[Discuss] SUSE looks good!

[John Blomfield]

Joan McIlmoyl Cleghorn wrote:
> Well John, this should probably be in the Newbie List, however, as my
> problem is all your fault<g>, I'm posting it here. You suggested that we try
> SUSE 10.3 so I promptly decided to d/l the Live CD to give it a try. I was
> pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was able to d/l the ISO as I've had
> some really bad experiences with 8 to 10 hours of d/ling...... Burned the
> disc and popped it in. Up it came and in an interesting shade of green
> (guys, don't even think of trying it the day after the night before<gggg>).
> I d/l'd the Gnome version btw. I think I might like it if only I could
> navigate properly in it.......it doesn't show my cursor!!! I can get my
> trackball to work provided I can figure out where it is (i.e., if an icon or
> button is suddenly highlighted). Mostly I had to use my keyboard to navigate
> which was less than workable in an unfamiliar environment.......so, does
> anyone know how I could get SUSE to give me back my cursor?<g> It's a
> Logitech Marble FX Trackball and I've never had a problem with several other
> Live CDs of different distros e.g. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PCLinuxOS,
> GenTOO.........
>
> 8-)
> Joan
>
>   
That's an interesting one - no cursor!  This has happened to me but not 
especially with SuSe, I have always blamed it on the fact that I have 
two computes that I use through a KVM switch and I have found 
occasionally the switch doesn't seem to connect with the mouse 
properly.  However, a simple re-boot has always fixed the problem.  Have 
you tried a re-boot or did you just shutdown in disgust!  I suppose its 
entirely possible that SuSe does not have a driver for your trackball 
but that I would say is extremely unlikely.

John


>   
>> Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:54:43 -0700
>> From: John Blomfield <jabfield at shaw.ca>
>> Subject: [Discuss] SUSE looks good!
>> To: discuss at vlug.org
>> Message-ID: <47E04833.8030808 at shaw.ca>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>
>> I have been installing a few distributions on an a spare computer that I
>> can use for a demo at the new BB&C Linux SIG and I cannot resist drawing
>> your attention to the SuSE 10.3 distro.  I don't normally try a lot of
>> different distros since I found Fedora suited most of my needs and once
>> you find out where everything is in a distro its too much like hard work
>> to keep changing.  But for the Linux SIG I thought I had better make the
>> effort and so far I have installed Debian, Ubuntu / Kubuntu, Fedora and
>> now SuSe.  I have one more empty partition to fill on my box and my
>> thought is to try Mandiva (but if I asked I am sure you all have your
>> favorite alternatives).  I have tried to stick to the major distros that
>> are well supported and maintained.  I prefer to try full installations
>> rather than just Live CD's since you can better see how they really do
>> stuff.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> So back to SuSe! The last time I used SuSe was five years ago and
>> release 8.2 (they don't seem to change their major release numbers
>> often, i.e 10.3 to 8.2 in five years!)  It is now unrecognizable from
>> those days and stuffed full of really useful GUI's for just about
>> everything.  Lots of systems info all nicely displayed with the standard
>> KDE desktop, no extra searching for the right packages to install.
>> Powerful configuration GUI's for hardware, servers and clients.  I have
>> always thought Fedora was good but SuSe I think is better.  The only
>> qualification I have so far is that some of the development packages are
>> not the latest stable releases, e.g. qt4.3.1 instead of qt4.3.3 but this
>> may be cautious quality control checking.  My bias is that I prefer KDE
>> to Gnome and SuSe supports KDE well (I haven't tried the SuSe Gnome
>> version yet).
>>
>> Try it!
>>
>> John Blomfield
>>
>>
>>
>>