[KLUG Members] Distro distro ...

[Bruce Smith]

> > Not being completely happy with Fedora because of a few annoying (but
> > minor) bugs, I started looking at other distributions.  I looked at and
> > rejected a few distros for a number of reasons (I'll discuss them on
> > advocacy if anyone is interested - not here), then I tried SuSE 9.0 ...
> 
> Yeah I would be interested in hearing what you have came up with the
> other distros.  I would also like to hear more on what you did not like
> about Fedora.  You may recall a I posted about a month ago asking about
> other distros as well.  

Feel free to reply to the advocacy list, I'll discuss details there.

> I broke down and decided to just continue with
> Fedora and so far so good.  The only thing that is bothering me is
> getting acpi working but I do not think it is a fedora thing that is
> more OE (operator error)

Fedora isn't too bad, but I'm used to Redhat.  Once I saw SuSE, I was
amazed how much better it was.
 
> > Now I'd like someone to talk me out of switching all of my Linux boxes
> > to SuSE.  Please help, it would save me a lot of time NOT to convert.
> > 
> > SuSE seems to be far ahead of Fedora/Redhat in a number of areas.  I
> > first noticed a lot of hardware support I've never seen before, like
> > Win-modems, TV Tuner cards, and ALSA configured sound cards, right from
> > the installer.
> > 
> > I also noticed more software features, like XFS, NTFS, encrypted
> > filesystems, answering machines, and more (like being able to setup
> > masquerading in the firewall setup). 
> 
> Is suse rpm based or at least rpm capable?  or does it use some other
> package system?

Yes, SuSE is RPM based.  I installed one RPM compiled for Redhat-9
(Firebird), and it installed and runs fine on SuSE 9.0.

> > To download updates, you don't need to register for an account or
> > anything like Redhat's "up2date" requires.  Just point it to a ftp
> > server or mirror and update.  You can even schedule automatic updates
> > from the same screen.
> Have you tried yum? The first time I tried Yum I was amazed as I
> installed a package that I was missing some dependencies well yum
> figured them all out and downloaded them as well.  It left me asking why
> did I not do this before.  How many times have you went to install an
> rpm and realized you need something else and that package need another
> package etc..  Well yum figures it all out. I have up2date configured as
> well on my fedora box where all I had to do was add some rpm
> repositories (ftp sites) and no need to register with RH.
> 
> I can share my .conf files if anyone is interested.

I haven't tried yum, but I've heard other good things about it too.

 - BS