Twitter: any blackberry curve/nokia E71 shootouts? Want to see how they compare from hardware perspective. 13 hrs ago

Dec

20

SUSE Linux 9.1 Professional on the IBM R50 Thinkpad

IBM, Linux, SUSE, Thinkpad 

Well, I got SUSE 9.1 Pro on my shiny new TP yesterday! Works like a charm!

I had a DVD of this distro from Novell, but since my old PC didn’t have a DVD ROM, I never got a change to have a look at this supposedly cool distro. RedHat/Fedora has been my mainstay since the bad old days of Linux 2.0.

SUSE’s installation is about as easy to use as Fedora’s, but it’s certainly more powerful. The only gripe I have is their handling of multilayered dialogs - where one dialog/preference box leads to another - leavs much room for improvement. The NTFS resizer was a joy to use! IBM’s default partitioning scheme is to use a ~4GB partition (which they call PreDesktop Area) for recovery, and use the rest as ine large C: drive. In addition, when you first boot the TP, Windows converts this FAT32 drive to NTFS. I’m glad SUSE was able to resize this so well; Fedora and the rest MUST have this feature by now!

(I’d do away with Windows XP altogether except for the fact that I’d paid good money for this copy - and IBM doesn’t provide installation CDs! GRRRR!)

The installation is simple for a newbie - if he/she sticks with the (decent) defaults, and is sufficiently flexible for a power user to tweak. I picked almost all of the packages SUSE had to offer. However, the installation itself takes a very long time - 4 GB took 2 hours to install! This is unacceptable, guys!

Once I was done, though, the most adorable little chameleon greeted me at startup! This was a welcome change from the furious cascade of kernel debug messages I was used to in Fedora. Even RHGB - Fedora’s attempt at graphical boot, although professional-looking - isn’t as pretty as this. My first virtual console was in a nice framebuffer.

OK. SUSE makes the best KDE desktop in the world. Period. No arguments about this one. I’ve tried Mandrake, RHEL and Fedora, and no one puts as much into their KDE as SUSE. I’ll put up a screenshot of their default desktop sometime soon. YAST is very nicely integrated into KDE’s Control Centre. SAX2, SUSE’s X configuration tool, rocks. The menus are well arranged, lots of applications, sensible defaults. Two great-looking wallpapers.

Gnome sucks. I hope fervently that things have improved in the 9.2 release and in Novell Linux Desktop. It’s amazing that fonts that look so great in KDE can be so unreadable in Gnome. And don’t accuse me of not tweaking enough - I’m a Gnome lover too, and know a fair bit about using and configuring it. YAST isn’t too well integrated here - and it’s difficult for a user to run a pure-Gnome SUSE desktop , because all of YAST’s modules seem to have been written using the Qt libraries. Oh, well - SUSE did always tout itself as a KDE-centric distro. Wonder how Ximian’s changed that.

SUSE’s notebook support is amazing! I’ve yet to go over this in detail, but suspend/stand-by and hibernate worked like a charm! There’s this YAST module which is a front-end to kpowersave - and it’s the most intuitive way I’ve seen to manage a mobile computer’s power-handling features. I was advised not to try ACPI, and to stick to APMd. I’ve done that. There’s this nice piece on OSNews.com about SUSE 9.2 Pro’s power handling support. Hope to upgrade to 9.2 soon, will try that out. More on this as I explore further.

The R50’s scroll feature doesn’t work yet, but there’s a program by the name of TPScroll which apparently does a good job at fixing that. I’ve dowloaded it, will try it out tonight. More later.

OK - so that’s my first experience with Linux on a Laptop - and, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s been quite appealing!

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