SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 Review

After being blown away by how well SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server 8 handled the Ultimate Linux Box, I decided
I would see how well SuSE handled on a more pedestrian machine. In
the carton along with SLES 8 was a copy of SuSE Linux Professional
8.2. Unlike the fancy ring-binder SLES 8 came in, this was the
traditional cardboard box, containing a fairly standard set of
books and CDs. I kept unfolding the jewel case and counted one,
two, three, four, five CDs, plus two DVDs
tucked into a multi-flipout little thing that looks like it should
hold only two CDs. Seven disks in all, plus a new logo sticker that
looks like a green radiation symbol but is too big for the usual
25mm divot on a lot of PC cases. Ah, well, if that's the only
problem we have today, we're doing real well.The manuals are substantial; the user guide is almost 400
pages. In addition to the usual installation and configuration
walk-through, it contains tutorials and references for everything
from Evolution and Galeon to burning CDs. There's even a section on
ergonomics. The administrator's manual is nearly 600 pages, and
where the user guide covers the bright shiny side of Linux, this
discusses its grungy underbelly. It covers such topics as file
synchronization, security in the network, SAMBA, LVM and software
RAID--the printer section alone is 80 pages long. It even tells you
what the strange-looking logo is--"a quintic surface with four
higher-order double points" (page 3)--and gives you not only the
equations for drawing it but a URL for software that handles the
equations and renders it for you. Our German friends are nothing if
not thorough.And that's only the manual. Being one to boot first and read
the manual later, I put CD 1 in the drive, fiddled with my BIOS and
away we went. My system, for reference, is a K6-2/450 with 128MB of
RAM atop a DFI Aladdin-IV-chipset motherboard, with a 4.3GB Seagate
system drive, a 3GB Quantum Fireball home drive, an S3 Trio 64
video card and an AMD PCnet32 LANCE NIC. SuSE took to it like a
duck to water. The boot splash lets you boot the installer normally
(sans ACPI), manually or safely. It also gives you choices for
booting from the hard drive (nice, if you hosed your MBR), booting
a rescue suite or running MEMTEST. It's good to have the installer
and diagnostics on the same CD. Cranking the installer, I was
presented with a choice in short order: it had found my old system,
and asked if I wanted to update or abort. No, go ahead and install,
please.The installer is menu-driven, not dialog-driven. You're
presented with a scrolling screen of stuff you can click on to
change. If you're happy with the defaults, you don't even have to
see them. I tinkered with the software settings, as I didn't want
everything for my small system. By default it had already
unselected GNOME and reduced KDE to a basic system. I had a few
conflicts--I wanted to take out some things it needed for other
things I wanted. I discovered both GTK 1.4 and GTK 2 were present,
as well as KDE 3, which is a good thing for some of the jobs I
eventually want to do with this machine. The conflict resolver can
be a little confusing at first, but it tells you everything that's
wrong. If you learn to focus on the conflict resolution part of
each section, it gets real easy real fast. When I got done I had
1.4GB of stuff to load from CD.So away we went into grey-bar land. I really like the way
SuSE set up this part. You get the usual this package and total
progress bars, but you also see separate little ones for each CD's
worth of data, in both percent and minutes, so you know if you've
got time to go get a cup of joe before having to change CDs. My
slowpoke CD drive took about 40 minutes to pull data from two of
the five CDs. There also aren't any ads, just a scrolling log of
which packages have been loaded.Once everything is loaded, it asked for a root password. I
had to press the Expert options button to make it do this in MD5
format. (Why installations don't do this by default is beyond me;
you always could give the option to go back to
DES if necessary. A minor quibble, however, it's easily
fixed.)Next was network configuration; I provided a static address
and filled in the usual numbers. Nothing fancy; it just works.
Ditto the New User page. At this point it asked to test the network
by downloading the latest release notes and update notifications.
Sure, why not? The modem lights on the firewall went blink, blink,
blink, and everything was fine. Did I care to go ahead and update
right there? No, thanks, I'll do that later.The release notes revealed, among other things, that the IMAP
dæmon no longer accepts plain-text passwords on unencrypted
sessions. This is a good thing, and I wish more people would do it.
With these notes read and accepted, the graphics configuration
screen appeared. I set up my monitor appropriately; everything else
was auto-detected correctly and didn't need help. The test went
fine.After clicking Finish, it reboot..., wait, no, that's
runlevel 5 we're kicking into. I'm not sure what kind of trickery
they used--it went by entirely too fast--but the installer simply
exited into a running system. KDM cranked right up, and when I
logged in as the user I had created, I was presented with
KDE.SuSE did a good job customizing KDE. The desktop has a Gecko
eye icon that brings up the launcher you see the first time you log
in; it links to support, updates and the like. A matching icon is
in the Start position for the usual KDE menus, and a second green
icon with a lightning bolt pulls up a menu of standard desktop
functions (word processor, e-mail, music and so forth). A third
icon, the classic document icon, handles text, pictures,
presentations and the file manager. Over on the right, next to the
clock, is the YOU (YaST Online Update) icon. A click on it brings
up the YOU configuration panel, allowing you to configure automatic
checking and updating or to launch YOU itself manually. I chose
manual launch, and YOU came up with a pre-configured mirror ready
to pull down updates. I advise against tinkering with that setting;
I did and ended up aborting the index download. Returning to the
default setting gave me an index in short order that allowed me to
pick which patches I wanted willy-nilly and then showed me whether
they were Security, Recommended or Optional. I unchecked a number
of things in deference to my firewall's 56k modem and let fly. Like
the installer, YOU's grey-bar screen has a nice scrolling log of
what's going on.YaST 2, SuSE's second-generation setup tool, is a total
dream. (Keep in mind this is a Debian fan talking here.) The
software installer looks very much like the install screen and
shows you which CDs you need to use and for how long; I imagine
it's much of the same code. The system tool lets you do everything
from edit /etc/sysconfig files to back up the system. The firewall
tool, under Security, allows for some fairly advanced
configuration, including DMZ and IP masquerade, right there under
the GUI. I could go on about this, but it's getting long already.
Oh, and if you're shelling in on a slow modem from Timbuktu, you
should know that YaST 2 works in text mode, too.No, it's not going to run like a scalded cat, as SLES 8 did
on the Ultimate Linux Box. But, a whole heck of a lot of
400MHz-class boxes are floating around out there for real cheap,
and I've seen a lot of them being used as Linux desktops and
servers. YaST 2 looks a lot like a Windows Control Panel, too, so
if you're looking to transition a friend to Linux, SuSE and such a
machine are just the ticket. If you want something hotter on the
cheap, I hear tell a certain Very Large Retailer is selling
machines with SuSE preloaded on its Web site.SuSE Professional, the version I used, includes Sun's Java
1.4, Apache 2 and a few other goodies, plus 90-day support. This
package costs you about $70 at your local big-box store. The
Personal Edition has less stuff, obviously, and runs about $40 on
the street. Those of you with fat bitpipes can be have it for the
cost of bandwidth. I encourage those of you with the budget to grab
a box, however; between the books and what SuSE is putting back
into the community, it's well worth the investment.ResourcesSuSE (USA)Froogle (pricing
info)Glenn Stone is a Red Hat
Certified Engineer, sysadmin, technical writer, cover model and
general Linux flunkie. He has been hand-building computers for fun
and profit since 1999, and he is a happy denizen of the Pacific
Northwest.

email: liawol.org!gs