Trey’s Blog

After hours of backing up data to DVD, I finally had the opportunity to install SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on my 64-bit machine. This install went very easy. I spent the most time dealing with the partitions because I haven’t had to deal with that in a while thanks to Ubuntu. The problem wasn’t that it was all that difficult, but that it detected a Windows install on the hard drive and wanted to work around it by default. I just went, in removed the Windows partition and realigned the other partitions. Once that was under way, I confirmed the default packages, set my time zone and left it alone for 30 minutes. At this point, I needed to confirm or modify the Hardware that was detected. It did a great job of finding everything, but it used a default driver for my ATI Radeon 7500 video card. This doesn’t affect regular use, but the default driver is not capable of 3D rendering. Essentially, Novell takes much pride in their support and the fact that they have an awesome desktop solution with this product, and they want you to subscribe to their support. I believe it is usually around $50 per year, which is not bad considering you may actually need it at some point. Upon registration of this support, the system is setup to retrieve the necessary drivers for your video card, whether it be ATI, nVidia, or Intel and your desktop with XGL is only minutes away. If you haven’t seen what this can do, you should really check it out. This is a fantastic alternative to Vista, which is still not yet released, but doesn’t have the steep hardware requirements.

Things to note about the SuSE Desktop install:

• The default install has just about everything the average user would want as far as software
• Mono, the .NET framework for linux, comes installed and already configured
• .NET apps such as Beagle, Banshee, and F-Spot are installed and ready to go.
• Firefox flash plug-ins are already installed. (this can be a bit of a hassle* with other distros)
• The ’start’/computer menu is very user friendly and a little Vista-ish.
• Desktop search via Beagle is very very impressive

*hassle: this is usually a hassle with other distributions because Firefox has a way of telling you you need the plugin, it greets you with a way to do it quickly through their interface, but with linux, this never seems to work. I’ve always had to go to adobe.com, get the installer scripts and run them manually. Granted this only take a couple of minutes, but I’m really bothered by the failed attempt on the Firefox end.

My next task is to attempt some DVD+DL burning, which always seem to fail in Windows on this particular box. I’ll also test Banshee with my iPod, although I’ve heard that it will not play non-DRM media. I find this very hard to believe, but time will tell.