SuSE 8.1 illustrates MS' fear

Christopher Wagner chrisw at pacaids.com
Wed Oct 30 10:32:04 PST 2002


To toss in my own two cents..

You seem to have confirmed a definite trend in the direction of Linux
operating systems.  Redhat 8.0, while still powerful and stable, seems to
lack many configuration options.  Hell, I was pretty shocked when I found
out it didn't even install compress!  The install, however DID install LPRng
and CUPS, and also postfix and sendmail.  With utilities for both to switch
back and forth on demand.  Since I'm a postfix fan, I found this to be
rather delightful.  I am, however still having difficulties with it
recognizing my Intel USB controller.  It says something about an IRQ or port
not being assigned when it tries loading usb-uhci.o.  Any thoughts?  I'm
going to try recompiling the kernel from source, but am hoping I can find a
simpler method of getting it to work.

The GUI in Gnome seems to lack MANY configuration features that the version
in 7.3 came with.  Although, the configuration features in the new Gnome are
considerably easier to get to and to understand how they will affect your
desktop.  A simple procedure for editing my program menu, however, doesn't
seem to be forthcoming.  Making new launchers and panels is fairly easy.
The screen saver was more straight-forward.  Mounting CDs and ZIP disks
(SCSI or IDE, haven't tried parallel) happens auto-magically.

Either way, Microsoft has something to definitely be afraid of.  I hope that
some of the major software vendors, catch on to it and start developing
their products for Linux.  Some hardware vendors are starting to provide
drivers, or at least suggestions to get their products working under Linux.

With the low cost of Linux distributions and the tools that they come with,
it makes a lot of sense to choose Linux over Microsoft products for a
variety of applications.  Esp. with OpenOffice.org and Ximian's Evolution
proving that many software applications can be successfully duplicated in
Linux, and with increased stability and reliability.

Well, that was a little more than 2 cents, but c'est la vie.. :)

- Christopher Wagner
chrisw at pacaids.com

Packaging Aids Corporation - Information Systems
P.O. Box 9144
San Rafael, CA 94912-9144
http://www.pacaids.com/
(415) 454-4868 x116


-----Original Message-----
From: mkjanes at sonic.net [mailto:mkjanes at sonic.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 9:48 AM
To: talk at nblug.org
Subject: Re: SuSE 8.1 illustrates MS' fear

~  As someone who has recently purchased and installed SuSE 8.1 on my
home system, I thought I'd relate my experience with the personal
($39.95) version. First of all, the initial loader REALLY wants to do a
GUI install, and it defaults to a graphical login. It seemed to conflict
endlessly with my SuSE 7.3 installation, so I ended up doing a complete
'install new system' installation. There's no kernel source here, just
the default (presumably a Pentium-optimized) and an AMD Athlon-optimized
kernel to choose from.

~  Second of all, it sets SCSI emulation on all IDE CD-ROM drives by
default which isn't a problem for most applications, but it slows the
data from my DVD drive enough that DVD viewing became noticably choppier
than before, when I could run the drive in DMA mode. The GUI
configuration tools offer no help in resolving this issue. I'm reminded
of Mark Street's comments on GUI's- something along the lines of they're
gooey and messy.

~   But, KDE3 is nice as GUI's go with a lot of applications, and the
recent version of GNOME is nice too. The current version of CUPS (the
Common UNIX Printing System) has printer drivers capable of printing at
the maximum 1440x720 resolution that my printer,a Canon BJC-3000, is
capable of. It's not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink SuSE offering
of the past but there's still many useful software packages here. It'd
be a good choice for someone who basically knows their way around a
computer and wants to leave the world of Microsoft behind. Personally, I
should either have ponied up the (30) extra dollars for the Professional
~ edition or maybe I need to look into another distribution.

Overall, it's still not an XP-killer, but the lizard, the penguin, and
the man in the red hat are closing in...

Mark Janes
- --
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