On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 19:49, jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote:
On Wednesday 26 January 2005 8:42 pm, Doug McGarrett wrote:
At 10:19 PM 1/26/2005 +0000, Sean Rima wrote:
I am about to buy the Professional package but am concerned that 9.3 or 10.0 will come out in a month or two. Is this likely?
/snip/
No, it is not likely. SuSE s/w comes out at about 6 month intervals. Since the last release was in November 2004, the next will probably be May or June 2005. If you've been reading this list for a while, I should think you would not want 9.2 Pro, and if you could find 9.0, you would would buy it. I would!
--doug
well, that may well depend on what sort of things he needs, does it not? Ass long as I can remember the list is roughly divided into two camps, those of us who buy every upgrade and have no problems, and those who sometimes buy or at least download and install the new version and often spend eons bitching and moaning that somehow SUSE is out to get them "just to make money" . Although I should imagine the goal of any commercial company is to make a profit ( money ) Generally, what you hear/read on the list after we earlly adopters have had our innings, is more and more of the other group , who jump into each question about upgrades to basically say no, and never !! It doesn't change, no matter the majority have few or no problems, research on the site would make most folks wonder why anyone would have ever bought/used ANY SUSE product since, uhm, maybe 6.5 ???? :)
If you want or need any or all of the new items in the 2.6 kernal, and don't want to or need to "roll your own" 9.2 is your baby.. because it is the default install. There are large improvements in multimedia handling, and the handling of things like, "I'm thru w/ the CD now, eject it dammit!! And you can often spend hours during which time the computer will tell you it's too busy using the CD in question!! OR your (flash) card reader may exhibit similar tendencies and you can't change the thing for days. That no longer happens w/ 9.2 . There is much better recognition of hardware, even if, on occassion the OS isn't certain what to do about some card or other.
Generally speaking, most folks have either had uneventful or suprisingly easy installs. At least the ones I've been responsable for . Including my Kid who is in the middle of the country w/ a damaged computer from that company that puts cow prints on it's boxes.. er, cartons. The computer was hit by a lightning strike, and ever since can't boot from a cd.. However, it boots from a floppy and that tells it to go look for the install stuff on the cd..
As for the company that sold her the computer. They won't even discuss any problems she might have until and unless she puts W2k back on the box. Since "that was how we sold it" No wonder windows users don't buy upgrades, or even consider changing OSes..
For her Windows partition, she has gone back to 98 as neither W2k nor Xp want to run.. and her hubby needs to use a windows PC to do his homework.. ( Yet another school/company etc. that refuses to recognize that none of those systems are secure at all, and especially when they insist work be done only thru ( wait for it...) I.E. for , "Security" reasons... I think her husband hates Windows so much once he is thru or they get a new box, he wants to deep6 all windows partition.. Tho they have "dialup" and have had repeted problems getting it to connect properly in linux. The latest escapade has something to do w/ wvdial AND kinternet both dialing also when the other one does, and they they both want to send the logon and pwd... and they get hung up upon as the ISP believes they are trying to make multiple connections. <sigh>
So far, between our long phone calls where we just go thru every possible location to find where these things are finding the instructions to both send whenever one dials, rather than one or the other doing it... ( It's one of those times when neither of us is certain which or what question to ask )
But even w/ a completely bolloxed box, all her family prefer to work in the Suse linux 9.2 version... They all like it better than any of the Windows stuff they have tried. Which is saying something, when you consider teen aged kids who want to be "cool" also live in that house. <VBG>
I found this thread interesting and informative and perhaps my experience would be useful to others. I have a laptop and desktop at home and tried installing 9.2 on both. On both I had multiple problems, so much so that I gave up on 9.2. But I had seen so many positive comments on the list that I went ahead and installed 9.2 on four other desktops of friends of mine. All of those installations went very smoothly (except for two winmodems and having to play with the monitor resulutions on two). But all of my friends are extremely happy with it, like it much better than previous distros I had installed on their machines and they find it easiest to use! So I went back and tried to figure out why I had so many problems. It turns out I have two hardware problems on my laptop, one partition has errors that I can't seem to fix or trace (still working on it) and my CD-Rom drive is also faulty, I have to take the laptop for servicing. The Desktop I can't figure out yet, but 9.1 seems to install and run fine on it (on the partition 9.2 failed). I'm fairly convinced now that it is not 9.2 that is the problem there, but some hardware issue. Which brings me to something I've noticed often. I'm not saying this is always the case, but it seems most often when people on this list have had problems with 9.2 it has been related to some hardware issue. Just my opinion. Gustav Degreef.