SUSE LINUX Professional 9.3

Suse 9.3 improves on an already impressive distribution - I personally believe Suse to be on a class of their own. Configuration is simple and quick, everything just works, whether you have a three year old computer or a brand-new one. Novell (the force behind Suse) have, fortunately, spent some time in making the desktop extremely appealing and functional.

All the software you might expect to find is there. Most importantly for new Linux users, the default choices are sane and provide the new user with an extremely capable system. For advanced users, almost everything you might need is there and Suse being a major force in the marketplace, almost all packages come as Suse rpms.

A word of warning. Out of the box, the OS does not include support for mp3 or dvd playback. While playing mp3s is taken care of the first time you update your system, playing dvds is a bit more complex (it involves adding a yast repository and updating), once you install Suse you will have a system that can accomplish everything you were used to doing in Windows.

Once you give Suse some time and you get used to its particularities (much like you got used to Windows) you will be surprised on how easy and rewarding working on Linux is.

For a user, the experience out of the box is pretty much like Windows - only basic software installed, and as long as the installation goes smoothly, it's all pretty straightforward. Mine wasn't - but this can happen with Windows too!

The installatation at 9.3 went a bit more smoothly than at 9.2. This time it recognized my SATA drive on the default AHCI setting. This means that I can dual boot with Windows XP without changing the BIOS settings each time I want to switch. HOORAH! Or at least: hoorah! I find that I very rarely boot into XP, because Linux is much more interesting!

I still have two driver problems:
1. my sound card doesn't work - I think this is an IRQ clash that Windows can resolve but Linux can't. This is a standard hazard when you buy a machine that is built to run Windows (Dell Dimension 8400).
2. 3D acceleration is disabled for my ATI Radeon X800SE graphics card. ATI do not supply open source drivers. You can download a proprietary driver, but this isn't nearly as good as the Windows equivalent, and installation involves editing configuration files. A mistake here can cause hardware damage, so this isn't very consumer friendly.

3D acceleration is required for some games and advanced graphics applications. You don't really need it the rest of the time. The ATI driver is a mixed blessing - it is noticably inferior to its Windows equivalent. You end up with a slightly clunky user experience either way. If you are buying a machine to run Linux on, I couldn't recommend an ATI graphics card.

Apart from the above there was very little set up. YAST detected everything well enough to produce a working system without any driver tweaking.

As a user, the experience is fairly familiar, although the applications are different. All my home web-browsing is now done with Firefox. I really like it. It has good compatibility and has features that I miss when I revert to IE. You don't need a virus scanner, and I don't miss the pauses that I get from my various Windows boxes when McAffee decides to scan a massive zip file for the n-hundredth time.

So far so good. Desktop users can stop reading here!

As a power user/administrator Linux and Windows are from different planets. For a start, most Linux software is open source and free of charge. This gives a home user access to software that would cost a small fortune in micro dollars in the Windows world. Web servers, databases, office and graphics all for nothing - with source code and instant access to a lively (and often feisty) development community. There are few black and white guarantees for the corporate-minded - although you can buy these from Novell, IBM, and others at the usual prices.

Administration is the usual. Setting up a network is no fun, and worse when it's mixed Windows/Linux. But what's new!

The SUSE distribution comes with recent stable releases of a huge range of software, however I did find that these were often not the latest released versions - so the DVD isn't as useful as it could be. I usually get an rpm for the latest version from the internet and deal with the inevitable version conflicts. Inside the box, both DVD and CD disks are supplied, there are two high quality manuals and 90 days of installation support. The usual petty penny-pinching is completely absent, and you get the feeling that the product is there for your convenience, rather than a corporate cash-cow. The manuals tell you how to set up the most common servers (apache, squid, CVS, subversion, ...)

I have used UNIX at work, but not for about 10 years. Doing my own Linux administration was a bit of a shock at first, and there is a huge learning curve. I've started to use vi for editing config files, set up apache, eclipse, java and subversion, become hooked on KAsteroids, sworn at Samba, Dell and ATI, and generally had a whole load of geek-style fun. I can't tell you if SUSE Linux is the best distribution, but just at the moment I'm hooked, and my Windows XP laptop is feeling a bit lonely.