Okay, so I'm installing SuSE Linux for the first time since SuSE 5.1. Here's what's happened so far: I have a spare 2gb SCSI drive on my machine at work for evaluating new distributions, so I installed SuSE there first. I first accidentally told it to install "Everything". "Everything" is close to 4gb of stuff! So I then told it to install "Regular". This was still over 2gb of stuff, or maybe it just didn't un-mark the stuff that "Everything" had marked? So I went through the package listings and pared it down to about 1.5gb of stuff. Unlike the last time I installed SuSE, I had no problems this time. The install was fairly intuitive, and did not drop me down into German like it did the last time (SuSE 5.1). I can still spot the Slackware heritage in the way some of the menus are laid out, but most of that has been smoothed out. The only problem I had was configuring the "X" server. I have a Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro in my machine at work, which was properly detected by SuSE's new "X" probing program which started up the proper XFB_Gloria server, but then the actual "X" configuration program complained that XFB_glint was not installed and refused to configure it. I eventually ended up setting the link by hand and using xf86config to set up a config file. Apparently this was a victim of the changing names of the Glint/Gloria server. Once I got it set up, I tried "startx" and it dumped me into KDE. No big deal. --- Part 2: Home. Fresh from that success, I headed home with an 8gb hard drive, figuring I couldn't fill that up as easily as the 2 gigger. I am impressed by the wide variety of software included with SuSE Linux, especially by some of the demo commercial software (e.g., my brother, a CAD operator, would be very interested in the board layout program on one of these disks). The biggest problem is picking and choosing! I currently have about 3gb of software installed on that 8gb hard drive. One thing I found out was that "yast" does not retry when it fails to mount a CD-ROM. My antique Plextor SCSI CD-ROM drive takes forever to detect that I have put a new disk into it, and one time I hit the "Enter" key when the CD-ROM was not in fact ready. "yast" aborted the whole install. Luckily it resumed where it left off when I restarted the install. I used "kppp" to set up my ISP connection, and here I am. --- Part 3: Questions. 1) What about PAM? I tried loading the "ssh" rpm from www.replay.com and it would not work. So I recompiled "ssh" from the tarball. What does SuSE use instead of PAM? Or is PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) there, but just not visible? 2) How come there's so many boot disks?! Just curious, because Red Hat somehow gets by with only one. Shades of Slackware! 3) How can I make apsfilter quit #$%@#@ duplexing my text?! I can't READ text that tiny! I want my text files to come out looking like normal text, not sideways and in teensy letters. 4) How can I make mail from "eric@england.local.net" be re-written as being mail from "el_green@bellsouth.net"? ("local.net" is my home network and "bellsouth.net" is my ISP). -- Eric Lee Green eric@linux-hw.com <A HREF="http://www.linux-hw.com/~eric"><A HREF="http://www.linux-hw.com/~eric</A">http://www.linux-hw.com/~eric</A</A>> "Linux represents a best-of-breed UNIX, that is trusted in mission critical applications..." -- internal Microsoft memo - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e