[PLUG] SuSE 9.0

[Russell Evans]

I had a chance to play with SuSE 9.0 this weekend and thought I would
post what I have found so far.

Wine on 9.0 will install MS Office97 Pro and will run all but outlook,
access, excel, word.  MS Office2000 Pro didn't make it through the first
screen.

My monitor was blurry using 8.2 with the nvidia drivers. 9.0 is
noticeable better. Whether this is nvidia driver updates or X I don't
know, but it really is better. I used to have to work with the monitor
to get X to line up correctly, 9.0, no issues straight out of the
install. 

Wireless setup is much better. In 8.2 if you had a card that was
identified via wlanX the network scripts would not work with it. Network
scripts in 9.0 work reasonably well. RH 9.0 has the ability to sense
media, and will complain that there isn't link on the ethX. SuSE has yet
to implement something like that and it is a draw back to wireless on a
laptop with a built in Ethernet port. Only one of the interfaces will
setup routing when both are set to use DHCP.  SuSE determines which one
gets to setup routes by the alphabet sorting of the interfaces, ethX
wlanX in my case. There is a setting that allows the manual setting of
which interface should be primary, but is quicker for me to add a route
than edit a file.  I have been working on adding a media check to the
scripts as I did in 8.2 to work around this. I had it working in 8.2 but
forgot to save the file I munged before upgrading. The really nice
addition to wireless is the hostap drivers, and bridging tools are now
included. This makes it very easy to build a wireless ap out of an old
box. I've been building an ap from an old box with SuSE since 8.1 and
have had to go get the tools, do the setup and kludge everything
together. Now it is pretty simple. Vtun and OpenVpn are there to make it
easy to secure as well. The 2.6 IPSec setup looks pretty good too, but I
old read up on it, haven't tried it out.

There is more system management configurations in yast now and a few
server management tools beside cups. It all pretty easy. If you are a
KDE person yast is not embedded in the kde control center. It looks
pretty slick. There is also this new tool that looks a lot like the
hardware tool in windows. I can't remember it is is a kde tool or SuSE
specific tool. The other MS window-ish thing is a vnc setup dialog in
yast for remote help. 

I have some issue with the yast runlevel editor, on two boxes after
doing the updates and turning off what I don't need, the yast run level
editor modules hangs when loading a 28%. SuSE 9.0 have a lot less
services runing than 8.2. The most notable to me was that atd is now off
by default. 

Firewall setup is easier than ever. The more detailed firewall setup is
available under yast in the /etc/sysconfig editor or by editing the very
well commented configuration file. 

DVD writing tools are there for dvd+rw drives. I bought a dvd-+rw at
fry's for $129 a couple of weeks ago and the dvd+rw tools are usable to
make a dvd-r/rw on that dvd writer. k3b seems to be the default GUI tool
in SuSE 9.0 and it uses dvd+rw tools to write dvd-r/w media so probably
it makes no difference if the drive is strictly dvd-r/w. 

I have been using opera for a web browser for a while because I like the
interface. The google entry box, tabs, the ability to strip down the
gui to make it compact, the small size really works for me on my
laptop. You do have to buy the thing to get rid of the big, at 1024x768,
ad box to make it really nice and compact.. I would place opera as
something I would not want to give up because it works so well for me.
That said, SuSE 9.0 ships with MozillaFirebird and I'm using it only. It
has got all that I like about opera and none of the stuff I don't;
paying for each time they make the xx.x to xx.y jump, and the really
annoying I found the address you are typing in the history file and now
I'm not going to let you type anymore, so get busy and grab the mouse,
issue. It took about an hour to get to the point where I said OK, I like
it. It took another hour installing extensions to make the tabs be more
opera like, and getting the very important extension that lets you use
external programs.  

Which brings me to mail clients. I have been using pronto for a while
and I think it really rocks. It is another program that I don't want to
do without. The problem with pronto is that it is a perl gui and is
pretty memory intensive. 

So SuSE 9.0 comes with Sylpheed-Claws. When I was looking for an email
client, Sylpheed was in the range but it had some things that didn't
work at the time, I think it was filtering, that made me choose pronto.
I think the spell checker was also one of the things that
wasn't there, Sylpheed-Claws has pretty good filtering and the spell
checker beats the spell checker in pronto very easily. The only thing I
wish I could figure out is how to map control-d so that when its keyed
over the folder list it deletes the mail in the folder instead of
deleting the folder itself, a la pronto.  SuSE already has the update
for the security issue in Sylpheed-claws that came out this week.

SuSe 8.2 did come mplayer and xine. SuSE 9.0 only has xine. I think the
picture quality is better with mplayer and that is the only reason I
care. There is a new KDE video player out, so that might be the reason
SuSE dropped mplayer. It not like I wouldn't compile it anyway. 8.2
introduced firewire hotplugging that worked, SuSE 9.0 continues to have
better and better hotplug support. 

I'm sure there is more groovy stuff that I have missed. KDE or
Gnome users probably will note many more things than I because of my
choice of window manager. The install is easier than
before and it was pretty much cake since 7.3. The other really handy
thing is the installer can shrink or grow ntfs partitions.  Very nice as
most vendors are shipping MS on ntfs now. 

Thank you
Russell