[plug] SuSE Linux

[Derek Fountain]

On Tuesday 25 March 2003 08:52, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> Some people expressed an interest in SuSE Linux at the PLUG workshop
> last night when I briefly showed it working on my "portable". I
> apologise for having misled them about the price of the distro.

I've been using SuSE for years. I wasn't at the meeting last night (I was 
killing myself on the volleyball courts next door), but I can give some input 
on this.

> Both everythinglinux.com.au and lsl.com.au are taking (pre-)orders
> for the 8.2 "Professional upgrade"; for less than $120. The German

Yes, it's relatively pricey, coming from Europe, and with a company with a 
business model which might have them survive for a while. You also pay for a 
really good and well maintained distribution. When it comes to engineering - 
cars or software - that Germanic attention to detail really makes their 
products stand out as top quality.

The best way to get it cheaply would be for a group of people at PLUG to chip 
in and buy it for the library, then make copies of the CDs as required. 
Not-for-profit redistribution is allowed.

> OK, OK... If 8.1 (and 8.0) are anything to go by; their online
> update "wizard" sucks dirty swamp water through a crinkled straw.
> It's painfully slow. (There's a free, faster alternative "fou4s"
> that I've been using for months now, at 4 different sites.)

I've heard this, but never had a problem with it. Yast Online Update (YOU, as 
it's called) has always worked absolutely flawlessly for me. It even updated 
my glibc package automatically, something I'd very rarely let an automated 
process have a go at. I use the local iinet FTP server's SuSE mirror as the 
source, and it's plenty quick enough for me. No download costs either. :o)

> And YaST is very memory-hungry. Many tasks cannot be done with less
> than 128MB of RAM, plus 512MB of swap.

Really? Like what? I run SuSE-8.1 on my firewall box - 32MB RAM with 128MB 
swap. Apart from a bit of a job getting it installed on a box with no CD 
drive, I've never yet hit a problem.

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003