Suse 10
I installed Suse 10 on my Linux hard drive this week. It was a tough decision to override my faithful Kanotix, but being a compulsive experimenter I couldn’t resist the temptation.
Suse installed easily and comes packed with software including commercial products such as Java, Flash and RealPlayer.
It’s a polished-looking distro with a full choice of window managers. I started with Gnome, which looks neater, but switched today to KDE, which works faster and has a better menu.
I installed the new final version of OpenOffice and it works fine.
The only hardware problem I had with Suse was getting my digital camera and scanner to work. They were recognised but didn’t function. The scanner worked with Fedora 4, so I don’t understand that one.
The other irritation is that Suse doesn’t play commercial DVDs due to some licensing issue that other distros seem to ignore.
I’ll stick with Suse for a while. Overall it’s fast, attractive and efficient. I’m going to try Mandriva on one of the spare computers next week and I may revert to Kanotix when the next release comes out.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
October 22nd, 2005 at 7:32 pm
it is difficult to install other software with Suse 9.2 for example….and to play .mov files Why pay for Real Player if it is not playing DVDs?
October 22nd, 2005 at 7:58 pm
I’ve downloaded RPMs from Packman for playing DVDs, but haven’t test it yet. I wanted Suse to be the main OS for my 9yo son to reduce virus risk. He needs it to play DVDs more than me. It is an issue.
November 3rd, 2005 at 12:03 pm
DVDs play fine in MPlayer but not in Kaffeine if you download the DVD css libraries
November 6th, 2005 at 10:09 pm
I switched from Fedora 4 to Suse 10 and I’m now finding it very hard to get my DVDs to play using MPlayer. Any thoughts?
November 7th, 2005 at 4:26 am
try this, it worked for me: http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178/42/
November 7th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Clint, thanks for that link. I followed the instructions and can now play DVDs with Totem or Xine. Kaffeine crashed on me and Mplayer simply doesn’t load. Never mind, it’s working and Suse now does almost everything Windows can do.
I found this comment in the article interesting though: "You’ll have to modify the video player so that it will play DVDs. While it originally had this functionality built in, Novell has removed it to make life more difficult for people who want to watch DVDs on their computer."