S.u.S.E. V5.0

When I arrived home following the ALG (Austin Linux Group) meeting of August 28, there in the kitchen sat a rather large box from S.u.S.E. Being of sound disposition and sober manner, I tore the box open. Inside were a boot diskette, four CDs in a single jewel box and a 380 plus page manual. The packaging was of good quality and shrink-wrapped as if it were sitting on a shelf at a computer retailer.

The manual is excellent. This is the finest piece of comprehensive documentation I have seen. It includes practical and detailed setup instructions for services, such as firewalling, rational sendmail configuration, emulator setups (and many emulators such as DOS, Atari, Nintendo, CBM from the PET to the VIC-20, Sinclair/Timex, Gameboy and others).

The highly detailed table of contents and comprehensive index are rare in this type of documentation. Not only is information accessible, but it is presented very clearly. There are minor errors in translation from the German, including the presence of some characters unique to that language being left as is, in particular, in the names of individuals. These mistakes are easy to overlook. An unusual and very appreciated aspect of this manual is that it consists of original material and does not contain reprints of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) HOWTOs. The manual's thoroughness is aptly complemented by the clarity and accessibility of the material. The manual alone is worth the price of admission.

The sheer amount of code available within this distribution is daunting—three of the four CD-ROMs are installation media. The fourth is a live file system that can be loaded in a demo mode that uses very little disk space. The explanation of how to permanently set up a small Linux partition and how to use the live file system to have a complete installation contains an accessible and cogent discussion of inode density, or how to cram 40,000 symbolic links into a partition.

S.u.S.E. has included utilities from Caldera and Red Hat; specifically Netware connectivity and Red Hat's RPM (Red Hat Package Management). The utilization of RPM, which is evolving into the de facto standard for installation, maintenance and replacement of software packages, is admirable.

I installed it on a variety of machines: a P166, a K6-166 and a PPro-II running at 300MHz. Kernel compile times were:

The system-level information available is the most thorough I have encountered in any operating system. The disk information, for example, contains the actual disk geometry as well as the LBA translations, the amount of physical cache on the disk and the manufacturer's information down to the device serial number. The same can be said for this utility's output regarding any physical device, e.g., the screens for the networking card go to the level of reading the registers for networking statistics on the card. I find this information of great value in diagnosing networking problems, as well as for installation ease. The S.u.S.E. environment contains only software available under the GPL (GNU Public License); there are no commercial X servers or window managers. The overall product seems to be quite complete.

As is the usual case the printed documentation is behind the actual code, so don't rely on the printed instructions to be consistent with what is on the screen at all times. The process is well documented on the screen. The only confusing point is the order of the process. Like all Unix installations, the first step is preparing the storage media by partitioning and/or making file systems. Under S.u.S.E. this process is accomplished within a cleanly presented screen that requires using the function keys for selection of mount points, formatting options (inode density and bad block checking), etc. I found that the level of options is far above other distributions and, unlike some, S.u.S.E. does install.

The installation is simplicity itself. Once the machine is booted using the enclosed diskette, a series of questions is asked. The install process begins by prompting for the insertion of the first CD-ROM. It loads all selected packages from that CD-ROM and then boots into the newly installed system to complete the installation. It works well—it is a solid installer. The installation process is quick—a base installation taking a little over half an hour with reboots and all. The entire process is as smooth as an installation of this sort on Wintel architecture is going to be. Linux will not install with the ease of Solaris or Irix; but those are captive machines, where the manufacturer has total control of the hardware and choices are rather small.