SUSE 9.3: More, Better, Faster, Now!
By: Bill von Hagen
Monday, May 16, 2005 12:40:42 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5855/1/
Cutting Edge and Oh, So Stable
Novell's latest release of SUSE Linux, SUSE 9.3, demonstrates Novell's continuing commitment to delivering polished, off-the-shelf Linux distributions for the desktop and professional markets. October 2004, which is when the previous version of SUSE Linux was released, seems like only yesterday. So what's new--and, perhaps, why should people care?
Initially, Novell's Linux strategy was a source of major concern for SUSE-lovers everywhere, but their commitment to Linux is clear even though some people seem to be concerned about fragmentation. For enterprise environments, Novell offers a high end server-oriented product known as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). The enterprise desktop companion to SLES is Novell Linux Desktop, a version of SUSE Linux focused on areas such as connectivity to Microsoft Windows and Novell groupware products. For the rest of us, there's SUSE Linux Professional, which provides a single, affordable solution for the laptop/desktop/workstation user markets.
SUSE has always prided itself on the unofficial title of "the world's most frequently released Linux distribution" which is both a good thing and a pain. On the one hand, it's a pain to keep chasing the latest SUSE professional release and upgrading multiple systems. On the other hand, it's a great source of comfort to home and business users to know that the latest, greatest Linux software is available from a commercial vendor with an extensive support network. Say what you like about the geek creds of community distributions such as Fedora, I'll gladly spend all of my nerd bucks for a supported distribution on the machines that I use to do "real work."
Have I ever called Novell for support? No. Do I sleep better knowing that there is a real company and support organization with empirical solutions to my problems? Yes indeed--and my boss might, too. As I've said before, Novell may have acquired SUSE, but SUSE acquired Novell's top-notch product support group, staffed by people with impressive technical and product knowledge. This is not to disparage SUSE's previous support group and forums, which have always been great. However, as we like to say in America, "More is better"--and this time, it's even true.
Installing SUSE 9.3
So as not to violate my contract with the IOSR (International Organization of Software Reviewers, Local 666), I am required to begin this review with comments about the process of installing SUSE 9.3. In a nutshell, it just works. Like the installers for all modern Linux distributions, SUSE's installer provides a nice graphical front end and provides an easy mechanism for selecting additional package groups or individual packages to install. SUSE's installer is known as YaST (Yet Another System Tool), and shares the same framework with the administrative utility of the same name that you use after completing your installation.
With 9.3, SUSE's installer provides a single default installation group "Standard system with KDE" (as shown in Figure 1) that includes KDE and Open Office, and clocks in at around 2 GB for a clean install. YaST makes it easy for you to customize the packages that you want to install, as shown in Figure 2. Because disk space is cheaper than dirt nowadays, even on most laptops, I'm a big fan of JIC installations, where I install everything "Just In Case" I ever need it. Selecting everything shown in Figure 2 (with the exception of the Laptop and Mobile Computing sets of packages) brought the total disk space requirements to 7.2 GB.
As test cases, I installed SUSE 9.3 to a clean P4 machine and to a virtual machine under VMware 5.0, and encountered no problems at all with SUSE itself. VMware seemed to get confused about whether I'd actually installed their VMware Tools package (which I did at least twice in order to get higher-resolution graphics and generally better performance), but that's the stuff of a different review. I also upgraded my existing SUSE 9.1 laptop and my 64-bit server without any problems. 64-bit fans can look forward to a separate review of 64-bit SUSE 9.3 coming soon on Linux Planet.
Selecting all packages for installation included some software that requires acceptance of special licenses, such as Macromedia's Flash Player (version 7) and AT&T's Graph Visualization software, graphviz. These packages both displayed license dialogs that had to be accepted in order to actually install the related software. Figure 3 shows Macromedia's license dialog. While some GPL purists may be up in arms about this, I merely found it convenient. For example, I was happy not to have to surf to Macromedia's site to download and then separately install the Flash Player.
Since SUSE's 8.x releases, SUSE has shipped a modern distribution media kit containing both DVDs and CDs. SUSE 9.3 provides a double-layer DVD that supports complete 32-bit and 64-bit installs, accompanied by another DVD that contains the source code. For classicists or people without DVD readers in their systems, SUSE 9.3 also provides five installation CDs. All of these CDs come in a nifty plastic case that survived a nice tumble down several slights of stairs in the office building where I toil during the day. I hadn't planned on making this particular test, but such is fate and my goal (in retrospect) is a complete review.
One of the best features of SUSE's last few releases is their off-the-shelf support for hardware that can be problematic. The best example of this is their Wireless Ethernet (802.11b) detection and support, which worked out of the box in both my laptop upgrade (no surprise) and in the wireless card I have in my test system as part of my personal Neighborhood Watch program. Laptop users who have traditionally brought bottles of Aspirin to the Linux installation process will be dancing in the pain-free streets after installing SUSE 9.3--just enter your SSID and WEP key, and you're ready to surf or even work.
What's in the Box?
Figure 4 shows the default SUSE KDE desktop with a Konsole and their pre-release of Open Office 2.0 displayed (showing the part of their installation slide show that discusses Open office). As always, SUSE provides a nice theme and background with easily interpreted and attractive icons. Like any other KDE instance, you can, of course, trick out to your heart's content, but the defaults are quite usable if you like SUSE's mascot.
The following table shows the versions of some of the most popular GNU/Linux software packages found in SUSE 9.3. For those who might be new to Linux, this table lists the base versions of the Evolution mail client, the binutils, GCC, GDB, and Glibc packages for compilation and debugging, the GNOME and KDE desktop systems and their graphical underpinnings in the X Window System, the Perl and Python scripting languages, the Open Office desktop productivity software package, the Linux kernel itself, and the RPM package management system.
| Package | Version |
| binutils | 2.15.94 |
| Evolution | 2.2.1-7 |
| Firefox | 1.0.3-1 |
| GCC | 3.3.5-5 |
| GDB | 6.3-14 |
| GIMP | 2.2.4-3 |
| Glibc | 2.3.4-23 |
| GNOME | 2.10.0-4 |
| KDE | 3.4.0-28 |
| Kernel | 2.6.11.4-20a |
| OpenOffice.org | 1.9.79-9 |
| Perl | 5.8.6-5 |
| Python | 2.4-14 |
| RPM | 4.1.1-208 |
| Samba | 3.0.13-1 |
| X Window System | 6.8.2-20 (x.org) |
As you can see from this list, almost all of these applications are pretty close to the latest and greatest unless one wanted to suck code from the keyboard buffers of various Open Source developers around the world. I was somewhat surprised that no pre- or official release of GCC 4.0 seemed to be included, but I suppose that it's not too much to ask for me to build something--everything else I am traditionally interested on was installed by my JIC approach.
One especially interesting package included with SUSE 9.3 is the Xen virtualization monitor and platform. Xen provides a simple, low-level operating system that enables multiple instances of other operating systems to run "on top of it," synchronizing and scheduling device access and other system resources across those virtual systems. When running multiple Linux systems using Xen, the systems that run on top of the Xen machine monitor shouldn't require any kernel tweaks, but just in case SUSE 9.3 includes a pre-configured Xen-aware kernel to simplify the experimentation and exploration process.
Xen is a GPL'd Open Source project, originally developed at the University of Cambridge in the UK. I've mentioned VMware elsewhere in this review, which provides similar functionality in a commercial product, but Xen is extremely promising and exciting as an open source alternative with potential preformance improvements due to the fact that Xen's virtual machines can easily use hardware, such as separate disk partitions, directly. As far as I know, though the Fedora project includes Xen and Red Hat has talked about it, SUSE is the first commercial Linux vendor to actually ship a distribution that includes Xen.
Customizing and Updating SUSE 9.3
SUSE 9.3 provides the standard KDE Control Center to configure and tweak its default KDE environment. This includes a standard System Administration tab, but also provides SUSE's YaST Modules for updating and customizing your system. Since SUSE 9.3 is quite new, I was interested in how many updates were already available. Keeping systems up to date is one of the key promises of supported distributions. Actually, every distribution cares about updates, but my expectations are stronger when I've actually shelled out money for a distribution rather than simply downloading it.
Selecting YaST modules > Software > Online Update displayed SUSE YaST Online Update (YOU) module, which is quite easy to use. you simply select an online update site and then wait while YaST retrieves a list of available updates. Next, you pick the ones you want (in my case, a not-too-surprising "Everything," and then go off for coffee while YOU retrieves and installs the updates.
I was pleasantly surprised by the number of updates already available, as shown in Figure 5. On the one hand, I guess that I could be concerned that updates were already suggested for many applications. In reality, software is inherently "soft," and I'm glad that SUSE is staying up to date with patches and enhancements.
Gotchas
Though I am extremely happy with SUSE 9.3, this rose is not without a thorn or two. One bizarre problem that I noted with SUSE 9.3 is that modifying the display resolution on both my Desktop system and in VMware caused SUSE to switch to the generic X Window system display/login manager, xdm, from its usual default of the KDE display manager, kdm. At first, I thought I was the victim of some remote time travel exploit, but this happened on both of my clean installs so I guess it's a bug. This was easy enough to fix by entering the Control Center's YaST2 Modules pane, selecting System, and selecting /etc/sysconfig Editor. After authenticating (unless you're already root), you can then expand the Desktop and Display manager selectors. You must then set DISPLAYMANAGER back to kdm (or to gdm if you prefer that display manager and have installed GNOME). You may want to modify this area in general, since SUSE 9.3 continues SUSE 9.2's insistence on prohibiting remote X clients from displaying on your system unless you set both DISPLAYMANAGER_REMOTE_ACCESS and DISPLAYMANAGER_SERVER_TCP_PORT_6000_OPEN to "yes."
After making these tweaks and restarting X on your system, you'll get the "right" display manager and you'll also be able to display xterms (or any other X client) from a remote system. Even after installing all of the available updates (as discussed in the previous section of this review), the problem still persisted and was repeatable. Caveat User.
I also noticed that, at least in VMware, my clean SUSE 9.3 installation was surprisingly hesitant to shut down, even when told to do so. While I found this touching (it's like it doesn't want to leave), it is irritating to have to tell it to turn off the computer twice. Perhaps this is another VMware thing--I didn't see this problem on my updates or in a clean install on physical hardware.
As shipped, SUSE's KDE 3.4 activated some irritating bells and whistles that I was compelled to disable. By default, mousing over anything in the panel displays a relatively large graphical tool tip that tells you what you're mousing over. Oddly enough, I already knew where my cursor was, and thus found this to be visually irritating and a probable waste of a few cycles. Turning this off was easy enough to do and actually quite intuitive. In the Control Center, I selected Desktop > Panels, and disabled the "Enable icon mouse-over effects" and all was well by my standards.
Wrapping Up
SUSE has always been a good desktop distribution, and I've used it off and on for years on some of my test machines. With Novell's support and financial encouragement, it should continue to be an excellent choice for a wide variety of users. I'm extremely happy with it and use it on both my laptop and home server system. If you're looking for a supported, complete, commercial Linux distribution, look at http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/index.html. Contrary to a recent editorial in an online Linux publication, there's plenty of mojo left in the gecko.
Aüf wiedersehen!