on Ubuntu now and it is running great. Other than the proprietary knick-knacks that were kind of handy when I ran SUSE (mainly before 9.2, I didn't run 9.2 for very long) I don't miss it. Ubuntu runs much much better. It is extremely fast with Gnome on my slow computer. (500 MHz, 256 MB RAM). It has KDE apps readily available.

What I don't get is how could the Ubuntu team throw together a distro this quick and still have it run great and SUSE/Novell has been doing this for years and have so many problems?

I would let Novell get all the kinks out of their products before buying from them....that is assuming they don't sell all their Linux assets to some other company or discontinue them like they do with every other product line they aquire (Unix, WordPerfect, Embedded Netware, Embedded SUSE, etc. etc.)

Thank you all ... I am convinced. I am definitely sticking to 9.1. I use it on my "productivity" comp in the lab and there I no way I am willing to put up with these sorts of problems. I am pretty disappointed in Novell/SuSE. Perhaps the age of Debian on my machines has finally come :-)

If they are productivity machines you should really take a look into Ubuntu. Other than a couple of missing things (eg Java...easy enough to install) it is an awesome distro. Consider Ubuntu to be Debian built specificially for the desktop. It is much more sane during the initial install, it doesn't install 500 different programs like Debian. This leaves you to only install the ones you want on there. It uses apt (of course)...all in all, an awesome distro. Other than my brief stint with SUSE which didn't last long I've been using Ubuntu for quite a while now, pretty much since right after they released the final version of warty.

I have not had any of these problems that you guys are having.

Hi ubuntu-addict, I also run Ubuntu and agree that it is a great distro. I'm an avid user.

As to SuSE 9.2, I am also stumped by many of your issues. I've simply not encountered anything similar to what you described about partition size misreads, gcc compiling problems, and YOU update install errors. I tried to duplicate the YOU issue by switching to another server but the process finished properly and I encountered no package failures. I've installed quite a few applications from source for use within my Gnome session, and I did have to grab a few devel packages from the 9.2 install disks for it to compile, but there were no roadblocks once those required libraries were recognized. What apps were you trying to compile?

That KDE load time is really way off. I have no idea what is going on there to cause such a massive time delay. I run a old AMD 700 and I can get KDE up on my SuSE 9.2 in well under 30 seconds. There is a very definite problem if you are experiencing anything over that result.

The other issues you speak about really puzzle me. Especially the one about all the KDE apps crashing in your Gnome session. It puzzles me because I've yet to find any KDE program that performs as you describe (excluding such add-ons as SuperKaramba and the like). For example, here's a recent screenie of my Gnome desktop with numerous KDE applications running:

KDE Programs in Gnome

I did do a quick search in Synaptic for those packages that you couldn't locate:

Thunderbird
imlib-devel

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Yeah, my aunt has been fairly lucky with her 9.2 installation *phew*. But, for the most part, it has not worked that great for me. I'd say stick with 9.1 and if SUSE 10.0 is this bad, begin planning for a new distribution. For me, there is no comparison between how good Ubuntu runs and SUSE runs. SUSE was always reading the harddrive too, whereas Ubuntu doesn't have that problem.

I dunno, Ubuntu allows me to just get my work done.

LOL > Nice to hear about your aunt. Mine is firmly in Windoze. Ugh.

Funny thing on my end (and this is no knock on Ubuntu since the problem was absolutely my fault), but I had totally borked my partitions by screwing up the disk geometry, and while postponing a total reset to correct the situation, I tried to install both SuSE 9.2 and Ubuntu. First I tried SuSE and it immediately informed me of the problem on my HD, but let me go ahead and select some of the existing partitions to format, and the install went just fine. But Ubuntu absolutely refused and would only give me the option of wiping the disk entirely. It didn't even give me a message dialogue to tell me what was wrong. Now, I was in a position of already knowing about the bad disk set, but if such was not the case I would have certainly been in the dark.

I dunno, maybe SUSE just really didn't like my hardware, but SUSE 9.1 ran perfectly fine. I just know that the first time 'I ever went to update it, it downloaded everything, then started to install, and then complained about all of the md5sums being wrong. So I redownloaded all of the patches from another server (not the default university one) and it happened again. So then I tried one of the ones near the bottom of the list and it finally worked.

The KDE load time shocked me too...I could not believe it. I'm thinking maybe KDE or QT was corrupted as this might explain KDE's load time and the KDE apps always crashing. Who knows, another person further up the list also complained of apps locking up on her.

As for gcc, mplayer, xine, kaffeine (because I couldn't get xine to compile) and a couple others just would not compile. I know I had all the dependancies installed, the configure script ran fine and then i would start compiling and would receive an error. I did have one app (can't remember what it is as i never did end up running it) that compiled, installed but would not run.

For imlib-dev and thunderbird, is that synaptic running on suse or ubuntu? I have them installed fine on ubuntu but had to do them manually on SUSE.

Lol, we should quit posting while the other is typing. From what I can tell, the partition was not screwed up in any way. I formatted the partition from Knoppix with the mkreiserfs command...and after that qtparted, fdisk, cfdisk and all those programs could see it just fine. I could even mount it from Knoppix before I formatted it and there was no problem. Konqueror saw the full size. It was just nautilus and konqueror in SUSE that would not work with it.

I've never tried to install mplayer so I can't help you there. The xine and kaffeine packages were in the SuSE repo so I just used the binaries. I've install gxine from source and encountered no issues, but the others looked a little more imposing that I cared to tackle especially since the RPM's were already available. But I have installed a number of source tarballs from the GnomeFiles site and can't think of one right away that I got stumped with during that process.

Yeah...that is Synaptic running on my SuSE box. If you notice where the package category buttons are located in those screenies you can see where they are different from Ubuntu's version. That's always the give-away for me when making a distinction at first glance. I prefer Synaptic over the YaST software install module but for no reason other than just increased simplicity.

I agree. I would be very surprised to find that you had a real partition problem since you were able to use parted (native in both SuSE and Ubuntu) without encountering any errors. Parted is way more fickled than the fdisk or cfdisk tools. Even when I had that geometry problem I was telling you about I was still able to use cfdisk to partition, format and install Yoper and Onebase. But parted would never have any of it. I finally got tired of running up against that issue and just reset the whole thing. That was when I was at last able to install Ubuntu from the official ISO.

Now I only use parted for my disk formatting. Actually, SuSE puts a very nice GUI on that application in the YaST module and I've also used that frequently. If I'd been using parted from the start I would have never even run into that HD geometry conflict.