I tried the eval cd for SUSE 9 and I really liked the feel of it. It even seemed to give a better first impression than RedHat 9.

I am wondering a couple of things.

1. Does the DVD player Kaffeine/XINE play dvd's and I am not talking about the theoretical unencrypted dvd because that limitation is not acceptable. It has to play actual dvds that I can buy in a store. Will it do this out of the box? I was unable to try because I was running the evaluation and I have only one drive.

Red Hat 9 played DVD's out of the box for me but with some sound problems.

2. Digital sound. My biggest problem with Red Hat 9 was that it would not play sound correctly for me. In my test I could not find any setting that would send the sound out in a digital format through the optical port to my 5.1 speaker system in SUSE either.

My speakers have their own decoder so as long as it can send out the raw digital signal through the optical port then that is fine. It does not need to have the decoder software which I have read is proprietary.

I've never run Suse, but on Slackware these should all be okay to run with no problems.

1. No idea, I use MPlayer, which will play DVDs AFAIK (I dont' have a dvd-rom, but others here at LQ have said to have gotten DVDs to work fine, and have even supplied the commands to do it).

2. as root: alsaconf then alsamixer then alsactl store
----will detect your sound card, set up sound modules, allow you to set your channels how you want them (type M to mute/unmute channels), and save your settings.

Hope this helps.