SuSE Linux 9.1 Review - Using SuSE Linux 9.1
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SuSE comes with the following list of goodies:
- Kernel 2.6.4
- KDE 3.2.1, GNOME 2.4
- GCC 3.3.3
- Mozilla 1.6
- OpenOffice 1.1.1, The GIMP 2.0
as well as the usual wide range of software that usually accompanies a Linux distribution. On this DVD, there's no shortage of choice either. There were 5 audio players, three video players (not including Xine) and a few web browsers. Having all of this on a DVD probably allows for even more choice than distributions that use three CDs, as well as giving Novell an opportunity to show off some other software.
KDE and GNOME are fast and snappy. If you watch your memory usage, it will appear that SuSE is a memory hog. I believe that SuSE has modified the kernel with some patches that make the kernel seem to aggressively cache memory, and on my system with 1.5 GB of RAM, it looked like I was running out of memory. Having said that, I haven't seen the system thrash at all.
After having a wonderful experience with the Totem Media Player in Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official, I was excited to try the multimedia capabilities in SuSE 9.1, and was quickly disappointed. Xine was deliberately crippled to not handle some DVD decryption abilities. As a result, I couldn't play a single one of my DVDs using Xine. Totem Media Player crashed frequently, and Kaffeine routinely crashed when a video file ended. When I was able to get them to play video files, I was limited to MPEG format files and no AVIs. While it is understandable that SuSE would not include the DivX codec because it is protected IP, the XviD codec seemed to be missing as well. The codecs can be had from the mplayer site, but after all of that, I was screaming to just compile and install mplayer and ditch Totem Media Player and Kaffeine. mplayer worked fine.
Audio playback was a much better experience. XMMS was installed and worked perfectly. The various other audio players could also play MP3s as well as WMA encoded files.
With the list of software not installed or not bundled, there were a few extras thrown in. A RealPlayer was bundled, as well as the Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2_03. Java developers still have to install the Java SDK, but if the Azureus BitTorrent client is on the wish list of programs to run without problems, then SuSE 9.1 saves a step. The Eclipse platform, as well as Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird worked without a hitch. As a matter of fact, the only programs that crashed were the video players.
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