[KLUG Advocacy] A quick SuSe 9.3 As A Workstation Review

[Adam Tauno Williams]

	My laptop cooked yet another power supply </grrrrrr>,  so I needed a
workstation up an running fast.  Fortunately I had new Dell DHP sitting
under my desk (aka folding table).  DHP is the nearest thing I can find
on this box to a model number (there is also a reference number 03152 if
that helps any Dell gurus).  This box has 1Gb of RAM, a single 2.8GHz
P4, and some crappy ATAPI hard drive.
	Install: Flawless,  I had to pick a No ACPI from the SuSe CD boot menu,
but after that everything just-worked.  It detected the sound, video,
USB, everthing.  Video came up in 1280x1024x24b (rather suprising), and
I clicked to enable 3D acceleration - that all just worked.
	Restore: I copied my files as well
as .evolution, .gnome2, .wine, .gnome2_private and the .gconf
directories from my laptop before the battery went ka-put.  I also
enabled beagle (via touch /home/awilliam/.runbeagle).  Then I logged
into GNOME.  
	Applications: Everything worked - evolution, firefox (with my old
bookmarks), and Open Office (which is a 2.0 beta by-the-way).  GAIM
connected to my Jabber server.  The installed version of WINE ran both
my NetTerm applications and Adobe Acrobat 6 without any nagging.  IE6sp1
loads and can open web pages, even Active-X intensive ones.  On our
Intranet we have a video library,  files from there loaded and played in
Windows Media Player 7 once I muted audio (since my WINE config has no
sound device).  WM7 also played "TheCave.WMV" movie trailer.  Once I
installed the 9.3  MPlayer RPMs that Bruce linked to video played in
Firefox as well, and the movie trailer played in the stand alone player.
Ripping from CD with the provided package seemed to work just fine,
albiet to Ogg instead of MP3.  TSClient connected to the Windows 2000
terminal server and browsing the CIFS network with Nautilus was *MUCH*
faster then before, and has yet to get into a prompt-for-password-loop.
The OOo 2.0 seems nice, but I haven't gotten into it much yet,  it seems
to open all my 1.0 files without incident (for whatever reason the JAVA
multimedia framework isn't included,  although JAVA and lots of JAVA
stuff is).  VMware 5 and DbVisualizer (a JAVA app) work without incident
as well.
	And this beagle thing?  Very cool,  could easily get used to this.  It
finds everything, AND *FAST*... Wooo Doggy!

	Best and easiest install yet;  total time, probably about 20 minutes,
and I'm back to real work.