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SuSEing it Out

I received the evaluation copy of SuSE 9.3 Pro a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, what Novell sent to me was the "Live" version. This version runs exclusively from a DVD, not from a hard drive.

Even with that limitation, I decided to take a look see. So I copied the supplied ISO image to my hard drive and then used EasyCD Creator to burn the DVD. However, the first try failed and I had try again. I don't know what went wrong but the second try created a bootable DVD.

After rebooting with the DVD, SuSE 9.3 Pro came up. I decided to try the browsers first. Firefox seems to run fine and since I regularly use it and don't need to see it again, I decided to take a look at Konqueror. I immediately noticed how much faster Konqueror loads and runs compared to Firefox. I don't know if this is because it is integrated into the operating system (if indeed it is) or some other reason. Still, Konqueror is a nice little browser and I could probably use it more.

Next up was the primary email application - Evolution. Unfortunately, Evolution failed to load. All I got was a message saying "The Application 'evolution' has quit unexpectedly. Restart. Close. Inform." Restarting failed to get it going and "inform" just tries to send a bug report. So I closed. I don't know if it even runs under KDE, which is what I was running or only under Gnome. If so, I wonder why SuSE includes an icon to it even when using KDE?

On the other hand, Kmail configured and worked just fine so there's always that.

Another non-starter was sound. I don't know what it is about the Dell Optiplex line but this is not the first distribution that I've had sound problems with. On the other hand, Xandros does a fine job so maybe the problem is with running Linux from a DVD or a configuration miscue.

For all that, the main reason I even considered looking at SuSE 9.3 Pro is that Novell's Netware Client for Linux (still in beta at this writing) is designed to run on it. But although I could download the 12MB Netware client, I could not expand it due to lack of "disk" space (which is understandable when you are running on a DVD-ROM). Thus, my experiment with SuSE 9.3 Pro comes to a quick and ignoble end.

This is a shame since the only thing holding me back from converting to Linux, any Linux, as my main operating system, is the lack of a Netware client. We have a load of Netware servers (as well as Windows, Sun, DEC, IBM mainframes, etc) that I need to access.

Yes, I know about and have tried various utilities that call themselves Netware clients. But. They aren't. Not really, anyway. I would guess that none have even 80 percent of the functionality of the Novell client for Windows. The show stopper, for me, was the lack of communication between the server and the various clients. Especially the notification that your password has expired and it is time to change it. Since, as far as I know, the various Linux-based utilities do not tell you this, you have no idea there is a problem until you no longer can log in. At that point, you have to contact the administrator to reset your password. Not a GoodThing(r).

Anyway, I wish I could report more but that's all I have. Perhaps, at some point, I'll download the six-month evaluation version of Novell's Desktop Linux 9, which is based on SuSE 9. At least that version appears to run from your hard drive (and is free, as in . . . free). But that won't happen until I have six blank CDs.

For now, I decided to install an older version of SuSE that I got last year. It's version 9.1 Pro and that installed to my hard drive without problems. Everything, including sound, seems to work. So I will try downloading the Novell Client and see if I can get it to install correctly. More when I know more.