SuSE 9.2 Professional
- November 22, 2004
- 2 comments
I recently installed SuSE 9.2 Professional on my PC. SuSE 9.1 was a very nice Linux distro, and luckily Novell hasn’t messed that up with their release of 9.2. In fact, they’ve made it even nicer. I like the way it looks better than XP! Of course, that’s not saying much.
The installer looks pretty much the same except for a new vertical progress bar that shows how much is left to do. Installation was easy and relatively quick considering I installed over 3 GB of stuff. I changed a couple settings, created a user and was ready to go!
Novell has made SuSE look more professional with this release. The splash screen is MUCH nicer than the last version. Crisper, cleaner and uh… more professional. They still have their ugly SuSE window theme on by default, but it’s easy to switch to Thin-Keramik or Plastik.
KDE 3.3 is the default environment and looks pretty much the same as it did in SuSE 9.1 except for a couple things. The first is that the huge icon spacing that plagued the earlier versions of KDE 3.3 has now been fixed. Icons are spaced in a much more pleasant grid now. There are a couple other small changes, but the major one I’ve noticed is that you can now mess with window transparency in the KDE control center. SuSE 9.2 now uses X.org as their default window server which allows for eye candy like true transparency and shadows. I had to do some research into how to edit the xorg.conf file to get this to work right, but once I got it working, things looked really nice. You can see a screenshot below.
The one thing I had trouble with was getting the stupid nVidia graphics driver to install properly. Instructions for installing it were easier than previous versions, but SaX2 would always crap out on me if I tried to initialize with the nVidia driver. I eventually got it working by using the older, more complicated instructions for previous drivers, so now I’ve got 3D support and accelerated graphics. I’m not sure why it gave me a hard time with 9.2. It was a piece of cake in 9.1.
Other than that, I haven’t had any problems. SuSE saw my Macs on the first try and easily connected to them through Samba. My Macs can see the SuSE machine and connect without any problems. USB thumb drives show up and automount, just like in XP and OS X. I can even get to my Windows partition easily in SuSE since there’s a drive icon for it sitting on my desktop.
Overall, I’m impressed with 9.2. It’s still my favorite Linux distro and I’ll probably end up using it more than XP. It still doesn’t compare to the ease-of-use and sheer beauty of OS X, but it is getting MUCH better than it used to be.
HI Dave, I can’t remember what changes I made to the Xorg.conf file. I can tell you that even after I made the changes, the drop shadows worked only part of the time. After a minute or so, they would just stop working. I could never figure it out, so now I just leave it off. Hopefully all this will be worked out with the next release of X.
I did my research here: http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/. There’s a lot of good posts there and some very knowledgable guys. Good luck!
Could you elaborate on the changes required to xorg.conf in order to enable window drop shadows? Thanks!