Hey, I am a "regular consumer"! And Linux is my choice os. But i can not do cad in linux, the kind you can make a living on. ergo vmware. And when windoze craps all over itself, all i have to do is copy two-three large files, about 4-6 gigs, and i have an all new installation of os and apps! The other major advantage is that a vmware drive can be set to terminate in the "previous" state, thus keeping even a windoze os almost virus-free in the long run. my next vm project -when i get time- will be to load free bsd and learn on it while keeping my system 100% functional. and so on. Yea, it can take some time to set it up properly, but linux can be made stable even when the hardware is a bit off the "standard". The longest uptime i have seen in *any* windoze os is a couple of months. My first linux box, on a cyrix 386 that would crash 98 every 15 minutes, only rebooted 3x in 3 years, when power was cut off... for me vmware is a real time saver. and let's me keep my favorite os on 100% of the time. Dimitris On Monday 02 February 2004 07:05, Alex Angerhofer wrote:

...

... Good morning Alex & everyone else,

Thank you very much for your feedbacks.

One thing I'm learning from linux is that nothing comes easy and even with Suse v9.0 Pro I would have expected a better product by reading this thread and all the rest of the problems.

You have to go through hoops and loops and fine-tuning to make everything work. This is nosense since we pay for a product like Suse or Red Hat.

Why a regular consumer should go through a recompile of the kernel to make a $300.00 software work ?

Anyways I'll give it a last try if not I'll switch back to Windows since VMWare runs on every (almost) version of WIndows without recompiling source code or kernels.

Regards,

Luis

Hi Luis,

well, you know you don't have to recompile the kernel in this case, simply compile the modules which have been included in 9.0 in the form of sources. Regarding your critique of SuSE, RH, and other linux distros: It is certainly true that you have to make much more of an effort to make things work. On the other hand you also gain much more freedom to do your own thing, create your own computing environment, setting up your own servers, creating your own software. Linux may not be at the point yet to compete with windows when it comes to the "regular consumer" who only expects to point and click and have everything work. However, having been such a customer at one time I very quickly found myself landlocked by windows. Trying to develop my own applications meant shelling out big bucks for compilers, trying to buy commercial packages for what I wanted to do (scientific data analysis) also meant paying big bucks and in the end having to live with whatever the particular programer thought his clients wanted... In the end for me linux was the right choice because I already knew UNIX, and because I needed the freedom to create my own software and/or to modify existing software. Having said that, I have to admit that I liked previous versions of SuSE better than 9.0. My first impression is that the games section has grown to epic proportions while the number of useful applications has shrunk quite a bit, with some applications like emacs or LaTeX even relegated to the "experienced user" corner and not even included in the default install. My gripe with 9.0 is also that it looks like quite a number of things are broken for no good reason, like k3b, or in this case vmware. However, what makes SuSE worthwhile for me is the ease of administering it with YaST. At this point I am pretty much hooked on it, and hope that it will be extended to include a lot more services. Things I'd like to see in YaST are: tripwire, ntp server, ftp server, apt, and perhaps a couple of more that I can't think of at the moment.

Best regards, Alex.