For long hours now I was trying to get Netbeans 5.5 Enterprise Pack Beta installed on my SuSE 10.1 X64 box. I had problems all over the place. First of all, the Sun Java Application Server does not work under a 64 bit JDK (not SuSE's fault of course) so I removed the 64 bit version and installed the 32 bit. All were SuSE packages. Still no go. The installer would not even recognize the JDK. Something in the SuSE installation makes it non-standard somehow. After struggling with it for a while, I gave up, removed SuSE's version and installed the latest JDK from Sun. I also created an alternative so I can change between versions. Now the application server installs and runs just fine. Problem number 2: Clicking on any link or help from within Netbeans did nothing. Checked the settings for firefox in NB and all looked fine. Again, after struggling with the problem for a while I installed the latest firefox which I downloaded from mozilla and now everything works fine. BTW, I am also running other distributions and they don't have all these problems. So now back to my question. Why does SuSE tweak packages so much that they break interoperability between different programs? Avi