[lug] My experience with SuSE Linux

[Ferdinand Schmid]

HI,
After using SuSE 7.1 for over 2 months now I thought I should share my
experience with this distro.  I had tried Caldera, Corel, SuSE,
TurboLinux, Mandrake, ... in the past and always came back to RedHat
because - well I know RH best.  RedHat was the first Linux distro I ever
tried and years of using it got me pretty familiar with it.  Especially
the KRUD distro of RH was very nice since Kevin does a good job cleaning
it up. 

But I a backup system (Arkeia and an HP tape library) gave me lots of
headache on RedHat.  My CD writer would top things off (ide-scsi and the
Arkeia tape library don't like each other very well).  So at some point
I was ready to try SuSE - they had a 2.4 kernel ready, reiserfs was
built in, and they had a reputation of carefully packaging all the
included applications so things would really work well.

I actually went and purchased a box set, which I hadn't done for any
linux distro in 3 years!  The printed documentation with the box is
awesome and makes me feel good about spending the money.  They explain
configuration of common applications really well and really tell you in
detail how you get your hardware to work.  Nothing is perfect - but this
is definitely the best Linux distro documentation I have ever seen!

It took patience and learning to use Yast (1 and 2) rather than going
straight at the configuration files with vi.  But now I enjoy having
SuSE do lots of the work for me.  Security updates are just a click on a
button and the system does everything for me - with as much of my manual
involvement as I want to do.   Printer setup... are easier than I had
ever seen.  None of the yast actions I have performed to date have
caused any damage to any of the systems I installed to date (about 5 or
so, 1 of them a laptop).  This is much better than what I have seen with
linuxconf, which got me into trouble more than once.  

At this point I also have a few servers running SuSE without any
trouble.  One of my systems has been running Samba2.2 as a PDC (since
their alpha release) and it also performs very well.

Issues I had to contend with like Netscape crashing... have completely
disappeared.  Netscape also had other problems like my address book not
working... Some of those problems only occurred on some RH systems I am
responsible for but none of those issues ever came up on SuSE boxes.  At
this point I am still running KDE 2.0 and problems are just about
unknown with any of the KDE utilities.  

SuSE packages CUPS with their distro and I think it is really worth it. 
With 7.1 I still had to configure CUPS manually but starting with 7.2,
which is due out very soon, yast2 will also handle cups.  At least on
print servers cups shows its strengths (more features for client
connectivity, nice www interface for users and administration).

Life is a compromise! While I really like almost everything about SuSE
here are some issues I don't like:  
- I am not too happy with their firewall scripts yet.  I may actually
need to dive into their documentation to see how that is meant to work. 
While I had a SuSE firewall up and running in 10 minutes it just took me
longer than I wanted to spend to get all the features set up properly. 
So I went back to use ipchains straight, which I had been doing in the
past.
- Upgrading the kernel takes some extra care because their mk_initrd
script works differently than RedHat's mkinitrd.  SuSE tries to
automatically upgrade all initrd images for all installed kernels -
dangerous!
- Creating an FTP install site from the CDs wasn't straight forward.  I
actually had to pull a few boot files from SuSE's ftp site.  But it is
very nice to be able to save install selections! 
- It sometimes takes patience to <<learn>> the SuSE way of doing things
for tasks that I know well on RH systems. 	

Ferdinand

DISCLAIMER:  The above document reflects my personal experience and
opinion.  I am posting this message as an experience report with a not
so widely used distribution (in the US).  My intent is not to make other
distributions appear inferior or less worthwhile.  Just consider this
info food for thought.
FYI: Except for subscriptions to some mailing lists and product
registration I have never contacted SuSE and am not affiliated with
them.    

-- 
Ferdinand Schmid
http://www.archenergy.com
303-444-4149 x231