From RedHat to Suse?
You never have a second chance to make a first good impression...
ISPs are often using SuSe for root Servers. Reason enough to take a closer look to verify if I could use the same system at home for compatibility and gain better configuration know-how.
After two years I tried again to make a move from RedHat to SuSe (OpenSuse 10.1 release) but it looks SuSe is still away from a painless system handling like it's used to be with RedHat (or Fedora).
Perhaps the best thing about Fedora Core is that installation is so clear and painless. A newbie could just press Next, Next, Next throughout the installation process, without making a single choice (other than to type in a root password), and end up with a perfectly satisfactory and totally useable system (-- http://www.edgy-penguins.org/compurants/whichdistro.html --).
The good part of SuSe in advance:
The installation worked without problems and although I had to enable the 3D mode of my graphic card manually it was regonized correctly and some of the bundled games are very good for free games. Even my forgotten TV card (Haupauge) was found in the configuration panel.
The not so good part:
The setup procedure tooks about an hour (which is okay) but with many interactions whereas important settings like configure the keyboard layout or set the firewall policy are at rather hidden places.
If you like both worlds, GNOME and KDE you cannot install both - there is a radio button whereas you will find check boxes in RedHat setups. Because rpm and yum are not available, at least not after a normal setup, I had to use yast to install missing packages. yast is pretty slow, even at startup and from a remote console the default colors are horrible to read, see yourself: http://www.infocopter.com/know-how/linux/suse.html
I had the need to install an Apache Webserver. After typing yast --help I found out I should be able to install Apache by typing yast -i apache2
I had to ignore many useless questions by clicking it away but finally it looked like Apache was installed.
I didn't know where the configuration files and start scripts are located (certainly my ignorance). The very useful locate command is not available after a normal setup. I found out SuSe is calling Apache as apache2 and tried to start it by typing
service apache2 start
Then, the response was
suse:~ # service apache2 start
Starting httpd2 (worker) /usr/sbin/httpd2-worker: error while loading shared libraries:
libaprutil-1.so.0: cannot open shared object file:
No such file or directory
The command line was:
/usr/sbin/httpd2-worker -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf failed
My personal conclusions
It was hard to find some quick information on the Net. Since SuSe is a part of Novel and I didn't find support pages on the redirected Novell start page I had to make a detour via Google and last found the URL www.novell.com/documentation/suse.html↑.
I found some huge manuals (600 pages or more) but it was filled with information for beginners, e.g. "what is a Firewall", "what is a Webserver".
SuSe is convenient for non-Power Users like people that want to move away from Microsoft and want to have a nice system with a good hardware recognition and multimedia capabilities.
People who like...
- fast and almost unattended installations
- the command-line
- often makes installation of server software or are compiling packages
- have the need to make non-graphical remote administration of their systems will probably
would make better experience with RedHat or Fedora products.
Probably I will throw SuSe away and re-install Fedora 5. But I will first of all show the funny games to my wife. Maybe I will keep SuSe as a host system and install Fedora 5 as a guest system with Xen.
As mentionned above, all of these information reflect my personal opinion.
If you'd like to leave a comment on this, please go to my Blog. If your comment has good arguments I'd like to add your notes at this position as well.
Enjoy!
--reto
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