Hi: I took some time out of a busy schedule to review Suse 9.1 Live CD today. A colleague had bought a copy of June 2004's LinuxForU and this was the second CD-ROM with the magazine. My hardware is Product name Intel(R) Desktop Board D845GVAD2 based system Board model Genuine Intel(R) D845GVAD2 system board Processor Intel P4 1.5 Ghz RAM 512 MB DDR CD-ROM Creative 24X I also have onboard sound and Ethernet. I have made passing remarks comparing Suse 9.1 to Knoppix 3.3 and RH9. Please bear in mind that Suse has kernel 2.6.4, where as both Knoppix as well as RH9 have 2.4.x 1. Startup Amazing. It had no problems with detecting all the hardware. There were no logon prompts, etc. Just boot and use. The complete startup took about 20 secs. 2. Apps Lots of useful apps. I liked everything that I saw. But not everything that's installed is available via the startup menu. e.g. I liked kopete that lets me sign onto both yahoo as well as MSN. OpenOffice 1.1.1 took time to startup as usual, but once running, it performed just great. The games included are a great way to get folks started on Linux. 3. Package manager YAST seems to be the equivalent of the windows control panel and more. The Package manager is much more informative than what I see in Widnows. You have quick information in dependencies, file sizes, and package description. 4. Internet apps I tried just Mozilla. This was very responsive, unlike Firebird on my Win2K system, or even Redhat 9.0 that I had earlier. I didn't try anything else. Nor did I test for Realplayer and Flashplugin operations. 5. Wine I just tried a tame notepad.exe and Explorer.exe. I also downloaded a pirated copy of Tally 5.4 off the net and tried that. But it failed with some Device I/O error. We use quickbooks, but I've not tried that yet. Unline Wine on Knoppix 3.3, I did not face any "Please click here to configure Wine" popups. 6. Partitioner This seems cool. I did not try it, as my partition table is already messed up. But it apparently lets you resize NTFS partitions too. NTFS tools and gpartd are included. 7. No development languages other than Perl, Tcl, and the JRE. No python, no Java compiler. This seems targeted at desktop users. 8. Java apps are _snappy_ ! I tried a few Java apps that are otherwise slow on my win2K environment. They performed reasonably well. I also tried the Eclipse 3.0 M8 platform (not the SDK). This took 10 secs to startup. It crashed once, when I clicked some help link. A restart of the application, and Eclipse did not crash for about 10 minutes of operation. Perhaps this was a bug with the M8 release. 9. Install to hard disk There's a quick install, that resizes you existing partitions, installs a boot loader, and transfer Suse. I have not tried this yet. But this is preferable to Knoppix' knx-hdinstall or the manual copy that I'd once tried. Problems and workarounds: 1. PCMCIA related tip. My colleague faced the problem of the startup not progressing beyond "Starting PCMCIA". I myself did not face this problem. Apparently, the solution for this is to give the arguments NOHOTPLUG=1 at the time of startup. This is not documented in the CD-ROM's startup-time help. It is however mentioned in the startup sequence. 2. Sound card You need to configure the sound card via YAST to increase the headset volume. I did not try with any desktop speakers, etc.. Stuff that I have not figured out yet: 1. Mount Windows partitions via the GUI. Unlike Knoppix, Suse 9.1 Live did not have conveniently placed desktop icons pointing to my NTFS5 (win2k) partitions. Perhaps my messed up partitioned table may have been the problem. How 3. Network IP This is not really a problem. The architectects apparently decided on a trade off between "smooth startup-let the user parametrize later" and "ask questions at startup". Summary: I observed the following: 1. Not much duplication of apps as compared to Knoppix and Redhat 2. Much, much faster than either knoppix 3.3 or Redhat 9.0 on my hard disk. I intend to install Suse 9.1 on to my hard disk. I use Eclipse and Java, read PDF docs and HTML docs, browse the net, use emule, Awasu for RSS feeds, MSN and Yahoo for IM, Winamp for music, and Lotus Notes 6.5 for timesheets and corporate emails (I'm a programmer). I do not use Word, but word pad for doc files. Equivalents for the above are either already available in Suse 9.1, or easy to acquire. Once I get the Lotus Notes 6.5 client for Linux and complete my current project, I'm switching over to Suse 9.1 as my desktop operating system. Since the Live version meets all my requirements, I will not be buying the Professional edition. -- Sriram --- Harsh Busa <<email address removed by sriram >> wrote: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo