[Nottingham] Nice Things About Suse Linux

[James Ogley]

I'm afraid I can't make comment on distros other than SUSE, it's been
quite a while since I used anything else on a desktop...

> SUSE is very polished, and I don't doubt James's opinion that it is
> impeccably engineered. Minus points for me are that my USB key doesn't
> appear on the desktop when plugged in, and there seems no way to
> umount it. (Perhaps one is supposed just to pull it out after the
> light stops flashing?) 

Well, on 10.1 (sorry, don't have any older versions installed anywhere
these days), in GNOME when I plug my USB drive in, it's automounted
at /media/<Drive label> and it appears as an icon on my desktop.  I can
just yank it when there's no activity and it gets sync()ed correctly, or
I can play safe and right click on the icon and select Unmount.

> I find adding repositories through YAST a bit
> confusing, there seem so many of them and no clear guidance on which
> ones should be used.

Yes, that is a bit confusing, there's no doubt about that.  In a way
it's ironic that one of the plus points of SUSE (the proliferation of
third party community-provided repositories) can also act against it.
The way to tell I guess is to hang out with the community, on the lists
and IRC and see which ones are respected.  You'll find that the key ones
(in addition to ones provided by SUSE themselves) are PackMan, Guru and
usr-local-bin, but do also consider pretty well any that are listed at
http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories - having
looked through the list, they're all ones I am aware of even if I don't
use them all.  There's a cliche in the openSUSE community that the new
Build Service will be the solution to most things.  Certainly it's true
that there will be a certain level of trust and competence involved with
packagers being granted accounts there.  (http://software.opensuse.org)
-- 
James Ogley
james at usr-local-bin.org http://usr-local-bin.org
Packages for SUSE: http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms
Help end poverty: http://oxfam.org.uk/imin