S.u.S.E. 9.2 Professional

One of the things on my wishlist was S.u.S.E. 9.2 Professional. It was, of course, in the very last box I opened.

My initial impression was that it was very impressive. The installation looks much more attractive than previous versions. The Professional edition comes with 2 DVD's (1 is source), and 5 CD's.

I installed from DVD. The only problem I've ran into is that my Lucent Winmodem doesn't seem to work. I had a few problems installing it in version 9.1, but the initial, 1st version of 9.1 detected the modem with no problems, so it's been a bit distressing that the driver seems to be getting worse, rather than better.

One pleasent surprise was that 9.2 was able to tell what "centimeters" setting I needed after I set my notebook to 1400x1050, something 9.1 didn't do. What this meant was that every time I booted 9.1 I got a message on the screen telling me the screen settings were not set completely. In 9.1 I had to guess the size, but 9.2 filled out the centimeters size for me after I selected the 1400x1050 resolution.

The user interface (UI) for the installer is much improved. KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.6 are new, as is extra Bluetooth and WLAN support, but I haven't had the chance to test the WLAN support yet. I was having "throttling" problems under 9.1 when on an 802.11b network, I haven't had the chance to see if it's fixed yet because I'm on dialup at home.

The box includes the 64-bit version, so when I finally move to the AMD64 for my desktop machine it will be supported.

Inside are 2 thick manuals. The User Guide surprised me by including a very informative chapter on ergonomics. My sweetheart bought me a computer chair for Christmas, a nice leather, air powered chair, which puts me at a nice height for working. I'll be working on the lighting and temperature conditions. I haven't had a chance to get to the Administration Guide which is more than double the size of the User guide, but it looks well written.

It could just be me but the desktop seems to look more crisp. (screen shots forthcoming) The fonts seem to be rendered better than old versions of S.u.S.E. Linux.

Despite the winmodem problem I'd still suggest that S.u.S.E. 9.2-Professional is a very worthwhile buy. It works well, has more software than I remember on mirror sites, and simply looks better.