Finally, we’ve got ourselves a free Suse 9.3 download. Novell has released a LiveDVD (like a LiveCD but… well, y’know) of their Suse 9.3 Professional. This Suse download is released for the purpose of allowing users to become acquainted with Suse 9.3 without installing to their hard disk or purchasing a license.

You can try out this Suse 9.3 LiveDVD by downloading it from a Novell mirror near you:
Suse Professional Download Mirrors
If you can’t find the LiveDVD available on the first couple mirrors you try, here’s one that’s sure to work:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-dvd-9.3/

I’ll have a review posted as soon as I can finish downloading the thing. If anyone sees a torrent available, let me know so I can post it.

Related Previous Posts:
Suse 9.3 torrent is fake
Suse 9.3 release details
Suse 9.3 expected

I’m not sure what it is exactly that’s making me write in praise of Suse in the middle of running Gentoo, but I think it’s worth doing. Suse 9.2 was the OS that I ran most recently and despite horrible support for the IPW2200BG it was a pretty good system.

Suse is an excellent entry-level distribution for linux beginners. It holds your hand through installation and configuration and, because Novel owns Suse, it has top of the line software. It integrates some things into Linux before anyone else does. For Suse 9.3 I’ll be excited to try out the Xen Hypervisor (a computer emulator) which they are packaging with the 9.3 release.

If you don’t have Suse 9.2 yet, you can find it here (it’s free):
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.2/iso/SUSE-Linux-9.2-FTP-DVD.iso

Named ‘Beagle’, the desktop search tool that will ship with Suse 10 (due in 2006) will be similar to Spotlight from apple which was in turn copied from the Google Desktop Search.

Beagle indexes documents, email, Web history, IM and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations, images, music files, source code, and more, including widely used file formats such as Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint files, MP3 files, and JPEG and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images.
Novell Linux 10

I’m still holding out for Suse 9.3 which will feature the Xen hypervisor among other seriously cool softwares. When versioni 10 comes along next year you can be sure a lot will have changed in the Linux scene.

Novell has officially announced that Suse 9.3 will be shipping in April of this year. They’ve also announced what improvements there will be in the new release.
useful improvements
There are several software and driver updates that will make this release of Suse Linux an excellent upgrade.

• Suse 9.3 will support Centrino, Bluetooth devices and many kinds of PDAs with synchronization.
• Power management for Suse 9.3 will be improved.
• Apple’s Ipod will be supported on Suse 9.3

serious improvements:
I didn’t realize how major the difference between Suse 9.2 and Suse 9.3 was going to be. There are some huge pieces of software innovation to be built into this release.

• The latest release of Mono will be included.
• the VoIP application Linphone is likely to be added to this release.
• Gnome 2.10 (released one day before the time of this article) will be included.
• KDE 3.4 will be shipped.
• The Xen Hypervisor will be included. Xen is like VMWare in that it allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single host operating system. It’s the open source response to VMWare that will have Intel and IBM support as of it’s next release.

I’m really, really excited about Xen. I don’t have the cash for a VMWare licence and I’m huge on experimenting with different operating systems (as you can probably tell by my Distro Installs category). If anyone has used Xen before, please leave a comment and describe how it went.

I don’t know if there will be a Suse 9.3 torrent available, but I’m definitely installing Suse 9.3 the day it’s released.

According to InfoWorld.com Novell is preparing a new version of Suse Linux. Version 9.3 is a response to Novells belief that many Linux users have now switched to Suse and are desiring more technical and more updated software packages.

Version 9.3, expected to be available through retail stories in the United States and online by mid-April, contains about 1,000 open source applications aimed at more technical users in both the business and home markets. It also contains previews of upcoming Linux-based server technologies including the XEN virtualization environment and a more intuitive search engine

We’ll be anticipating the release of Suse 9.3 in April of this year, hopefully it will have increased support for wifi cards and will include KDE 3.4

Praise the Lord for the Bittorrent network. If you’re not familiar with the Bittorrent protocol, you should check it out the next time you need to distribute a lot of data to a lot of people. In my opinion the single greatest use of this protocol is for exchanging full copies of (open source) operating systems. I found Suse 9.2 in DVD format so I don’t have to waste five CD-Rs each time it’s released anymore. Also, I can take just the one disk with me on the road in case I need to do any emergency installs.

I’m also getting the bootable DVD of Mandrake Linux 10.1. I’m having some issues with the ipw2200 package crashing my Dell 600m and I’d like to see if I can get it running a little better with a different distribution. It’s not that the distro has anything to do with the package software, but the installation of a device driver is so complex that I’m still far short of understanding it.

For those of you who are interested in the Bittorrent network, I recommend Azureus. You have to use your browser to find the *.torrent files (they’re pretty small in size) but you’ll need different software for downloading the real file, and for that Azureus can’t be beat. Named after the poison dart frog (how cool) it runs on virtually every operating system (it’s runs in Java) and it’s fast, secure, and even pretty. It’s a great example of how open-source code can run really smoothly.

The first Linux distribution I ever installed was Mandrake 7.0. Back when that came out it was a huge deal because it was one of the first distributions to offer wide hardware support. It was installed on a dual-boot laptop that ever after only ran Windows. After that I ran various kinds of RedHat (later Fedora Core), Debian (which ended very quickly), and every version of Mandrake up through 10.1
Nothing has been worth keeping until I installed Suse 9.2 last December. Here are some of the major benefits of it:

1. It runs my Intel ProWireless 2200 BG
2. It has up-to-date versions of both KDE and Gnome
3. It comes stocked with a jack-load of open-source games

So maybe the games aren’t the main reason I’m liking Suse, but they’re the best thing about my computer when I’m away on vacation (my girlfriend likes to play Frozen Bubble and KSnake). And even without them Suse 9.2 is an excellent distribution. I’m still partial to Mandrake but I’ll see what they’ve got up their sleeves with 10.2 before I consider moving back to them.