Mizzou_Engineer

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I have used SuSE since its 9.1 release and have generally found it to be a very full-featured and robust operating system but tended to be a little bloated and not as fast as it could be. SuSE 10.1 continues that tradition in spades.

My Hardware:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
ABIT KN8-SLi motherboard, NForce 4 SLi chipset
2x1GB Corsair DDR400
WD 740GD 74GB 10,000rpm SATA-150 HDD (sda)
WD 2500KS 250GB 7200rpm SATA-300 HDD (sdb)
XFX GeForce 6200TC 64/256MB PCI-express graphics
Dell 2001FP monitor @ 1600x1200x24bpp, 60Hz, DVI
Sony DVD-RW DW-Q30A ATA/66 (hda)
Sony CD-RW/DVD-ROM CRX320EE ATA/33 (hdb)
Mitsumi 7-in-one USB memory card reader/FDD (sdc, sdd, fd0)
Assembled 3/3/06

INSTALL: The install is typical SuSE, with the YaST installer detecting the hardware on this pretty new rig perfectly. I chose to install the 64-bit version, and did so from the 5 CD set that was originally available at the launch date (DVDs are now available today, May 19th.) About 30 minutes later, I have the stock KDE system ready to go. I let YaST see the addon CD, which took a couple of minutes to scan and add. The CDs were about twice as slow as installing 10.0 from DVD due to the lower read speed on the CDs and the fact that I have to shuffle them around.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: The default theme and fonts are SO much better than in 10.0 or 9.x. It is actually very pretty now and the fonts are appropriate size. The speed and responsiveness are typical for SuSE, maybe a hair faster than in 10.0, and a lot better than in the 9.x series. But it's a bit slower than Ubuntu and a LOT less zippy than Gentoo, which I ran from a Live CD in RAM. My monitor is running at 1280x1024 even though I told YaST's SaX tool to set it at 1600x1200, but that is a known-to-me bug with my choice of running my monitor over DVI with my card. (Analog RGB input to my monitor from my GPU lets me do 1600x1200 out of the box, but it's not as sharp.) The NVIDIA drivers from NVIDIA's website fix this and I'm at 1600x1200. I set up XGL per the instructions on Novell's website and XGL has limited features but works. Transparencies don't work, but the resize, window effects, and the cube and zoom work. I'm impressed. The ZMD update tool pops up and wants me to update, but it took roughly 20 minutes to process even the update lists, frequently pegging both cores at 100%. It appears to hang once the list comes up and I select "update," but I can see that the computer is downloading data and the tool finishes the updates without giving any indication that it is even working.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS: After running the OS for a week, I can say that it is very stable and is easier on the RAM than SuSE 10.0 was, even though XGL is running in 10.1 and wasn't on 10.0. It's a little snappier than 10.0, but it basically represents a very polished-up 10.0 with a little better memory management and a cool new GUI option with XGL. After using ZMD a bit, it seems to be more set up to be a centralized patch management/deployment system rather than a single-computer system. It would excel in the corporate arena, which is where I think that Novell really wants this OS and its derivative, SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10, to be. Maybe Novell/OpenSUSE will tweak ZMD to work better in 10.2- if they get that done and make the OS a little more sprightly then it would be about perfect.

Speed: 6/10
Stability: 10/10
Features: 10/10
Appearance: 10/10
Usability: 9/10
OVERALL: 9/10.

SgtCedar

I have been using Suse Linux for several years. I upgraded to version 10.1 as soon as it was available. I installed from DVD with no problems.

The only complaint I have is I have not been able to get either my laser of HP photo printer to work. They would not work under version 10.0 either. I need to take time to download the proper drivers, etc. I had tried to do this under version 10 but that version could not seem to compile anything to an executable program. I do not have the same problem with 10.1. This was the main reason I upgraded.

The new program to install and update Linux programs seems slower then YaST. It does do the job without any input though. I have gotten into the habit of installing using Ksetup.

Overall, Suse 10.1 seems to be very stable and usable. I would completely dump Windows XP if I could get a program to view encrypted DVDs under Linux. I found a program that shows DVDs but was unable to install it under the last version due to not being able to compile anything. I will try again under this version.

maprx

well, 10.1 is a complete waiste of time for me. I spent more time trying to config this on 3 systems, the installer buggy. the screen fonts look horrible, while all other tried distro's work with the nvidia card. suse, does not seem to know how to handle my basic 64mb nvidia card. SLOW SLOW SLOW, yes did I say it was slow. Took over 45 mins to install only to be corrupted , when attempting updates, I got dependency problems, well wtf, this is a new install from trust repos, so why would I get depend errors on a new install.

Printer, well that is a night mare, it worked after an hour of playing with the installer. Then you hope that your internet connection works is a another problem.

Bottom line, if it takes longer to install a Linux distro then windows, and is buggier then windows, stay with windows, or go with mepis or fedora

usaf_sp

I upgraded to 10.1 from 10.0 only to find out that the YaST sources are broken. I can not download an RPM to my home directory and install from there. Also you need to jump through too many hoops to get the online update working if you do not configure your network during system install.

usaf_sp

I upgraded to 10.1 from 10.0 only to find out that the YaST sources are broken. I can not download an RPM to my home directory and install from there. Also you need to jump through too many hoops to get the online update working if you do not configure your network during system install.

showwaddy

Suse 10.1 is a major jump from my last try with them, 8.1. and is getting close to being acceptable. but it looks like i will still have to have a dual boot system. Of the things I am intereted in. Kino dv prog still laggs beihind even the free software under windows as does a lot of other things. And as for playing commercial dvds well? but this time I am going to persevere just because I need the change but i will let you know in three months if it last?

jhajny

I am running SuSE 10.(laugh) behind a router. I have downloaded and run SuSE 9.x up to 10.0 with no problem. When I install 10.1, I CANNOT connect to the Internet, regardless of how many times I change my network settings, insert DNS Server ID's., etc. It's a joke.....SuSE 10.1 is sad....really, really, is....Kubuntu 6 works and finds my network right out of the box; as does CentOS 4.3, PCLinuxOS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. OpenBSD???? The MOST secure desktop there is finds my network behind a router but "SuSE" can't do it? Jeez........I can't wait to post...I really can't....what a joke....no wonder it's "free."

waterox

I recently bought a amd64 x2 with a shuttle case that comes with a micro board run by nvidia chipset. After much problems with Slack and Debian I decided to give Suse a whirl again.

The install worked fine. Saw all of my components. Did not install components I did not have. Very flexible as far as letting me install custom modules. Everything worked beautifully. Even recognized the super sound system in my machine.

So after everything is installed I go to play an avi file off of my NAS device. There is no xine. I install xine which requires my installation dvd. Once Xine is installed Xine tells me that it has been modified so it won't play risky materials. Evidentally AVI are risky materials. Well I decide to pop in a cd full of MP3. Ummmm where is my cdrom? There is no reference any where to the cdrom or dvdrom for that matter. After searching for a way to get it working I give up.

So the good thing is Suse10.1 works right out of the box. Bad thing is if your wanting to do something extreme like watching anime shows from AVI too bad. I am sure there is a patch for this. But then again I am sure there is a linux system that allows it out of the box.

Yertle

I have been using SuSE for a number of years, since version 7.x - I think. Upgraded from 10.0 to 10.1 using the dvd from Novell. Everything went fine. The online update worked, but the ZENworks updater did not do it for me; so I am using Smart Package Manager rather than the zenworks.

10.1 does not seem any faster to me than 10.0, and I don't much care for the splash screen. It looks to me like something designed to leave one with a blah feeling.

angryfirelord

Upon installing this product, the installer went extremely slowly from page to page (i think yast kept refreshing itself). However, once it was up and running, nothing went wrong except for the fact that it froze 2 times. It's got tons of free software that you wouldn't believe existed.

The only gripe I have about this distro is that it's a HUGE memory hog, worse than windows xp. This thing will consume from 250MB-314MB of RAM & the computer running it only had 320MB. Be aware if you install this on low memory machines or it will be swapping to the hard drive constantly.

Certainly not a terrible distro.

ORLANDO_N

I lost the capability to switch between (American and Spanish) languages with one single click -and what is worst, I do not know how to get it back. Besides this only lost in my SuSE 10.1, I have gained a top of the line linux flavor -I think.

Yagotta B. Kidding

I'm giving 5 (Good) for the effort, 1 (Poor) for the overall performance.

Suffice it to say that I ditched the 10.1 the very moment SLED 10 (RC 3) came out... no issues, IT JUST WORKS!

Now that SLED 10 is GA, it is a no-brainer for every SUSEr to choose the best distro of'em all: SLED! It is like 10.1 without the errors, omissions and quirks.

Folks, go for SLED!

The mighty adventurous will choose SLES instead.

SUSE Linux Entreprise Server Release 10, or SLES 10 for short: this one is going to be the choice distro of the professionals. For the Joe Linux who just wants to stay in contact with his pals, who just wants to do his surfing, office'ing, and probably developing of software the SLES 10 might be an overkill. You don't need a server if you want to do your daily chores or write great programs.

Kocsonya

I've been a faithful SuSE user since their 4.? but 10.1 makes me wonder if I should change. I installed 10.1 on 3 machines, a 64 bit machine, a 32 bit machine (both of them AMD with NVidia video) and a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. The install went reasonably well on all of them. Network update didn't work on any of them. Then came all the surprises.


The 32 bit machine has a motherboard chipset that supports only UHCI USB - according to the log the kernel realises it. When a USB stick is plugged in, however, it fires up the EHCI driver, which then locks up and the USB is gone until reboot. The 64 bit machine has a quite new NVidia motherboard chipset. On that one the on-board Ethernet controller is detected and initialised but after a few packets it locks up and there's no traffic in any direction any more until reboot. (the HW is OK on both cases - it's been tested) On the laptop the ATI Mobile video is recognised but the 3D acceleration does not work - even though it used to work perfectly under 9.x and 10.0.


Neither machine runs KDE or GNOME, they have FVWM and that is it. Therefore, the automatic mounting of media (like USB sticks) that was finally working pretty well in 10.0 is a very nice feature. However, that has been removed in the 10.1 version - the new version assumes that your desktop manager takes care of the actual mounting/umounting. Which, if you do not run a desktop manager, is of course not happening.


If you want to run legacy application which are not available in source form, you may be out of luck with 10.1. There is no support for running anything that relies on older glibc versions. Forget about the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL. Issuing that will render even the most basic commands unoperable. Thus, a handful of commercial games cease to operate as well as other commercial software: for example StarOffice 6.0 crashes immediately. Actually, you may be in trouble even if you have the source, due to changes in the threading model. SuSE used to be reasonably backward compatible, so if that is important to you, you may not want to get 10.1. Chances are that your legacy apps won't run. Oh, there is a package on the DVD that *supposed* to let you run older application (according to the package description). Unfortunately, this description is the content of the package and nothing else. There are exactly 0 bytes extracted from the package when you install it.

Also, it is fairly slow. Opera 8 loads in about 5 seconds on a machine with a 50MB/s disc, 2G RAM and a 3200+ AMD CPU; OOo 2 takes about as much time as the *slow* OOo 1 used to take on a machine with half the speed.

On the good side, the packages that are there are the latest and mostly working.

So, if you want the latest stuff, go for it. However, if you want something that works like the previous version only better, faster and bugs fixed, my advice would be to steer away from 10.1.

merdalf

Must admit l am very new to linux , have read alot but never taken the plunge.
Well that has now change , l am running suse 10.1 as a dual boot system with windows xp pro.
Its early days yet but the install was painless and l had no problems with suse finding my hardware .
All in all l am pretty happy .... but how do you add programs ? I cannot find a exec or install file on anything l download ( old window habits ) , so any advice or help.

Althon Xp 3000
Nvidea 5600 256 Meg
Gigabyte 400L1 m/board
756 Meg DDr Ram
350G/byte hard drives
Zip Drive
Epson RX 600 printer/scanner

mrchaos

I decided to install SuSE 10.1 as a the next distribution of linux in my "tour de distro." I like the concepts behind SuSE; ease of use and graphical design. One may never truly need to use the lackluster command-line console in SuSE. Unfortunately, that was a turn off for me. Being a true Slackie at heart, I found that it took much longer to do certain things in SuSE that could have been done in seconds using Slackware. The most painfully obvious was package installation. YaST is terribly slow on my PIII 1000 MHz machine with 320 MB of RAM. It takes a bare minimum of 10 minutes to install ANYTHING. Since I was so used to simply pulling up a console and typing "installpkg ____" or "upgradepkg ___," this slow process sort of sucked. On the other hand, YaST really struck me as an excellent idea, if not poorly executed. It's like one-stop shopping for all your computer's needs, right there in front of you. It can even be used in command-line mode in a user-interface similar to Midnight Commander.

All and all, here is my conclusion:

Operation speed sacrificed for graphical interface and ease of use. Still, an excellent stepping stone for closing the gap between Windows (ease of use) and Linux (stability and computing power), but SuSE still has a ways to go before I will consider it "the" linux distro.

slackass

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I bought the retail version of 10.1. I've been using eX Pee / Suse 10.0 and liked Suse 10.0 so much that I had to try 10.1... BIG mistake!!! It took 2 days for me to get the half assed yast updater working and I cant get my nvidia 3d card working. Now I'm triple booting eX Pee / 10.0 / 10.1 just so I can use 3d on 10.0. I'm going to be takeing 10.1 off of my box because it just consumes space. I'll think it through a little better before I buy anything else from Suse.

Lsatenstein

The system cleverly jumped over my core5 install (with some hinting) and proceeded directly to my second drive (Sata).

I am pleased with the install process, except that I wanted to chose the keyboard layout before proceeding. The install operation is proceeding as I write this, and if I cannot make keyboard changes, or boot the system, then I will be back to the web for help.

assettt

After 15 years with whine Doze i decided on something new. Tried a suse live cd and liked it. Downloaded suse 10.1 thru' P2P burned on DVD. Installation quite straight forward except i wanted to install the Gnome environment (don't know why, i just liked the name) but it could not complete installation. Gave up on Gnome and chose KDE which completed my installation. Suprisingly similar to windows on GUI and most of my hardware installed without hiccups. Even my new sonyericsson phone which was a pain to install in windows is immediately installed.
Only thing is my lexmark printer is not supported under suse but i'm still dual booting and only slightly inconconvinient to print. I can honestly say i like what i'm using now and don't miss windows the least despite not quite having a hang on installing from source but the freedom from having to worry about antivirus and malware makes everything worthwhile.
If you would like to migrate from windows then suse 10.1 is the way to go.

drmjh

I've been using Suse since 8.x and until 10.1, I've been reasonably satisfied. I am now seriously considering installing another distro.
My computer houses a Pentium 4 / Celeron CPU with a very fast clock speed and loads of DDRAM but still the program takes forever to boot up. The update function doesn't work at all and for me, worse is the fact that after agreeing initially to use the new update it erased all of my oringinal ftp sites for updates.
Although a major pain, I was able to find and install the Xine and codecs to be able to play commercial DVD's in each release over the years until now. I have spent hours and still can't manage to find and install the necessary combination of files to get the player(s) to work..
Even the sound is major headache and I have given up trying to configure and/or tweek the player(s) to play my CD's..
All in all, 10.1 has been a major disappointment for me and I wouldn't recommend it at all.
drmjh:confused: