On Monday 20 December 2004 02:10 pm, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

We've moved several of our central servers to SuSe 9.2. And beyond a few run-of-the-mill problems it has proven to be a good quality solution.

I have to agree. SuSe 9.2 has been the best Linux distro I've used. Looking back at the list archives for the past two years, it looks to me like there is a pretty good jump in activity around each new release. I don't see that this time, at least not yet. Could that mean that fewer people are having problems? Doug

Just my opinion, but out of the box the 9.2 is much better than 9.1. ).1 was slow up unitl version 2.6.x-105 was released (for i386). Version 9.2 is much better for performance (i am a j2ee developer on linux, so i can se performance gains...) Also, all the acpi related stuff worked out of the box on my aging Latitude c840, apart of course, from the non acpi aware nvidia linux drivers. So, acutally, i can say that form 8.0 on, 9.2 is the bes out of the box. Alle 21:55, lunedì 20 dicembre 2004, Steve Kratz ha scritto:

...

Looking back at the list archives for the past two years, it looks to me like there is a pretty good jump in activity around each new release. I don't see that this time, at least not yet. Could that mean that fewer people are having problems?

I'd generally agree with that-- other than then buggy acpi kernel 9.2 shipped with that caused some headaches with my laptop, and the "Only available on the damn DVD" issues, it's been pretty rock solid for me.

Steve

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On Monday 20 December 2004 22:55, Steve Kratz wrote:

...

Looking back at the list archives for the past two years, it looks to me like there is a pretty good jump in activity around each new release. I don't see that this time, at least not yet. Could that mean that fewer people are having problems?

I'd generally agree with that-- other than then buggy acpi kernel 9.2 shipped with that caused some headaches with my laptop, and the "Only available on the damn DVD" issues, it's been pretty rock solid for me.

Yes. I agree with you here. I have not had any stability problems with the SuSE 9.2 boxes I have built after I made them work. Everything I was complaining about is related to installation issues and broken init scripts. Once you get past these issues SuSE 9.2 is better than anything that came before it. I just hate to see these minor glitches ruin what could be an almost perfect user experience. (The broken freeradius init script is inexcusable! It means they modified it from the previously working one AND never bothered to test it!) Anyway I have a meeting with Novell today and will make my thoughts known :-) Cheers -- Peter Nixon http://www.peternixon.net/ PGP Key: http://www.peternixon.net/public.asc

It's the darn install problems, once installed, it's stable. If you catch this before your meeting, please see if you can get them to open their test releases or at least extend the number of people testing. I was supposed to be on the list, but was not included. Regards Sid.

That's one thing the Fedora releases have over SuSE- the public test releases... Most of the folks I know running SuSE Linux have at least one spare test machine they could sacrifce to the gods of stability... Steve

Peter wrote:

(The broken freeradius init script is inexcusable! It means they modified it from the previously working one AND never bothered to test it!)

These type of issues are the issues I was referring to with: "That inevitably leads to versions released before they are ready, containing small, but crippling bugs that causes newbies to just give up." Don't get me wrong, I remain a big fan of Suse. I can't through darts at 9.2 -- I haven't installed it -- yet. The original intent of my reply was simply to raise awareness of problems I have seen following corporate entrance into an open source project, and hoping upon hope that maybe someone in Novell may take it to heart to avoid similar problems with Suse. (please ignore the comma splice -- I couldn't resist) -- David C. Rankin, J.D., P.E. RANKIN * BERTIN, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 (936) 715-9333 (936) 715-9339 fax www.rankin-bertin.com -- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Nixon" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 1:18 AM Subject: [SLE] Re: Fw: SuSE 9.2 not quite fully cooked?

On Monday 20 December 2004 22:55, Steve Kratz wrote:

...

...

Looking back at the list archives for the past two years, it looks to me like there is a pretty good jump in activity around each new release. I don't see that this time, at least not yet. Could that mean that fewer people are having problems?

I'd generally agree with that-- other than then buggy acpi kernel 9.2 shipped with that caused some headaches with my laptop, and the "Only available on the damn DVD" issues, it's been pretty rock solid for me.

Yes. I agree with you here. I have not had any stability problems with the SuSE 9.2 boxes I have built after I made them work. Everything I was complaining about is related to installation issues and broken init scripts. Once you get past these issues SuSE 9.2 is better than anything that came before it. I just hate to see these minor glitches ruin what could be an almost perfect user experience. (The broken freeradius init script is inexcusable! It means they modified it from the previously working one AND never bothered to test it!)

Anyway I have a meeting with Novell today and will make my thoughts known :-)

Cheers

--

Peter Nixon http://www.peternixon.net/ PGP Key: http://www.peternixon.net/public.asc

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Doug B wrote:

On Monday 20 December 2004 02:10 pm, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

...

We've moved several of our central servers to SuSe 9.2. And beyond a few run-of-the-mill problems it has proven to be a good quality solution.

I have to agree. SuSe 9.2 has been the best Linux distro I've used.

Looking back at the list archives for the past two years, it looks to me like there is a pretty good jump in activity around each new release. I don't see that this time, at least not yet. Could that mean that fewer people are having problems?

Doug

This has definitely not been my experience as chronicled on this list. What has been surprising to me is the almost total lack of response to the problems I've been detailing such as phantom drives being listed, drives not being found, and apparently total inability to deal with ATAPI zip drives. At this point I'm looking into other distributions. Up through 9.0 I felt like SuSE was THE distribution to own, but I'm beginning to change my opinions more and more with each subsequent release since 9.0 dave -- David C. Johanson Linux Counter # 116410 Powered by SuSE Linux 7.3 People who behold a phenomenon will often extend their thinking beyond it; people who merely hear about the phenomenon will not be moved to think at all. -- Goethe

On Monday 20 December 2004 05:19 pm, David Johanson wrote:

This has definitely not been my experience as chronicled on this list. What has been surprising to me is the almost total lack of response to the problems I've been detailing such as phantom drives being listed, drives not being found, and apparently total inability to deal with ATAPI zip drives. At this point I'm looking into other distributions. Up through 9.0 I felt like SuSE was THE distribution to own, but I'm beginning to change my opinions more and more with each subsequent release since 9.0

I do have to agree on the zip drive thing. I still haven't looked into that. I rarely use the drive any more. Could it be there is a lack of response to your problems because so few are seeing them. For me, it's hard to solve a problem I haven't seen and can't reproduce. No OS is perfect. I've had my share of problems getting windows to install on some boxes. On this box (amd64, nforce, nvidia), I had to do a bios upgrade just to get 9.1 to install. Even then it was pretty unstable. 9.2 wasn't much better until I turned acpi off. Since then everything has been good... I hope it continues. I'm not married to Suse. It works for me. If it ever doesn't, I'll move on to what does. That's what I did when Red Hat went a direction I didn't like. To me that is part of the power of linux. Frankly, I kind of liked Gentoo, but Suse is giving me all I need at less of a learning curve so I'll stay a while. I'm sure you'll find what works best for you. Good luck Doug

On Monday 20 December 2004 9:52 pm, Linda A. W. wrote:

A great boon to the SuSE release process would be for an upgrade to be able to upgrade from multiple prior releases just as on Windows. With SuSE, if you miss 9.2 because it hoses your system, don't expect to be able to cleanly upgrade to 9.3 from 9.1.

You really can't 'cleanly' upgrade from 9.1 to 9.2. Too many things change. I know, I'm still sorting thru the mess on my box. After you 'upgrade', try a locate .rpmnew after your locatedb is rebuilt, you'll see what I mean. Scott -- POPFile, the OpenSource EMail Classifier http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ Linux 2.6.8-24.5-default x86_64

On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 09:30 -0500, BandiPat wrote:

On Tuesday 21 December 2004 12:52 am, Linda A. W. wrote:

...

A great boon to the SuSE release process would be for an upgrade to be able to upgrade from multiple prior releases just as on Windows. With SuSE, if you miss 9.2 because it hoses your system, don't expect to be able to cleanly upgrade to 9.3 from 9.1.

You have to go through each intermediate release no matter how bad they are and no matter how badly they may not work on your computer in order to be able to do the update/upgrade feature in Yast[2]. That's a major detraction for those who don't want to upgrade 3-4 times per year.

-linda ============

Linda, I'll have to disagree on a couple things in your mail. Upgrading any version of Windows to another version is haphazard at best! As unstable as it is in one form, it will become even more so by updating. You'll always get a better setup with a fresh install.

I've updated two 9.0 systems and two 9.1 systems with SuSE 9.2 and am happy to say all went well. Those folks are happily working away on their 9.2 systems now. I do, as most here will confirm also, prefer to fresh install, if the versions are very far apart. 8.x to 9.2, try updating, but fresh install recommended. 7.x to 9.2? Absolutely a new install, because of the many changes that have occurred. Part of the problem I think most people see are the strength & weakness of Linux. It's great because the programs, etc. are constantly updated, improved. It can be frustrating, because the programs, etc are constantly updated, improved. ;o)

regards, Lee

-- --- KMail v1.7.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.2 --- Registered Linux User #225206 "Don't let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game!"

I have to agree with Lee; I have always done a fresh install with my win release ugrades. They never work properly if done as upgrade install. If you regularly back up your data you should not have a problem with a fresh install.Rather it should be quicker ( as no extra hassles after install) and cleaner as it wipes out any traces of problems that may be gestating within your system.( rather like in Alien). At least with Suse you can by an upgrade version without having to have the full previous version and still do a completly cleean install. Chris linux user 375231.

On Monday 20 December 2004 06:11 pm, Doug B wrote:

On Monday 20 December 2004 05:19 pm, David Johanson wrote:

...

This has definitely not been my experience as chronicled on this list. What has been surprising to me is the almost total lack of response to the problems I've been detailing such as phantom drives being listed, drives not being found, and apparently total inability to deal with ATAPI zip drives. At this point I'm looking into other distributions. Up through 9.0 I felt like SuSE was THE distribution to own, but I'm beginning to change my opinions more and more with each subsequent release since 9.0

I do have to agree on the zip drive thing. I still haven't looked into that. I rarely use the drive any more.

I finally got around to looking into this. With the old way of do this , the fstab entry looked like: /dev/hdb4 /media/zip vfat user,defaults 0 0 Well, there is no /dev/hdb4 on this machine. every /dev/hdx had a fourth partition expect the one my zip was hung on. I tried create the device, but no luck. Finally I tried /dev/hdb (no partition number) in fstab: /dev/hdb /media/zip vfat user,defaults 0 0 I can now read the disk just fine. It has not been repartitioned or formated. They are the same files on the same partition as when the drive was in a 9.1 box using /dev/hdb4 (actually hdd4 on that other box.) I still think a lot of the flack distros are taking can be traced back to kernel development. Without a 2.7 testing/development branch, things move into the 2.6 kernel too quickly. Have fun! Doug