Suse Linux Professional 9.1 review

SuSE Professional 9.1 is the first product SuSE has released since it was acquired by Novell in January 2004, and it shows the future direction of the distribution.

Novell's input will be invaluable to the Linux community, as it brings years of networking and operating system experience to the table. Because of the nature of the GPL licence, all changes and improvements must be submitted to the original author.

When you purchase SuSE you get five CD-ROMs, two double-sided DVDs, two manuals (the Administration Guide and the User Guide) and 90 days of installation support. The 64-bit version of the software is on a DVD, so make sure your machine has a DVD drive before you make your purchase.

The installation is straightforward. It uses the graphical YaST system, which will be familiar to SuSE users and shoud be amenable to newcomers. To get started simply boot your machine from the DVD and select your native language and the packages that you wish to install. It will partition the drive and you're off. You can also partition the drive manually. On our test machine the automatic partitioning shrunk the Windows partition that was already on the drive, and configured the bootloader to include the Windows installation flawlessly, which is a nice touch. We were then able to boot into Windows or Linux without any problems.

YaST then takes you through the essential configuration stages, which include setting the root password, configuring network interfaces and adding users. The process is simple and well laid out in a step-by-step fashion, although it may be a little confusing for new Linux users.

The hardware detection is excellent and the only problem we experienced was that we had to configure widescreen resolutions manually. As widescreen notebooks and LCD monitors are becoming more popular, it surely can't be long before this is supported by a configuration utility rather than forcing users to edit the X configuration files with a text editor. For now, though, that's what you have to do.

Once the system is up and running, it's impressively smooth. All the hardware on the machine was set up perfectly, and the hot-swap features are coming along nicely. When we plugged in a USB memory drive the device mounted and a file browser window opened automatically, making it as simple to use as it would be in Windows. USB-compatible cameras and devices such as Sony's Magic Gate drives should all work in exactly the same way.

SuSE prefers KDE as its Window Manager, and this has improved a great deal recently. Unfortunately, the distribution is rather lacking in support for GNOME, which many people use. GNOME fans may wish to steer clear of SuSE in favour of a distribution with better support and integration. Work has been done to make GNOME applications look exactly like KDE programs when using KDE. The style is selected independently of the GNOME configuration, so changing themes in the gnome-control-center application will not affect the way those applications appear under KDE.

There are loads of applications included in the package. The default installation tends to install one application per task, rather than the lot, and these selections are generally well chosen. You can, of course, install the applications of your choice on top of the default installations by using the package manager. This Professional edition also bundles some commercial applications, including SQL Anywhere Studio 9 (Developer Edition) from Sybase, which is a welcome addition for developers and small businesses that need to create database-driven applications.