2002.05_Suse 8.0 Explored.pdf

FEATURE

SuSE 8.0

A reason to celebrate

S uSE has introduced

The new release of

SuSE 8.0 has finally

arrived to the great

relief of the

developers involved

and to the excitement

of the end users and

SuSE fans alike.

Richard Ibbotson

gives us a hands-on

view of the new

distro

some major new

innovations into its

Professional and Personal

versions of SuSE 8.0, which

means that it’s well worth

having a look at it. From

when you first open up their

glossy and well thought out

manuals to the finish when

you begin to click on the

mouse and ooh and ah at the excellent and highly

stable desktop you can be fairly certain that you

are onto a good thing.

The desktop users have got the latest and greatest

in the shape of KDE 3.0, GNOME 1.4, XFCE 3.8,

Windowmaker 0.80.0 and Enlightenment, as well as

several other minimalist and lightweight desktops.

You can also mix and match these to great effect and

make any or all of them suit your own personal

tastes. There are many universities and Government

departments out there using these desktops to good

effect. In recent times there are even commercial

organisations using the Linux desktops rather than

other products.

After booting from the floppy boot disk or the first

CD you will be presented with several screens that

will ask you about resizing your Windows partition.

You are not committed to the

final size of the partition until you

are presented with a screen that

will tell you that your partition will

be re-sized. The installation

process has been simplified quite

a bit, whether it’s for the

straightforward SuSE Linux

installation or whether you do in

fact need a dual boot machine.

After placing the first CD in the

computer, the installer will check all of the hardware

on your system and find things like CD-RWs or LS120

drives, as well as floppy drives and all of your other

hardware. It will then take you through an easy to

understand graphical installation process, which will

ask you questions and give you a few choices about

what it is that you want to do with your newly

installed machine. Boot configuration is sorted out

for you for the next time you start the machine. The

Xwindows configuration should be a trivial part of

the installation process.

Providing your graphics card and monitor are not

much more than two years old everything should be

fine, though many people have found that older

hardware works just as well. If you do have problems

consult people on one of the many LUG discussion

Installation

If you do need to dual boot a Linux partition with a

Windows one, then that’s very easy to configure at

the time that you run the SuSE Linux installation.

SuSE 8.0 welcome screen

Taking control of multimedia

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 20 • 2001

FEATURE

lists or ask for some help from the SuSE support

department. Basic configuration is part of the 60 or

90-day support scheme, which comes with every box

of the software. The test machine that was used with

the SuSE 8.0 software presented no problems at all

for automatic configuration of a workstation and that

was with a very much out of date Belinea monitor

which would probably look much better sitting on a

scrap heap than on a test bench.

YaST2 for

your PDA

SuSE Linux

does have a

great choice

of desktop

applications

Applications

As is always the case, SuSE Linux does have a great

choice of desktop applications. This includes many

feature-rich wordprocessors, all of them Free, as well

as organisers, email applications and a bewildering

array of Web browsers, which quite simply leave the

Microsoft stuff firmly in the last century.

OpenOffice.org has now been included into the

SuSE distribution. In time it will probably replace the

present Star Office 5.2 due to the licensing conditions

that affect Star Office 6.0. Other word processors are

of course present, such as Kword 1.1.1. This can save

in a variety of formats such as RTF, Abiword and one

or two others. If you’re a Palm Pilot or Handspring

fan then you might like to have a look at the latest

version of Abiword. Not only does it do your normal

run of the mill MS Word documents but it will also

handle HTML and TeX and most important of all it

will save with the Palm extension on any document

so that you can use Jpilot or Kpilot to transfer your

documents over to your PDA for the next day’s

business or pleasure. There is a free version of

Abiword for Windows that you can download from

the Net.

There’s also all of the expected Postscript and PDF

utilities that will enable to you to produce those top

class documents that people look at more than once.

It’s great to know that Postscript is still used and will

be in use for a long time to come. You can use the

above for Web pages or, if you aren’t a highly trained

TeX person, you can use something like Mozilla

Composer to write a graphical Web page and then

finish off with Quanta+ by hacking the code. There

are other HTML authoring tools on the CDs – it’s best

to have a look at them to find out what’s there.

with anything else you are in for a few surprises with

the new desktops that are around just now. Kmail is

probably a good replacement for Eudora. Evolution

1.0.2 – that long-promised Outlook clone and PIM –

is also now a part of SuSE 8.0. Other mailers that you

can use include Balsa and Spruce, which are GUI-

based applications that are easy to use. If you are a

traditional Unix user you can of course use something

like Pine or Mutt to do all of those things that you

would have done on another platform.

The development tools are all there for the aspiring

programmer or hacker, who

wants to either develop

some software or just

experiment with some ideas

that might not work out.

Tools like automake and the

GCC compiler are present.

There is also the IBM Java

development tools and C++

compilers and many other

tools. Glade and Anjunta

provide for GNOME

development on the desktop

and Kdevelop for the KDE people. There is also a free

version of Kylix for anyone who wants to risk such an

adventure.

For the purposes of leisure, or perhaps even for

day-to-day use at work, there are tools for digital

photography or listening to music or mixing it at the

time of recording or you can watch your favourite

DVDs or TV programmes on your computer. Listening

to music from CD or MP3 is something of a joy when

using Alsa sound tools and a good set of speakers.

WindowMaker

desktop

Internet tools

The wonderful array of text processing tools is

backed up by the Internet-based tools. The Web

browsers that are included are Mozilla 0.98 which

also has Mozilla mail and Mozilla Composer for

producing Web pages; Opera, which is small and

light when compared with the others; Konqueror

which is very popular just now; Galeon for the

GNOME fans and several others. If you are a bit old

fashioned then you can always use Netscape and

Netscape mail. Speaking of mail applications. If you

are a Eudora or Outlook person and you can’t cope

Server-side up

If you want a server rather than a desktop

workstation or notebook installation then SuSE Linux

does have NFS and NIS server software built in, as

well as DNS software and the various bits and pieces

of security software that are normally associated with

servers. If you want a Samba server, version 2.23a is

the one that comes with the CDs. This will allow you

to set up shares on a Linux computer so that it

servers files to a local network or to a remote

Issue 20 • 2001

LINUX MAGAZINE

FEATURE

XFCE

running

Get hold of

the SuSE 8.0

Professional

version

network with SSL security protocols. This gives you a

rock solid server that your MS Windows computers

can connect to.

For a reliable mail server that also has a spam filter

and virus scanner, you’ll need to get hold of the SuSE

8.0 Professional version, which can build a mail server

with an MTA such as Sendmail or Postfix. Both of

these are well understood and they also come with a

virus scanner (Amavis) built-in. If you don’t want to

use Amavis there are many other Linux-based virus

scanners out there, such as Sophos or the Trendmicro

ones that you will have to pay for.

There are many thousands of Apache Web

servers out there on the Net, all of which are

maintained by an army of technicians and system

administrators. The SuSE distribution has a wealth

of information about Apache and how to configure

it. There is also a good choice of Apache modules

and plenty of support for this application can be

found from the SuSE list and through pay for

professional services. The Apache configuration

tool, Comanche, is also included.

Memory info from the control centre

package is what you want to install. If you are also a

Debian GNU/Linux fan you might prefer apt-get? If

that’s the case you can use apt4rpm to get hold of

your updates.

Net configuration

Configuring your Net connection, whether it’s at

home or in a commercial or Government

environment, is well catered for. YaST2 can be used in

console mode without Xwindows, so that you can

take advantage of command line configuration and

use YaST2 to help you with the difficult parts such as

configuring an ISDN card or ADSL connection. ADSL is

best configured with a cable modem through the

Ethernet interface. You can also configure and use the

BT Alcatel USB modems after recompiling the kernel

and installing the Benoit Papillault software from the

Net, which is available from Sourceforge. The SuSE

firewall is included in the Professional version.

You can use the SuSE security list to ask questions

about things like how to configure /etc/hosts.deny or

which parameters to put into the firewall when you

set it up. There is also the personal firewall, which

you might want to use on a notebook when you are

travelling. For home use on a dial-up connection you

should use the full version of the firewall so that you

can find out with logged messages just who it is that

is having a go at your systems. In present day

circumstances this is no longer a joke and you should

take notice of this.

In a nutshell

The kernel people out there might want to know

about the new 2.4.18 kernel that is a part of the 8.0

release. The usual selection of SuSE standard kernels

for i386, i586/i686 uniprocessor and SMP

( S ymmetrical M ulti- P rocessor) has been added to,

with the first time inclusion of an nVidia kernel. This

means that you have a great choice of PC hardware

to run. Alpha and Sparc versions will come along

later. You can still re-compile your kernel for your

own requirements to improve the performance of

your computer if that is what is required.

YaST2, which has now replaced YaST1, performs

package management and system updates, as well

changes in configuration. YaST Update Online will

allow you to manually or automatically connect to a

SuSE server so that your machine can check for and

download updates. There are quite a few system

administrators out there who like to know what it is

that is being installed into their computers on their

networks. The manual update will allow to you say

yes or no to a package before accepting that the

SuSE 8.0

Conclusion

If there is something that hasn’t been mentioned

above then it’s because there isn’t enough room to

explain all of it here. If you have a specific need or

wish then you should find that the SuSE 8.0 release

will have already identified your problems and sorted

them out. The Professional version comes to you in a

well-presented box with a very full set of manuals.

You get seven CDs and one DVD, which contains all

of the software that is on the other CDs and a good

bit more as well. The Personal version costs less but

has everything that you might need for your own

workstation to write letters and to send faxes.

Supplier SuSE

Price To be confirmed

Web http://www.suse.co.uk

For All-inclusive

Against No YaST1 included

rating

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 20 • 2001

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