I tried downloading the boot CD for the FTP install of 9.3 a few days ago, and it was a horrendous experience. I tried 3 separate downloads, only to have each of them freeze after about an hour and a half-- to download 68 MB, that is... I had much better luck with SuSE's mirror sites:

SuSE Mirrors

All of them are very fast, and super-reliable. It's a shame SuSE's own site isn't anywhere nearly as quick.

hi girlboxer5,

Thankyou for the link.

I selected the first FTP site on the list and it started at a whopping 220k, which it maintained for a while, but it has plateaued out between about 161 and 165... still a rattling good speed. Almost 70 megs downloaded.

If it works I might also look at the 9.3, but wonder if my older machinery would be able to run it adequately.

Thank you again

Richard
Adelaide
South Australia

My pleasure I'm glad I could help How old is the system you're trying to run SuSE on? My Linux box is about 5 years old:

667 Mhz emachines e-tower
384 MB RAM
16 Gig HD

It's been running 9.3 pretty well, although on the first boot, I was having some minor screen drawing problems. They've cleared up by running the screen resolution a bit lower, and it's been working beautifully since, if just a hair slower than 9.2.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth, that sounds great

As I start to type this, the SuSE 9.2 download is at 674Mb (I have a nominally 1200Mb/s ADSL connection, upgraded a few days ago from 512kb/s, and waiting till the end of a month for a switch to an ADSL2 (maximum of) 12Mb/s connection which my ISP has just equipped in my local phone exchange. I truly marvel at how fast these things are progressing, I was on dialup until 2-1/2 years ago, with no broadband capability at all

The machine I use for testing is an AMD Duron 1300MHz tower, recently upped from 128M RAM to 512, and which I modified for two IDEs using plug-in racks. Description of HDD racks here.

I have several others in various state of disrepair and disrepute, all towers, and all of which live under my u-shaped desk. Currently playing with an IBM Aptiva which uses a K6 500 processor, but that's a bit iffy on some linux distros. I run an earlier Aptiva on Win2000 with an apache and a couple of chat clients, 24/7.

I picked the Aptivas up about 18 months ago for about $100 the pair, and only needed to throw a decent amount of RAM into them to get them working. I think they might be 6 years old, or maybe 7.

This machine I'm typoing on (yes, deliberate mistake!) is one of a pair of nearly 5-yo HP Vectra PII 400Megs, with 192M of RAM fitted oem (and supplied with win95 or NT4), but they just run and run and run... but native soundcard is only supported in Linux by SuSE (which is odd) - not even in SJDS which is a customisation of SuSE. This one is dual boot to SuSE 9.1 and Win2000, the other has two plug-in HDD racks I mix and match the boot and data storage on.

The PIIs both like SuSE 8, 9 and 9.1

The locally built AMD 1300M machine likes it too. I haven't tried any SuSE on the Aptiva 500Meg one, Sun JDS locks it up (even in live version) and so does Linspire 5, but Linspire 4.5 runs on it well.

Have you tried ubuntu's KDE mate kubuntu? Or Kanotix (developed from Knoppix)?

Okay, download is over a gig now

I haven't tried Kubuntu, but I've heard good things about it. I'm still sort of "experimental" with Linux, in that I mostly just want to learn how to use it in case Longhorn really sucks (I'm very fond of XP...). I've tried a lot of different distros live, just to see how they felt to me. Overall, I like Gnome more than KDE, so I wasn't in a rush to try Kubuntu, but SuSE's KDE really felt nice to me, and I find myself using it more than Ubuntu (the fact that I either forgot my user ID or my password in Ubuntu doesn't help much either -- will have to do a little investigating later...) mostly because I'm addicted to Frozen Bubble Ubuntu is about twice as fast on my machine as SuSE, and I'm very fond of its feel.

ubuntu has a lovely feel. And I find its live CD is a very effective get-out-of-trouble distro, better than Knoppix, Kannotix, etc, which all don't want you to write to any other drives... which means without knowing what their root password is, there is little show to change permissions.

I burned the 4gig 9.2 ISO to a rewritable and it boots as far as the multiple language greeting after the opening splash. I can't get it to display why it stalls by pressing Esc immediately. I'm wondering if the problem is using a rewritable?

So I'm downloading the seperate CD ISOs for 9.3 and will try that, now.

>I burned the 4gig 9.2 ISO to a rewritable and it boots as far as the multiple language greeting after the opening splash. I can't get it to display why it stalls by pressing Esc immediately. I'm wondering if the problem is using a rewritable?<

How weird! Since my Linux box is really un-upgradable, I ended up torrenting the CDs and burning them individually. I've also had other weird problems with the YaST graphical installer ending up in a little gray lined clump at the top of the monitor. If you get past the splash, you might be able to get the text installer to work (select install, and then hit F2 to change "VESA" to text. After 9.2 they "hid" the installer). That's how I was able to get 9.3 to install finally. I don't think the problem is using the RW disk-- I was able to install 9.1 Personal off of a CD-RW with no problems so long as I used the text installer.

Good luck with the CDs!

Well, I downloaded the five CDs and got a bad burn from Nero 6 free edition on the first one, so burned the set in Linspire/K3B without a problem.

SuSE 9.3 is a very pretty looking distro. Surprised at the lack of Gnome... maybe it is one of the options because large chunks of CDs 3-5 weren't used in the install.

You might have to select the Gnome packages manually, but I'm not sure. Mine installed a number of the Gnome packages, and the entire Gnome environment by default. When you logged in the first time, did it give you a drop-down box asking you the kind of session you wanted to have? It defaults to KDE, but if you click the arrow, you probably can select Gnome and FVWM (and a couple of other environments too...), I think-- at least that's the way it worked for me when I installed the upgrade. You might be able to log out, and then log back into a different session with Gnome. If not, you can use YaST to install the Gnome environment. YaST should also tell you whether or not Gnome was installed.

The Gnome install, as I recall from when I first installed SuSE 9.1 Personal, is part of CD 1. I think CDs 3-5 are mostly server packages, games and developer tools.

Glad you like SuSE I fell in love with its KDE handling, even though I usually like Gnome better.

I voted 2 stars. I have been out of the linux loop for some time so I grabbed a copy of the Linspire Live CD and it installed far easier than XP (although my sound still doesn't work). The down side:

1. I don't want to pay for linux and other opensource software. You can get around CNR and instal your own but it's a real pain.

2. I don't have as much control over my OS as I do with some other distro's (I really like Slackware for that reason)

3. I can't get Lisnspires GRUB to recognize my Slackware partition on boot up.

Doesn't offer me anything above what other linux(s) offer? Pay for OS and CNR and if you want a beta then pay to be a insider also.... Dont forget the ads! Software choice is limited to what they want to give you or risk breaking something because they ahve renamed all the packages. Boxed edition does not contain a source code cd or the written offer.

"give away enough low cost or free software to hook the user because they become familiar with it, and happy with using it, and bingo! you have another customer prepared to keep paying out for upgrades because they have no choice, lol."

this sounds just like linspire, does it not!

I had installed Linspire and liked it but what got me to uninstall it was the fact I couldn't get the Nvidia drivers installed to allow for 3d accelleration. I went through about 20 emails from their tech support and one phone call and the final solution was that "there are problems installing the Nvidia drivers with certain nforce3 motherboards." I can post the actual email if needed.

I've moved to Kanotix which I had no problem installing the Nvidia drivers on and it also provided a 64bit version, so all is good.

Well they have renamed some packages (not all) to make it easier for the new users. Someone from Windows will search for "DVD Player" and not "Xine" so that could be a good move.
Also some packages were renamed after users requested it, "Pornview" is a good example for this, it's just an image viewer but people thought the name was offending and they renamed it.

Also what you say about only having the software "they" want you is not entirely correct. If you want a program that's not in CNR you can contact them and request them to add it to their software respoitory (mostly they will listen to you).

Ah, if you have been out of the Linux loop for a while, that could explain a lot. Is this the first attempt at installing a recent distro?

In view of your comments further down your post about not paying for Linux, did you get a copy of someone else's distro, so that you could write something scathing about it?

Sorry mate, but I used to write magazine critiques a few years ago, and there was only once - in nearly ten years of doing it - that I could not find something positive to say about a product my editor suggested I looked at.

Looks like you may have missed the eternal debate about what the word "free" means. Do you go to work for a living, to earn money to put food on the table for your wife and kids, and pay the rent for the roof over your head?

Ummm actually you get around CNR very simply if you want to do it the hard way; you just don't pay for it, and just don't use it.

Where's the real pain? In your choosing to work out all the dependencies, I guess. My time is better spent doing a single click; this leaves more of it to doing things more interesting to me

Well, the solution is simple. Use Slackware. Why did you try Linspire? Perhaps someone encouraged you to write a negative single paragraph review?

I've noticed that in a range of other distros' Grub also. It's not unique to Linspire, or even Debian.