I've installed suse 9 on a linux box i purchased from cpubuilders. it's better than there red hat 9 based system, but suse's not without it's problems either. For example, sometimes when i execute an app from kde, i see the mouse curser change into an hour glass like the program's loading, then nothing happens, the mouse turns normal. then 5 minutes later the app displays out of nowhere. some times i experience the same thing in gnome, but only when i click log out from the main menu. then i have to wait 5 minutes until it lets me log out. i experienced the same behavior when i installed suse 9 on my laptop so i think it's a case of another distro not making sure the software works. this brings me to my real problem. if i want to try and get a more stable system, then i have to look out for software updates and bug fixes. how do i upgrade an application that's already installed on my system? for instance, i tried to upgrade to gaim 0.76 because it works with yahoo better, but i kept getting all these warnings and conflicts about missing libraries within yast. shouldn't upgrading an app be easy? what's the deal? sometimes when i use the yast package manager with rpms it works fine and others i get conflicts. what confuses me about gaim is that the download site didn't list any dependencies, in fact it list "None". what if i want to upgrade gnome and kde? Is there an easier way then building dozens of modules? any help on this issue would help, i know i can't be the only one with this problem.

As with any other distro. You can upgrade this very, very easily. And, as with other distros, you just have to use the appropriate distro oriented rpms. You cant just go download an i386 rpm of gaim or kde built for no specific distro and expect it to work perfectly. You have to download an rpm, built for Suse 9.0 for it to work without asking you for the dependencies.

I suggest you learn to use google to find appropriate rpms. Its not that hard. packagename Suse 9.0 rpm usually works..

P.S. for gaim.. type "gaim suse usr local bin" and pick usr.local.bin.org or something like that.