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SUSE LINUX 9.2 on AMD64

SUSE has been making a 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX since version 8.2, released in April 2003. Originally, only the product's main components, such as the kernel and essential libraries were 64-bit enabled, but as the developers gained experience in porting applications to AMD64, the distribution became much more complete in terms of 64-bit support. Up until version 9.1 the 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX was sold separately (at a slight premium), but starting with 9.2, the commercially distributed Professional edition now includes both i586 and x86_64 variants of SUSE LINUX. Last week, two months after the official release, a 3.1GB DVD image with SUSE LINUX 9.2 Professional was made available for free download and we took the opportunity to give the 64-bit edition of SUSE's flagship product a closer look.

We installed SUSE LINUX 9.2 on a system with the following specifications: AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) mainboard from Micro-Star International, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, 2 x 120 GB Maxtor hard disks, Plextor PX-712A DVD/CD rewritable drive, and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card. The monitor was a standard 19 inch LCD from Mozo International.

We downloaded the DVD image from one of SUSE's FTP/HTTP mirrors. Although the main 'suse' directory is split into separate i386 and x86_64 subdirectories, the 9.2 directory under x86_64 is just a symbolic link to the same directory under i386, which is then further subdivided into i586, i686 (only a handful of libraries are optimized for i686), noarch and x86_64 directories. Similarly, the DVD image includes separate directories containing 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Compared to the boxed edition of SUSE LINUX Professional, the freely downloadable DVD only contains a subset of the available RPM files, but these are complete enough for most users. If missing applications are desired, it is easy to configure YaST's package installation module to point to one of the mirrors and download and install missing applications and their dependencies directly from an FTP or HTTP server. For those who don't own a DVD writer, SUSE also provides a traditional network installation ISO image, which can be used to initiate a SUSE installation from any of the available mirrors.

There is not much to say about the installation process other than it was smooth and fast. Some users claim that YaST is confusing in some places, but since we have previously completed many SUSE installations, we found our way around the maze of options easily. More importantly, YaST correctly detected and configured all our hardware, without exception. As for package installation, we selected a complete graphical workstation with KDE and GNOME, but despite the large number of packages that had to be copied from the DVD to hard disk, the installation was over in about 15 minutes. The only nitpick we had with the installer was the fact that it did not give us a choice between a 32-bit or a 64-bit system - the installer simply assumed that since the processor was of a AMD64 variety, we would automatically want a 64-bit operating system.

One interesting observation: unlike in SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9, Novell's name and logos are not particularly obvious in SUSE LINUX 9.2. The installation screen claimed that this release was designed for "technically skilled home users and Linux enthusiasts" (a term popularized by Red Hat when it was trying to convince corporations using its free distribution to migrate to Red Hat's subscription service), which perhaps indicates that we are beginning to see a more clear product separation between Novell Linux and SUSE LINUX (in a fashion resembling the split of Red Hat Linux into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core). Although it seems unlikely that Novell will move towards a completely open, Fedora-style development model in the foreseeable future, the fact that the networking giant is now providing the popular SUSE distribution in the form of a freely downloadable ISO image and that it has GPL-ed the YaST configuration utility, is an indication that Novell is finding Red Hat's business and development model attractive enough to borrow ideas from.

As was the case with Fedora, Mandrakelinux, and other 64-bit distributions we reviewed earlier, SUSE also provides several 32-bit applications and corresponding libraries and their dependencies. Besides the usual culprits, such as OpenOffice.org (rumor has it that the upcoming version 2.0 will have its code cleaned up and it will be possible to compile OpenOffice.org 2.0 for 64-bit architectures), other applications that were 32-bit only were the demo editions of some of the commercial programs supplied by SUSE, including MainActor (video editing software), Moneyplex (home banking software), Textmaker and Planmaker, but also RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Eclipse (a Java-based IDE) and FlashPlayer. Interestingly, after installing FlashPlayer (the plugin was found in /usr/lib/browser-plugins), Flash animations were displayed correctly in Konqueror, but not in Firefox.

SUSE LINUX 9.2 for x86_64 turned out to be an enjoyable distribution. It was much less buggy than Mandrakelinux 10.1, and as solid as Fedora Core 3, with an additional advantage of having included several multimedia and useful non-free applications (or scripts for easy installation of non-free applications, such as the NVIDIA driver or MS TrueType fonts) that are not distributed with Fedora Core. On checking out third-party repositories for SUSE LINUX, we were surprised to find that APT for SUSE now distributes an amazing range of RPM packages for x86_64, including multimedia stuff, as well as the latest KDE and Mozilla builds, all available through APT and Synaptic, and signed by their respective package maintainers. In fact, the number of available 64-bit third-party RPMs for SUSE was higher than that for Fedora Core or Mandrakelinux! And although the development of SUSE LINUX is still done mostly behind closed doors, it is amazing to see that the 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX is now available for free download, while the 64-bit edition of Mandrakelinux is not. Quite a turnaround of events, compared to a few years ago.

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Distribution News

Ubuntu Hoary live CD available

For those of you wondering where the Ubuntu 'Hoary' distribution is going: an experimental live CD is now available. There are still some rough edges to be aware of; read the announcement (click below) for the details.

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SUSE Security Summary Report SUSE-SR:2005:01

SUSE has fixed a number of minor security issues in the kernel, acroread, iproute2, namazu, mpg123, subversion-viewcvs, postgresql, libxml2 and xpdf. Click below for details.

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Discontinued SUSE Linux Distributions: 8.1

With the release of the SUSE Linux 9.2 FTP edition, SUSE Security has announced that the SUSE Linux 8.1 version for home users will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 8.1 after January 31st 2005 will no longer be fixed. Click below for more information.

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Fedora Core updates

FC3 updates: man-pages-ja (updates and bug fixes), ruby (new upstream release), gpdf (minor security fix), hotplug (fix usb remove events), system-config-samba-1.2.25 (brown paper bag release for 1.2.23), sane-backends (resolves issues concerning device permissions for USB scanners), gtk2 (fix some threading lockups in the file chooser), selinux-policy-targeted (allow ldconfig to run with full privileges), policycoreutils (backport restorecon and fixfiles from rawhide), selinux-policy-targeted (require policycoreutils for selinux-policy-targeted), yum (new yum release fixes many small bugs), system-config-samba (bug fixes), system-config-services (throw away stderr), cups (fixes a small regression), subversion (latest release of Subversion 1.1, including bug fixes), vim (fixes a modeline vulnerability), system-config-samba (more bug fixes), selinux-policy-targeted (allow dhcpd to read certs files).

FC2 updates: man-pages-ja (updates and bug fixes), gpdf (minor security fix), cups (fixes a small regression), initscripts (fix the mounting of usbfs on boot), epiphany-1.2.7-0.2.0 (rebuild because of Mozilla API changes), epiphany-1.2.7-0.2.2 (rebuild because of Mozilla API changes), vim (update vim to version 6.3 with many bug fixes).

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Mandrakelinux updates

Mandrakelinux 10.1 updates: xscreensaver (bug fix), g-wrap (fixes a compilation error in g-wrap which prevented gnucash from running on Mandrakelinux 10.1/x86_64), kde (a variety of bug fixes for various components of kdeaddons, kdebase, kdelibs, kdenetwork, and kdepim).

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New Distributions

Pingo Linux

Pingo Linux is a Slovenian Linux distribution intended for a complete home desktop, including office tools, system administration utilities and full multimedia support. The packaging is RPM based. Historically, it started as an offspring of Red Hat Linux and is currently based on Fedora Core. The distribution is intensively localized in the Slovenian language and provides the KDE desktop as the default environment. Pingo is installed as second boot system on computers provided by the Ministry of education in Slovenian schools, giving it a base of over 12,000 users. The distribution is accompanied with printed books aimed at the novice user. From its beginnings in 1999, this free distribution regularly releases one to two upgrades per year. Pingo activists are organizing well attended Install Fests all over Slovenia. Pingo v3.1 was released December 30, 2004. (Thanks to Ales Kosir)

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LinEspa

LinEspa has been added to the list of Spanish distributions. Currently at version 0.22, LinEspa comes with XFCE4 and a 2.6.8.1 kernel. (Thanks to Julian Coccia)

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

Debian Weekly News for January 11, 2005 is out with a look at Knowing Knoppix, an interview with Debian project leader Martin Michlmayr, KDE 3.3 in testing, and much more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 10, 2005 covers the use of a visual registration confirmation to prevent forum abuse, the availability of a stable 2.6.10 kernel package, and several other topics.

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Mandrakelinux Cooker Weekly News

The Cooker Weekly News for January 8, 2005 looks at the last month in Mandrakelinux development, including iso images for 10.1 Official, a cooker snapshot on ftp, and more.

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Ubuntu Traffic #16

Ubuntu Traffic #16 is out; it looks at the Matarò conference, support for non-free software, kernel security updates, and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 82

The DistroWatch Weekly for January 10, 2005 is out. "Welcome to this year's 2nd edition of DistroWatch Weekly! If you haven't had a chance to try out SUSE LINUX 9.2, now is your chance as the entire Professional edition is now available for download on a mirror site near you. We'll also talk about the new product line from MandrakeSoft and introduce ASP Linux as the featured distribution of the week. Enjoy!"

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Minor distribution updates

Bio-Linux 4 announced

Version 4 of the Bio-Linux distribution has been announced. "As of version 4.0, Bio-Linux is based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Bioinformatics-related customisations include the inclusion of a large number of bioinformatics programs and programming libraries, the addition of graphical menus for much of the bioinformatics software, and links from the desktop to key documentation and applications. The system also includes a comprehensive, categorised and searchable documentation system for bioinformatics software."

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FrazierWall No More

FrazierWall Linux has been removed from our Distributions list. For now the web site still exists with some reasons why Ken Frazier has decided to withdraw the distribution. (Thanks to Nigel Arnot)

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Gentoo for All the Unusual Reasons (Linux Journal)

Andrew Cowie writes about Gentoo Linux on production systems, on Linux Journal. "I have a confession to make. I use Gentoo Linux. My colleagues at the various Linux User Group meetings I attend think I'm nuts. Everyone knows that Gentoo is a source-based Linux distribution. Gentoo's reputation (in large measure pushed by the people who develop the distribution) is that it's for people who want super crazy optimizations, and it really is suitable only for those who use desktops. In truth, Gentoo is ideal for a whole bunch of other, unexpected, reasons. Much to my surprise, people actually are using Gentoo in production environments for these very reasons."

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Linux Netwosix One Year Later (LinuxSecurity.com)

LinuxSecurity.com has an article by Vincenzo Ciaglia about Linux Netwosix. "Linux Netwosix is a powerful and optimized Linux distribution for servers and Network Security related jobs. It can also be used for special operations such as penetration testing with its big collection of security oriented software and sources. It's a light distribution created for the requirements of every SysAdmin and it's very portable and highly configurable. Its philosophy is to give greater liberty for configuration to the SysAdmin. Only in this way he/she can configure a powerful and stable server machine. Linux Netwosix also has a powerful ports system (Nepote) similar to the xBSD systems but more flexible and usable."

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New Site For SUSE Beginners (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews introduces the new SUSEroot web site. "SUSEroot just went live, a site designed to help new SUSE Linux users get acquainted with their new operating system."

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Distribution reviews

My workstation OS: SUSE Professional (NewsForge)

NewsForge hears from a SUSE Linux enthusiast. "Long-time Linux users know that the kernel and most of the programs are the same across distributions, but different implementations vary in their hardware detection, default choices of basic software, package management system, availability of extra packages, third-party software, and bundled management tools. I was looking for a single distribution I could rely on as both a server and a desktop OS, and one that I could install and support remotely for clients and use at home for work and play. What I found was the powerful SUSE Professional."

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Product Review: Novell Linux Desktop heads to the office (Computerworld.au)

Computerworld.au looks at Novell Linux Desktop. "Is NLD ready for the corporate desktop? Our answer is a qualified yes. Handling routine office chores using Open Office for word processing, Evolution for e-mail and Firefox for Web browsing works great. However, connecting to Windows networks still needs some work to become seamless."

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SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional edition review (Linux Tips for Free)

Linux Tips for Free is mostly devoted to Mandrakelinux. This review of SUSE Linux 9.2 Pro also compares the SUSE release to Mandrakelinux 10.1. "I will naturally look at SUSE 9.2 from a Mandrakelinux point of view, due to my Linux experience. I will try to stay objective nonetheless. I have used SUSE 9.2 for over 5 weeks now, on this machine I have only booted to Mdk10.1OE a few times to compare some things (video playback with xine and mplayer and CPU load during such actions), other than that I have made it a point to get SUSE 9.2 to the same point of usability (the way I want to use it - strictly personal). I don't want to give away too much, but I'll say that I have no big trouble to use SUSE instead of Mdk, the differences can easily be handled if one invests a bit of time and effort. Naturally, one has to start by accepting that there are differences - which I will point out in detail as far as I have come across them and find them relevant."

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