Review: SUSE 9.0: A Distro Worth Paying ForReview: SUSE 9.0: A Distro Worth Paying For

The KDE vs GNOME battle has been going on for years: each has its sworn adherents. SUSE stays out of this religious battle by offering both interfaces. GNOME's critics consider it to be too simple, whereas KDE is more full-featured, but its critics think it's bloated and slow.

The KDE interface offers one true advantage, though: it feels more like Windows (even offering a "Start" button) and Windows refugees will feel more immediately at home, with a plethora of Windowy desktop features.

CD and DVD writing is part of the standard installation, as is some pretty sophisticated image processing and editing.

Minor problem: SUSE's idea of a typical installation may surprise you: more then a few packages needed to be checked "on" in the package installation area to get it to what may be considered a Power-User/Developer level. However, this should not be a problem for most users; non-developers will generally be satisfied with the default installation configuration.

An enhanced resource management system on the kernel gives great sound and video. The included MainActor5 gives great video editing, but it is a demo of a still-being-developed package expected to be priced at $200. The demo is fully functional but leaves a little watermark on video.

A wide selection of audio software rounds out the multimedia mix.

The software includes the instant messenger software Kopote, supporting AOL, MSN, IRC and ICQ instant messaging as well as Jabber clients.

The OS comes with bundled development tools, including a variety of C and C++ compilers, linkers, time synchronization utilities, a Sun Java compiler, a programming library and librarian utility and the newest distribution tool, rpm 4.1.1. The update notification lets you know of every update available, optionally installing them for you.

OpenOffice 1.1, included in the distro, is a pretty comprehensive office suite. With SUSE import/export filters and 1.1's MS Office compatibility (not quite 100%, but rapidly approaching), users will have the ability to create a file in .PDF (Portable Document Format), XML import and export capabilities, support for Macromedia Flash files, export ability for XHTML files, and a host of other features.

OpenOffice is no longer an Office wannabe, but a complete and complex suite of office products, including spreadsheets, presentation graphics, and database reading and writing. One particularly welcome feature is for OpenOffice to repair some purposely damaged files. We damaged a few files on purpose to test the software. OpenOffice took a licking and kept on ticking.

SUSE 9 includes desktop publishing software, Scribus 1.0, the ability to remotely administer an installation easily, and the GIMP 1.3 graphics editor.

SUSE comes with several web browsers and mail clients. It supports many TWAIN devices, including every digital camera we tried. OCR support on scans worked well at about 91%, far better than we expected.

SUSE 9 also has a line-up of web and networking tools: a full Apache web server with all installable and configurable modules, DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol for server assigned IP numbers), NIS, DNS, and NFS server and configuration modules.

Linux users are a gaming lot: no Linux distribution would be complete without multiple Chess and Checkers games, just as no Windows release would be caught dead without Solitaire, This Linux release includes some new games, including: adventure games, arcade games and games of 3D graphics with great sound. Use them with caution: they're quite addictive.

I'm getting my $90 worth on this superb package.

Ross M. Greenberg is a programmer, writer, consultant, and web page designer with experience in Linux, Unix and Windows. He started working on Unix-based systems in the early 1980s. Lately, he's been concentrating on PHP and ASP database programming.