SuSE 6.3: A First Look

by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview & AboutLinux
Copyright February 21, 2000
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Introduction

My last SuSE review was back on October 18, 1999 - since that time SuSE has significantly improved on their Linux offering. I received SuSE 6.3 some weeks ago; and I've finally had a chance to review it.

[Editor: I wish to thank SuSE for supplying a review copy of SuSE 6.3]

The front of the retail box highlights the availability of the new graphical installer and that SuSE includes 1,500 applications for Internet, networking, graphics etc.

The right handed spine of the box briefly explains what Linux is, and lists the hardware requirements (32Mb minimum with GUI, 486DX and above, 120Mb-6Gb disk space). For a GUI workstation I would suggest a minimum of Pentium-90 with 64Mb and 1Gb of disk - KDE and Gnome are certainly user friendly, but they significantly increase resource (particularly memory) utilization.

My test system (Athlon 500 / 128Mb / 10Gb) just flew...

I liked the lists of supported SCSI / RAID / Parallel / Video devices, and I was particularly impressed with the list of unsupported video cards - that was definitely a nice touch.

The back of the box showed a nice KDE screen shot, a positive quote from Linux Journal, and that SuSE was voted the "Best System Software" at the March '99 LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose. The new YaST2 installation tool is (justifiably) touted as a major new feature, as is the revised manual and installation support. Mention is made of hardware 3D accelerated support for 3dfx, Matrox and nVidia.

A fair sampling of the included software packages is also listed on the back of the package.

NEXT: Test System Configuration

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Edited by
William Henning
Copyright Aug 11/99

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