SuSE Linux 9.1 Review - Installation
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SuSE Linux uses its own homegrown setup tool for installation and configuration – YaST. YaST, which stands for Yet another Setup Tool, is in its second version in this incarnation and looks very nice. Where Mandrake 10 and Fedora will make you go through different steps in a wizard-like fashion, YaST2 gives you all of your configurations in one screen.
Its hard to tell how well the average user will find this installer. I really like the fact that all the configuration options are all in one place, but its not obvious to the user to click on the headings in order to change settings. Using columns would also help, since its easy to go through this installer a few times and didn't notice the scroll bar on the right side, which configures X Windows. Having said that, once you figure out how to use YaST2, the rest is easy. The partitioning options are well thought out, and reasonably simple. (Granted, partitioning is not easy for those who don't use it.) YaST2 did recommend ReiserFS as the default filesystem, and detected my Windows XP partition and by FAT32 backup partition on my second drive without problems. SuSE also doesn't mount the FAT or NTFS partitions it finds under /mnt like most distributions do – instead, it uses /windows/c, /windows/d, and so on for them. The CD writer and DVD drives were automatically mounted at /media/cdrecorder and /media/dvd, also different from the standard /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/cdrom1.
The package managing component of the install is similar to those found in other distributions. Be forewarned: the auto-dependency check is not turned on by default. I tried to install everything (an 11 GB adventure) only to turn on dependency checking and find that 53 packages were conflicting. The DVD appears to have multiple versions of the same software on it, and as a result, the conflicts were appearing. Dependency checking, if its an option, should be turned on by default, and unlike the Fedora installer, an afterthought when it brings up a message saying “Hey! Did you know you also need packages X, Y, and Z?” I eventually opted for installing all of KDE and GNOME, as well as other packages such as samba, which turned out to 4.3 GB.
When the command to install was given, YaST2 happily formatted and partitioned my drive. Installing the bootloader choked. Having modified the bootloader settings to use LILO instead of GRUB, the lilo.conf that YaST2 generated caused LILO to fail because there was a space in one of the labels. Since LILO does not like spaces in its configuration files at all, LILO failed and generated a non-descriptive error message. While its easy to assume that the average user will not change the bootloader from LILO to GRUB, the default label should be compatible with both LILO and GRUB.
The copy time was about 45 minutes, and overall, the installation took about 1 hour. Aside from the bootloader problem, it went without a hitch.
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