Review of SuSE 8.1 Professional
Source: OS News
reaper: By Eugenia Loli-Queru
If there are two things in this apartment that I don't like, that would first be the dog upstairs which barks at 5 AM almost every morning, and the fact that UPS almost never deliver things on our door. They never bother to check if we are in. The SuSE people were very kind to send us the Professional version of SuSE 8.1, but unfortunately, I received it 10 days later after it arrived in the apartment's complex. But now we got it here, we gave it a spin for almost a week, and here is what we think about it.
Installation
I had a special partition waiting for SuSE 8.1 on my dual Celeron machine (2x533 Mhz, 256 MB SDRAM). SuSE 8.1 Professional comes in 7 CDs or 1 DVD. SuSE sent me the CD version, so I placed the first CD to my Matshita DVD-ROM (which has successfully loaded and installed more than 15 Linux distros during its time) but to my surprise, SuSE wouldn't load. It would read and read and read from the DVD-ROM, but it would not load the kernel or anything else. After about 1 minute of this behavior, the CD would revert the booting process to the boot manager of the machine instead. I tried it again and again, but always with the same effect. When I tried to load it to my husband's dual 450 PIII via its Plextor SCSI CD-RW it would load fine, a sign that the CD was not physically damaged. Searching at SuSE's knowledge base, I found that they have specific problems when loading from some DVD drives and they do not know yet the cause of the problem. It only seems to happen on SuSE though and not other distros. I had to find another machine to load it, so I decided to delete my QNX partition on this AthlonXP 1600+ and install it side by side to my Red Hat 8.
