thelinuxlink.net

On Sunday I took a look at a danish online store which is selling Linux related products and the enterprise products from Red Hat and SUSE, I noticed that the retail version of SUSE Linux 10.0 was on sale (half the price), mainly because 10.1 is coming out next month so they need to clear out the remaining 10.0 boxes. Since it was only half the price I thought "What the heck" and went ahead a bought it to see what the retail version of SUSE Linux is like, I got it in the mail today, and damn this is nice!

In the box you get:
5 CDs (32-bit)
1 DVD (32-bit + 64-bit)
1 Manual
90 days of installation support

Let me tell you something, I'd go so far and call the included manual a smaller book, it's at 276 pages of well wriiten, easy-to-understand introductionary documentation, it walks the user all the way through the very easy installation process and all the way to using Firefox or Konqueror to browse the web, downloading stuff with KGet, protecting passwords with KWallet and introduction to KDE and GNOME.

All this talk is of course very boring so I borrowed my sister's camera took some pictures of the package: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16276474@N ... 082184172/
I'm not exactly Jes Hall when it comes to photography, but I think I did OK considering this was actually my real first try with a digital camera.

I remember when I first started with Linux in 2001/2002 I bought the packaged versions of SuSE Professional 7.3, 8.0, and 8.1 and in those days they included stickers for your computer box, which I thought was cool. Are the stickers still included?

I also remember that in those sets there were 2 manuals -- a user's manual and an administrator's manual. The users manual was usually like 300 pages but the admin manual was much larger, like 800 pages or something, but it does not sound like they do that any more.

SuSE always knew how to package a nice product.

Chess wrote:I remember when I first started with Linux in 2001/2002 I bought the packaged versions of SuSE Professional 7.3, 8.0, and 8.1 and in those days they included stickers for your computer box, which I thought was cool. Are the stickers still included?

I have a 9.1 Personal box, which I got from a guy on a danish Linux forum and that one had a sticker included, I havn't noticed any in the 10.0 package.

Chess wrote:I also remember that in those sets there were 2 manuals -- a user's manual and an administrator's manual. The users manual was usually like 300 pages but the admin manual was much larger, like 800 pages or something, but it does not sound like they do that any more.

Well, when you bought the SUSE products, you bought the "Professional" version right? There is no longer a "SUSE Linux Professional", the last version of a "Professional" was 9.3, so the thing you can buy today is more of a consumer products, which is probably why they don't include a so to speak "administrator manual". SUSE doesn't have a "Personal" product either, today there is only "SUSE Linux 10.0", and then you have Novell's enterprise products such as "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server", the upcoming "SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop".......

Chess wrote:SuSE always knew how to package a nice product.

Yes indeed, I'd really like to see a newbie go to Fry's (I seem to remember that they sell the retail version of SUSE), pick up SUSE and go home and use it.
'ey Chess, you should mention this on Linux Reality, SUSE delivers a fantastic retail product, and these days it's really cheap, just about 60 bucks.
Of coure, as I've said before, you can always go to opensuse.org and downlaod the "Evaluation edition" which is the full retail version, without support, manual, but with a bad/discouraging title
It's going to be a little different with 10.1, not completely sure though.

something about having the retail version.

I still buy suse every now and then just to support them and see what they are up to

I might buy it when 10.1 comes out -

I use to run it all the time and got some of best uptimes with it - like years.

I still like what suse does with their kernels they seem really stable.

Tsuroerusu wrote:'ey Chess, you should mention this on Linux Reality, SUSE delivers a fantastic retail product, and these days it's really cheap, just about 60 bucks. Of coure, as I've said before, you can always go to opensuse.org and downlaod the "Evaluation edition" which is the full retail version, without support, manual, but with a bad/discouraging title

It's going to be a little different with 10.1, not completely sure though.

Oh, I will, don't worry.

jsusanka wrote:something about having the retail version.

I still buy suse every now and then just to support them and see what they are up to

I might buy it when 10.1 comes out -

I use to run it all the time and got some of best uptimes with it - like years.

I still like what suse does with their kernels they seem really stable.

Unlike Red Hat, SUSE hasn't discontinued their consumer product and I think that by opening the development process, Novell has made it even better. Speaking of SUSE's kernel, if I say CGL2.0 and EAL4+ certifications, I think you'll know why you got those good uptimes

10.1 looks like it's gonna be very cool, there will be a brand new KDE frontend for Beagle, so you'll have good integrated desktop search on both KDE and GNOME, the package manager has seen HUGE changes and of course, a lot of bugfixes, more polish here and there, and I think they're also gonna have an automated system for installing ATi's proprietary driver, SUSE already makes it so easy to install NVIDIA's driver, you just check a box during the online update process and wait a few minutes and there you go, they're gonna have a similar system for ATi pretty soon.
Also, SUSE 10.1 might be a very good option for laptops, NetworkManager has been fully integrated into the distribution, and there's of course also a KDE frontend for that, which supports WPA wireless encryption, VPN connections and good stuff like that. XGL might even been there, but I'm not sure about that.

I have bought one version of suse ever since 6.4 so that means I still have a version of 7.x 8.x and 9.x

I have now tried 10.0 and it is the best suse so far. it does seem snappier - don't know if it is kde or just suse in general.

I still keep the manuals from the previous versions - they have some good general unix stuff in them and I still go and look at them every now and then. their manuals are the best.

so now you have me convinced that when 10.1 comes out I will go buy and support suse and probably put it on my amd64 machine.

jsusanka wrote:so now you have me convinced that when 10.1 comes out I will go buy and support suse and probably put it on my amd64 machine.

Well I'd be interested to hear about your experiences with it, personally I really look forward to it, they have now very nice new theming and of course the desktop search. By the way, Beagle does have hooks for KMail, Kopete and Konqueror's web history cache, so it sounds like Beagle will be a nice desktop search until we see KDE 4.0 with it's Tenor stuff. Also support for for the RSS feed reader, Akregator, Kontact and Konversation should be underway for Beagle, so it looks to become a very capable desktop search application.