Distribution Watch: SuSE Linux 8.0 Beta - page 3

Meet SuSE 8.0, The Beta

After the soft boot, I selected a KDE3 session and logged in. Annoying problems began at this point, which does not really surprise me in a beta. For example, after logging in as a mortal user, SuSE's hardware detector found "new" hardware. I found this odd because it had already identified all of my hardware. After enabling detection of new hardware detection going in the future, I clicked "Yes" to see what it had found. Behold, it had found a mouse. But, before I could proceed to configure the mouse, a separate probing dialog popped up, started probing my LCD display (again) and told me it had found a "Generic Monitor" (again). Curious how this all would end, I aborted the chance to reconfigure the LCD display that I had, I thought, configured during installation. My rationale was I would see if the same probe happened after another logout and reboot. Instead, I returned to configuring the mouse. Lo, it asked to configure my USB Wheelmouse again. I restarted the system again, this time using the KDM menu, wondering if about that monitor configuration I'd declined and whether or not KDM would start. After far too long a pause for the on-boot hardware scan, YaST2 again asked to reconfigure my USB wheel mouse (this time in an ncurses-based text mode window). Happily, once I had configured the mouse for the third time, KDM started. This time, I reconfigured the LCD screen when prompted, which caused SuSEconfig to run through its complete save/update process.

Available window managers included KDE, Window Maker, Sawfish, GNOME, Motif (mwm), twm, and failsafe. Motif is unconfigured save for the root menu; Sawfish was completely unconfigured, requiring me to kill the X server to get back the KDM login screen; KDE and GNOME had suitable initial configurations, which I'll briefly describe below. Presumably, Motif and Sawfish will gain functioning configurations in the gold release.