SuSE 9.3

An RPM-based Linux distribution that has recently been assimilated by Novell.

Good Points:

• YaST
• Utterly painless partition resizing for installation
• Graphical boot
• Comes with Gnome 2.10, Tomboy, Beagle and other Mono goodness.

Bad Points:

• Annoying default sound theme
• Ugly KDE icons in the Gnome menu and all over YaST
• Even uglier default cursor scheme (and no GUI to change it)
• Evolution 2.2 remains identical to its buggy self (the Exchange connector crashes, and requires a --force-shutdown)
• OpenOffice is still miles from usable
• For some moronic reason, the default Portuguese keyboard layout is "Eliminate dead keys" (changeable via gnome-settings but not via YaST)

Tested Hardware:

• Toshiba Portégé M100 - Toshiba audio, mouse and hotkeys just worked. The ipw2000 Wi-Fi card is appropriately detected and supported during install (but does get "cloned" after the initial reboot). Suspend to RAM failed once, but worked correctly after a reboot. Wi-Fi did not reconnect automatically, but that seems to be a matter of preferences. battery-applet thinks having two batteries means I'm on AC power

. As an added bonus, swapping the DVD drive for the extra battery pack hard froze the machine.

• apt for SuSE

# Suggested sources.list file
#
# This line for production servers:
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/9.3-i386 update security suse-projects rpmkeys

# Additional sources line for 'base' packages
# Uncomment once base component is available
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/9.3-i386 base

# Uncomment these components for desktop machines:
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/9.3-i386 packman packman-i686 usr-local-bin suser-jogley

# Mozilla component - uncomment for desktops if made available for 9.3
#rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/9.3-i386 mozilla