DistributionWatch Review: SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal/Professional

By: Brian Proffitt
Friday, September 29, 2000 09:11:41 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/2394/1/

Geeko the Gecko? Urgh!

In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal that I participated in the "Name-the-SuSE-lizard" contest last February at the Manhattan LinuxWorld. My entry of "Get the Hell Away From Me You Big Green Thing!" did not win, for some reason, and I freely admit I hold no bitterness towards SuSE for picking the name "Geeko" instead. Really.

As the Linux community holds its collective breath waiting for the 2.4 kernel, which is starting to get to be more anticipated than the Land of Milk and Honey was to that bunch of lost Hebrews a few thousand years ago, each new Linux distribution released these days gets scrutinized for features that might help ease the wait.

Red Hat 7.0's recent release was ransacked by the user community, looking for the next Big Thing. The response has been less than overwhelming thus far. But while all the hoopla about Red Hat was going on here in the States, the latest release from Deutschland has quietly been causing a stir of its own, first in its home country, and now here.

SuSE Linux 7.0, the latest offering from the Germany-based SuSE GmbH, comes in two distinct offerings--Personal and Professional--as well as an Upgrade version for current SuSE users. Superficially, there is little difference between the products, even in price. The SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal costs a mere $39.95, the Upgrade version $49.95, and the Professional version just $69.95, should you choose to pick them up off the shelf. Downloading is available, as with most Linux distributions, but in this instance, I strongly recommend plunking down the cash for this distro.

Tale of the Tape

The two versions I review here, Personal and Professional, both come with well-written documentation, including (in the Professional version) a very complete near-600-page Technical Handbook that answers a lot of questions for both new and mid-level Linux users. The Configuration manual that comes in both editions was also full of real-world examples to get you going including a detailed section on getting an IDE CD-RW drive working with SCSI emulation in Linux, something I personally have been wrestling with these past few weeks.

The documentation alone is worth the price, not to mention the ease of use you get having an enormous number of packages on hand to install instead of having to find them online and then download them through a small pipe, if you are so cursed.

How enormous? Well, the Personal edition, targeted at home or office users who have had little to no exposure to Linux, ships with a nice neat number of 700 apps, all on 3 CDs. The Professional edition shatters that number with a whopping 1987 applications available, if you want them. Shipping will all of those packages means a whopping 6 CDs come in the box, or, if you've can handle it, one DVD.

The Upgrade version, geared to pull current SuSE users up to 7.0, includes all of the packages shipping with the Professional version--a nice reward for current SuSE customers.

The installation support for both versions are pretty standard for the industry: 60 days for Personal and Upgrade and 90 days for the Professional edition. Other support includes a pretty large support database on the SuSE Web site that I found easy to use in terms of functionality and clarity. I ran searches for several terms and found on-target results for most everything, though I had to try one search for CD writer drives a couple of times to get it nailed down. Every article I found had an equivalent translation in at least two other languages (usually French and German), with Spanish and Czech translations appearing as well. Both versions promoted support that was available via WAP cell phones, but I was unable to test this feature.

The Professional version included an offer for a trial membership in the Oracle Technology Network, and free Oracle software to download and check out, which I also did not test.

BaDLY CaPiTalized, BUt eFFicent

The installations of SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal and Professional were each done on the same machine on separate occasions. The test machine was my standard AMD K6 300 MHz Linux box, with a previously ext2-partitioned section of the primary IDE drive.

Installation of the Personal edition is touted to be less than 20 minutes, and my number was close: 24 minutes installing the Default with Office option, which is a base install along with StarOffice 5.2. The installation interface was YaST2 (Yet Another Setup Tool), a graphical interface that was crisp and clean, though sometimes a tad slow at registering mouse clicks.

Package selection came in three forms: choose from one of four installation paths, choose packages by group, or select individual packages. For this test, I ran the Default with Office option and let YaST2 select my partitioning scheme, which I assume any new user might do.

One of the things that sort of threw me the first time it happened was the requested reboot of the machine during the middle of the package installation. I had never seen a Linux distro do this, and for a second I wondered what had gone wrong. I blindly followed to the dialog boxes' instructions, and soon was back to installing packages.

After installing packages, the hardware detection section of the program kicks in and looks for your printer, NIC, soundcard, modem. I was impressed to see that the application found all of these components, including my oddball soundcard, which other Linux distributions have had trouble seeing.

Once complete, the user is presented with a standard KDE desktop, though if you choose to install them, the graphical login will let you have access to any one of 15 window managers or environments, including Gnome, AfterStep, and Xfce, just to name a few.

This is definitely a platform aimed at the home or office user who has minimum Linux experience. While not as automated as Corel Linux, the installation experience was simple enough for most users who are at least savvy with Windows to handle without too much stress. The Installation guide explained much of the pure Linux stuff (such as LILO) for users not in the know.

In comparison, only a few differences occurred when I installed the Professional edition on the same machine. For giggles, I selected the Almost Everything option, just to get an idea of the greatest length of installation. I was not giggling when it was finally done installing a full 4 and a half hours later. Granted, I asked for the installation of +1900 packages onto a final total of 6.4 Gb of disk space, so I got what I deserved. Consider yourself warned.

This installation was actually the second try with the Professional edition. The first was for a Default with Office install, which for reasons unknown, failed to put a /proc directory on my drive, which was glaringly apparent during the mid-install reboot and a later one when YaST2 could not find a single card on my machine. Before I called Tech Support, I tried the Almost Everything install and this time everything went well. I never did find out what went wrong and I was not able to repeat the problem during a third Default with Office installation later on, so it may have been a glitch in my test machine, not the software.

Run, Geeko, Run

Functionally, the two editions of SuSE Linux 7.0 are identical. There is nothing stopping you from going out and grabbing any of the apps from the Professional version and putting them on your Personal edition. All you need is room on your drive and access to the applications.

Both editions now feature the Reiser FileSystem, a journaling filesystem designed to perform more efficiently than ext2. >From what I tested, it worked as well as, if not a smidge better than ext2.

As you might expect, the Professional edition contains many more server packages, as well as Java2 support, development tools, and ALICE, SuSE's automated installation solution for multiple workstations.

Most of the configuration tests were done in the Professional edition. All of the window managers and environments worked well and all had their own standard configuration tools. I had fun exploring all of the different environments, especially the beta KDE2 I chose to install. This was pretty stable, much more so than some of the earlier versions I have seen of this environment, and it makes me look forward to its official release.

Though not the "official" SuSE environment, the KDE desktop had a few features that made it fit better with SuSE, such as the neat touch of displaying a stark red desktop and red text when you are in root, as compared to the more sedate default blue tones a regular user sees. The KDE environment also includes Panel access to the SuSE configuration tools that allowed me to quickly access the network settings, for example, and tweak network settings that I'd entered incorrectly during installation.

SaX2 is provided to configure X, specifically XFree86 4.0, and it did a fair job, though for some reason kept warning me I was actually running XFree86 3.0, when I knew better. It also gave me a bedeviling time trying to get an 800X600 resolution, but with a little patience, everything smoothed out.

Printer setup went without a hitch and, much to my delight, so did Samba. Using a tool called kWin, I was able to mount a shared Windows directory in seconds, without hand-editing any of the hosts.* or smb.conf files, as I usually have to do.

In all, I found SuSE to be among the most user-friendly of the Linux distributions I have seen to date and it is likely going to stay on my desktop for some time to come. This ease of use is exactly what SuSE is aiming for, as I learned in an interview with Volker Wiegand, President of SuSE Inc., its U.S. division.

A Chat with The Lizard's Keeper

Linux, Wiegand stated, "has the stigma of not being as easy to handle as Microsoft." Because of this presumption, many users have been staying away from the platform. Lately, ease of use has been integrated into Linux with its inherent stability, and it has become an attractive platform for current Windows and Mac users who may or may not have ever seen Linux.

It is exactly this group of people that Wiegand and the rest of SuSE covets the most. Windows users represent a big customer target for SuSE and the decision to release SuSE 7.0 in two editions reflects that ambition.

The Professional edition, Wiegand explained, is for all of the experienced Linux users. Those who know what they're doing, know what they want, and know how to play around with the multitude of toys the Professional edition gives them.

The Personal edition, on the other hand, is aimed straight at the average user who knows their way around a PC, but not necessarily Linux. SuSE Personal is designed to make the transition easier for future Windows expatriates to make, hence the strong marketing of StarOffice, GIMP, and Netscape--all applications with clear Windows counterparts.

Wiegand emphasized that the division of the two products falls along these customer lines, not platform-specific labels such as "desktop" and "server."

"It's not so much as what you are going to use Linux for," Wiegand said, "but who's going to use Linux."

Wiegand, a former IT executive from Deutchebank, learned a lot about customer service at that financial organization. He carries his beliefs into his current job as head of the American division of SuSE. Wiegand wants SuSE Linux to be the tool users' implement on their way to their final goal, not the final goal itself. "At the end of the day, users are interested in just getting the problem solved," Wiegand said, regardless of the platform. Wiegand and the Deutschebank managers that came on board with him to SuSE learned that every day from Deutchebank's customer interactions and transactions.

Because of its growing ease of use, Wiegand sees Linux--and specifically SuSE Linux--moving increasingly into the desktop market. Once Linux establishes a foothold in the desktop arena, Wiegand believes that the enterprise market, a traditionally more conservative group fixated on mission critical apps, will eventually follow.

To further address the needs of the enterprise market, SuSE is pushing the technology surrounding high availability, or clustering, into the Open Source realm. Wiegand, who has been involved with HA for quite some time, sees the open source philosophy as succeeding on the kernel, then the desktop. It is now time, he believes, to start moving middleware into open source, which includes HA solutions.

Wiegand is not alone in this desire, and has managed to pull off a partnership with SGI to implement their HA work formerly done with the IRIS FailSafe software exclusively on Linux, effectively dropping their IRIS work. SuSE partnerships don't stop there. They are also teaming up with Polyserve to use the Understudy clustering product and are supporting the development of the global file system as well. Wiegand sees these partnerships not as a way to promote SuSE but rather to provide better service to the customer.

"Share the technology and the best will get the business," Wiegand said.

This is a decidedly German outlook on customer relations and an outlook that explains why Linux has done so well in Germany and the rest of Europe.

"Germany," Wiegand explained,"is a technology-oriented market. Users will always find good technology if it?s there."

This seems to be the case with SuSE Linux's success in Germany. When the 7.0 software was released in late August, they sold 84,000 units directly to customers on the very first day, which sold out the product. Over the course of the next month, they sold another 40,000 units. SuSE's success is also blazingly clear according to an independent survey of software sold in Germany that included games and utilities as well as operating systems and productivity apps. In that survey, Wiegand said, SuSE Linux Professional was ranked number one and SuSE Linux Personal was number three (Norton AntiVirus for Windows was number two).

Of course, marketing in the U.S. is completely the other way around. In the United States, Wiegand said, "we have to bring the technology to the market.

"The challenge here is to make a good market appearance with the limited resources we have," he continued.

While SuSE's U.S. numbers don't reflect near the strength they have in Germany and the rest of Europe, they aren't too bad and are definitely growing. SuSE 6.4 sold around 20-25,000 units in the U.S. when it was out. SuSE 7.0 sold 38,000 on the first day of its release in the United States and a week later, it, too, sold out for a brief time.

Wiegand firmly believes that the strength of Linux's offerings will keep boosting its market share. One of those strengths is the choice of desktop, which Wiegand sees as a chance to help Linux, not hurt it.

Because the operating system and the desktop do not depend on each other, the desktop is very much dependent on the user's taste. This means that the ongoing competition between the desktop platforms, specifically Gnome and KDE, is somewhat unnecessary, in Wiegand's view.

"Instead of competition, these two parties should work together to develop standards that independent software developers can use to create better applications for both desktops," Wiegand said.

"Linux is about having a choice," Wiegand summarized, "It is not about having a monopoly."