This is Nightowl's husband John. She said you might want to know what the SuSE 9.0 install was like.

I have the retail box version of SuSE Linux 9.0 Professional. I decided to install it on Owl's old Celeron 400 MHz computer with 512MB memory, a CD player, CD writer, floppy drive, 2 parallel ports, and 2 serial ports.

Her computer had an old 4GB hard drive. I wanted more space than that, so I replaced it prior to the install with a blank 80GB hard drive. The installation process claims to be able to recognize existing Linux and resize Windows partitions to make room for itself, but I didn't test that.

Setting partitions for the empty hard drive was relatively pain-free. It defaults to just creating boot and swap partitions, and then putting everything else on one big partition. I was able to change that without fuss, and it had helpful hints for partitioning in a side frame while I designated what I wanted.

You can select what you want to install off the distribution pretty easily. There are descriptions of everything, and a way to check to make sure you're not installing something that will conflict with something else. They also have packages of suggested things to install. There were times I was wishing I could just click "I have the disk space, so just install everything, dammit", but I understand why they didn't do that.

I was disappointed with the hardware auto-detection. It figured out OK that I had a Radeon graphics card and two parallel ports, but it kept forgetting some of the things I selected. For example, I tried more than once to activate 3D graphics acceleration, and it acts like it works OK all the way up to where you click Finalize, and then it shows you the summary screen indicating that 3D graphics acceleration is deactivated. I'm going to have to work on that some more. It also refused to remember what I told it my sound card was.

It had a habit of forgetting what I indicated in user setup. For example, I told it I wanted to use /bin/ksh as my shell, instead of the suggested /bin/bash, and it gave me /bin/bash anyway. It also seemed to want to reset my password to something 6 characters long. Very annoying.

I haven't had a chance to work on it very much other than the very basic setup, so maybe the full-featured setup works better than the initial setup. Otherwise, I'm going to have to set things up the hard way. (But then, isn't that what Linux is about?)

Created as new thread #129779 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=129779|You are completely unbelievable....]