A Review of SUSE 10

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

October 20, 2005

Seems I picked the week when everybody else wanted SUSE 10.

My attempts to get Novell's SUSE 10 from their official site ended up in a trickle of data that would have had me writing this article some time after New Year.

After consulting a few news items on SUSE, I picked up the torrent file for OpenSUSE 10. In the end, I got my 5 CDs and began the installation process.

Installing SUSE 10

SUSE 10 starts with a welcome in many languages, so if you're a speaker of one (or more) of the languages that are displayed their, your first contact with SUSE will be a pleasant 'hello'.

The rest, I'm glad to report, is equally pleasant. That doesn't mean that they're aren't things that could be improved. Anything can be improved, but SUSE 10 is as close to the perfect Linux distribution that we have to date. But before we talk about the distribution's virtues (and some small defects), let's walk through the main parts of the install so you'll know what to expect.

After the warm welcome, you'll see a menu with the following choices:

• Boot from hard disk
• Installation
• Installation ACPI Settings
• Installation Safe Settings
• Rescue System
• Memory Test

I chose plain old 'Installation'. You'll now see some icons for the hard drive, keyword and video card start lighting up one by one. After this, you'll be asked to choose your language. Once you've chosen your language, you'll be asked to do a 'media check'. This will see if the CDs you downloaded have been burned properly. As the tool points out, you don't want to get half way through the process only to find that CD 4 is defective. As with this step and others, there are notes on the left side of the screen to guide you through it. When each disk is finished, just plunk another one in the drive. This will take a bit of time. According to the notes, it doesn't matter which disks you put in and it what order. When you've checked all 5 disks, put the first disk back in and push 'next'.

Now, you'll be asked to agree to the SUSE licensing terms. Now, I haven't passed the bar (nor tended it, for that matter), but you can safely agree to the terms. After all, this is the Linux world. Next, you'll be asked to choose the installation mode. There are two choices: New Installation and Update. There's also another button that says 'Other' which brings up a dialog with choices we saw in the first menu: Repair Installed System and Boot Installed System. This is probably there in case you missed the first time around and you got this far. I chose 'New Installation', since this was my first time with SUSE 10.

You'll have to choose your time zone at this point. Then you'll have to choose which graphical user interface (or GUI) you'll be using for your desktop. Your choice is between KDE and GNOME, though there is an option to install a minimalist or only a text mode system. Our installer points out that both are "powerful and intuitive" desktops, but the only real difference, according to the descriptions, is that KDE uses Kontact for email and Konqueror for browsing the web and GNOME uses Evolution and Firefox respectively. For those who don't know much about the Linux world, there might be some doubt here as to which one is better. I suppose that those coming from Windows will recognize Firefox and presumably choose GNOME. However, I would think that a Windows user would probably feel more at home with KDE. Not that I want to start a flame war or anything!

Once you've chosen your desktop look, we move on to the main installation menu. You'll see two tabs named 'overview' and 'expert'. Overview has the main parts of the install. The first stop here is partitioning, which brings shivers to everyone's spine. Partitioning is never as bad as they make it out to be. First, you can just let the installer use the whole hard drive. If that's an option for you (if you've got a free hard drive), you might want to go with that. If you're feeling up to it and click on partitioning, you'll be presented with three options:

• Accept Proposal
• Base Partition Setup
• Create Custom Partition Setup

After a little investigating, I found that if you click on 'Base Partition Setup', you get basically the same as if you had clicked on 'Create Custom Partition Setup' and then 'Custom Partitioning. I chose the second option and then setup. I used the partitioning tool to get my preferred hard disk layout, which is to allow about 7 GBs for everything in the root (/) partition. What's left goes for the /home partition, to keep personal files. Also, remember to leave some over for a swap partition. Of course, when it comes to partitioning, every school teacher has his little book, as the Spanish proverb goes. I'll let you investigate the ins and outs of dividing your hard disk on your own. Make sure that you choose an appropriate filesystem as well. I normally choose ext3, which is the most popular these days, just ahead of Reiser.

Next comes perhaps the most important part of the install process, choosing the software packages that you want on your system. You'll see two lists. The left side has the major categories of packages. If you click on one of these major categories, a list of the individual packages will appear on the right. Here, you can eliminate or add these specific programs. If had to look in the category 'Experienced User' to find the text editor 'emacs', which is a must on any system I use. The instant messaging client 'Gaim' is also in there for some reason. In the 'Office' category, you'll find an application called 'Beagle'. I've heard a lot about this program and I was curious to try it. It's a desktop search engine written in a programming framework called Mono, which is (or at least started out to be) an open source version of Microsoft's .NET. The installer will take care of the Mono dependencies, as it will with any other package you choose at this point.

When I was finished, I pushed 'accept' and it showed the packages that were automatically selected to resolve the dependencies I mentioned before. I then pushed 'continue'.

At this point, you can choose secondary languages. I chose Spanish. Then I was brought back to the main menu, and I pushed the 'accept' button again.

Now, the installer takes over and begins to format the partitions and install the software you've chosen. It gave me an estimate of 45 minutes to complete the process, which in the end turned out to be about right. After the packages on the first CD were installed, the computer rebooted. It did this on its own, apparently. Since I had 45 minutes to kill, I went out to grab a snack. It was there asking for CD 2 when I got back. It then asked for each CD, one by one until it was finished installing packages.

The post-install part starts with your being asked for a password for the administrator of the system, root. After it complained once about my only using lowercase for a password, it accepted my choice. Then you'll need to configure your network. Before that, I noticed that there was an option indicating that SSH or the 'secure shell' was disabled. Since I need to log in remotely to the computer, I enabled it. I have an ADSL router, so I configured a static address plus the host name and name servers. It the menu option 'Detailed Settings', you'll fine 'routing', where you can add the IP address of your default gateway. I also enabled 'VNC Remote Administration' so I can use the desktop from a remote computer. Once this is setup, you'll be able to test your connection. To do this, it will download the SUSE 10 release notes. You'll get a 'success' message if it worked.

You'll now be asked to run the online update. This will download and install any packages that have been fixed due to bugs or security alerts. This will take some time. The longer the time has gone by since the release date, the longer it will take.

Next, you'll need to select an authentication method. The options are

• local /etc/password
• LDAP
• NIS
• Samba

For home use, /etc/password is just fine. If you're installing SUSE in a business setting, you'll probably want to consult the person who makes the decisions. You'll also need to create a regular user account. If you're planning on having more than one person use the machine, the don't choose 'automatic login'. Later, with the administration tools you can add more user accounts. You'll also be shown the release notes. It's worth the read, especially if you're using some high-end graphics cards. There's information about configuring those. Speaking of graphics cards, it successfully detected mine as well as the monitor. If you need to configure a printer, you'll be asked to do that at this point.

Since I don't have any other hardware that needed configuring, the installation process was finished for me at this point. My new SUSE system was ready to use and I logged in to my user account.

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