Suse Linux 9 Gripes

NOTE: The web page below is as of early 2004. Novell now owns the SUSE Linux distribution and there is no longer a free version of SUSE Linux. However, it has been replaced by openSUSE. December 2, 2008.

Linux, like Windows, is normally installed from a CD to a hard disk from where it runs. Many flavors of Linux however, can run totally and completely from a CD. Suse calls their CD only based edition, Live Evaluation. The gripes below are based on version 9 of the Suse Live Evaluation CD from October 2003.

FYI: In some circumstances, running Suse Linux on a CD might create files on your hard disk. This is explained in the documentation. Other CD based versions of Linux promise never to write anything at all to your hard disk. 

Will it work on your computer? I could not find any system requirements anywhere. 

IBM Intellistation

January 20, 2004. I ran Suse on an IBM Intellistation computer with a Pentium III, 128 MB of ram and a single FAT32 partition. It failed to boot three times. The computer is capable of booting from a CD, in fact Lindows booted and ran from a CD on this computer. The CD in question was fine, it booted Suse Linux in another computer. Even worse, booting from the Suse CD screwed up the computer to the point that the CD tray would not open. Three times I had to take an unfurled paper clip and stick in the emergency hole in the CD drive to get it to open.  

Dell PowerEdge Server 

January 20, 2004. I ran the Suse Linux CD on a Dell PowerEdge with a Celeron 1.2 GHz and 640 MB of ram. 

It didn't boot up. It started to boot, but soon the monitor displayed an error: "cannot display this video mode". Of course, Suse has no documentation on the system requirements to run their Linux from a CD. 

After rebooting, I gambled on the F2 key. The boot screen has the numbers 1280x1024 next to the letters "F2" so I guessed this had something to do with video resolutions. It did. Pressing F2 lets you change the video resolution. After lowering it, the system booted and ran. 

During the boot process you are asked if you want to create a swap file. I said no. The next thing displayed is a message saying that it is creating a 100 MB swap file.

Further along the boot process, there was an error message that something could not be opened. It went by so quickly however, that I couldn't read it.  

There was a C disk and an E disk on the desktop. However, Suse could not open either one because they are NTFS formatted partitions and it can't read the NTFS file system. The computer also has a FAT32 partition, but there was no drive letter for it on the desktop. 

It created four files, totaling 202 MB on the FAT32 partition. Since there was no drive letter for this partition, I didn't realize this until booting Windows on the machine. One of the files is suselive.txt and it says: 

  contains data for your SuSE Linux 9.0 LiveEval CD.
  suselive.swp (if it exists) is the swap file.
  suselive.usr (if it exists) is an ext2 file system with the user's home dir.

There was also a suselive.swp file of 100 MB. There was a suselive.usr file of 100 MB. And finally, there was a suselive.900 file of 3 MB. According to the readme.txt file on the SuSE FTP server, there should not have been a suselive.swp file. The readme says: 

    The installation program will look for free space on your first hard drive ('C:') and create these files:
  suselive.swp: a swap file; only if you have less than about 160MB main memory

The machine had 640 MB of ram, yet the swap file was created. 

The simplest thing, displaying the date and time was a hassle. There is no option to display dates in month-day-year format. Suse is a German company and no one in Germany must want the month to be displayed before the day. I do. 

Like Windows, the time is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Windows displays it as HH:MM AM/PM, a format I like and have gotten used to. Suse Linux can not do this. I'm not sure what time it was displaying at first. When the time on the East coast of the US was 9:57 PM, Suse Linux displayed 13:57. I changed the time zone to Eastern Time in the US but it had no effect on the display. I changed the time from UTC to local and the screen went black for more than a few seconds. When it came back, the time displayed was 18:57. At this point, the date/time application says that it is 21:57, but the time displayed on the desktop is still 18:57.  I told it to show the time zone and this resulted in displaying 21:57 on the desktop. That's the closest I could come to my preferred format. If you would rather see 9:57 PM, the answer seems to be tough luck.  

Another simple thing, determining the screen resolution and refresh rate, was impossible (at least for me). I clicked everywhere I could think to click and could not learn the current screen resolution, let alone the refresh rate, let alone change either one. In Lindows 4.5, this was easy, you right clicked on the desktop. The desktop configuration application in Suse Linux does not have any monitor/screen properties. So too the Control Center, which does not control the monitor. 

One reason I wanted to lower the screen resolution was that web pages looked fuzzy in both Mozilla 1.4 and Konqueror. In the old days, Linux was said to be bad with fonts. This seems to still be true. The text on web pages displayed miserably. Mozilla, is now at version 1.6. 

It wasn't clear if there was a firewall program included in the distribution or whether it was running by default. 

The system includes KDE 3.1 and, in my opinion, is not as Windows-user friendly as Lindows 4.5. 

When you're done, of course, you want to shut down the computer. There is no shutdown option off the Linux equivalent of the Start button - only a log out option. Turns out, that's where the shutdown function is.  

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FYI: There are two sides to the issue of SuSE Linux not being able to read NTFS partitions. On the one hand, if you have a copy of Windows that is broken to the point it can't start up, it would be nice to use Linux to read your files and copy them off the computer. On the other hand, if your computer has nothing but NTFS partitions, then SuSE Linux should not write any files at all to your hard disk making it safer to experiment with. I have not yet run it however, on a computer with only NTFS partitions.

FYI: This page from Frozen Tech has a long list of Linux Live CDs.

FYI: For very brief reviews of other Linux distributions that run from a CD see A Taste of Linux by Jim Lynch at ExtremeTech January 23, 2004 and A Taste of Linux, Part Two By Jim Lynch March 5, 2004. The articles do not, however, point out which distributions write to your hard disk and which do not.