Learning abit about SuSE

[Buzza24]

Hey Gang,

I have just finished installing SuSE for the firt time. I am a big Linux fan so it's not my first linux distro. After getting abit miffed with Fedora I decided to try something else out and it so how happens that APC puts a copy of SuSE on tehir DVD. I have been using it for one hour or so; so far so good.

I wanted to get others opinions on this distro. I am aware that it's designed to be user friendly but at the moment i am willing to try any thing.

What's your views on the piece of software?

[Void Main]

SUSE and Red Hat are very similar distros and both compete for the same segment of users/businesses. There are many that will tell you they favor one over the other but for me it's "flip a coin".

[Buzza24]

What about package management?
Is it just as good as Red Hat/Fedora and is it compatible with RPM?

And another question
How the font is so big no matter how small I make it in KDE Control Center?

[worker201]

I used Suse a long while ago (Personal 8.0), and thought it was alright. I wasn't happy with the way they bundled things - kde is sorta forced on you. I attempted to install with gnome, and the installation manager forced me to install all kde components anyway, by some sort of dependency thing. So that was kinda lame. Suse's look seems streamlined for kde anyway.

I believe their package manager is called Yast. It was rather easy to find tools that will allow you to convert deb and rpm packages, so no worries there. By now, they probably have native rpm support, but don't quote me on that.

[Calum]

suse uses rpms too, but of course they are suse rpms
and they have the whole yast2 thing which will act a little like other automatic system upgrading things, like apt and so forth. suse's rpms are often similar enough to red hat and mandrake ones (i think suse and RH rpms tend to be more similar than mandrake and RH ones) that you can just use RH rpms in your SUSE system, but sometimes you can't. it's worth checking rpm.pbone.net first for a specific suse rpm of something if you need it i would say.

[Void Main]

I would not suggest mixing RPMs from SUSE and RedHat/Fedora. In fact I would not even recommend mixing RPMs from differing versions of each distribution. I still prefer to use "apt" (and synaptic if you must) on SUSE. Makes life easier when managing software is done in the same way on all the systems I use (Debian, Fedora/RH, SUSE, etc):

apt for SUSE:
http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/

Here's a thread where with more info:
viewtopic.php?t=307

[Calum]

i wouldn't recommend it either, but, it's easier to do it with suse and red hat than with mandrake and red hat, in my experience. often if there's only one rpm available, it's for red hat (the ymessenger rpm for instance, until quite recently) but the red hat rpm simply means it was built on red hat but will work on others.

but no, i wouldn't recommend it as a rule.

[Void Main]

What I do if there isn't an RPM for Red Hat but there is for another platform is grab the SRPM from the other platform and build it for my machine. Very often it's as simple as:

# rpmbuild --rebuild myobscureprogram.src.rpm

Sometimes it takes a little more work to get a compile but if the above is successful you know that the binaries are linked against the versions of libraries you have installed, not against the versions that were installed on the other distro or release of distro that the original binary RPM was built on.

[worker201]

Or, you could just build the program in question from source.

[Calum]

you could i suppose, if it's open source. i really just meant the odd occasion when you might want something like ymessenger or opera but since opera is more or less superceded by firefox with prefbar now, and they have fixed the yahoo protocol bug in gaim, those are kind of not required.

[bazoukas]

My three favorite distros are RH, Suse and Debian.
Hell, I have all three in my three computers. I should say though that I still run RH 7.3 but with a jacked up kernel .


And hello Voidman