As the author of the WWW FAQ, I regularly answer questions about the workings of the Web. If a question is frequently asked, I simply add an article to the FAQ. But sometimes a question is more detailed, more in-depth— not really a FAQ, but still of interest to others. You'll find those questions, with my answers, here in Innards along with commentary on other web-technology-related topics.

2004-08-20

This week the desktop PC upstairs finally refused to boot Windows XP at all. The little moving dot, it moves, but the windows, they do not appear. Even if you give it 24 hours. Y'know? Various flavors of kung-fu failed to revive it. I might have reinstalled XP... except that I can't.

A year ago, when I gutted my PC and moved the hard drive to a new PC, decommissioning the rest of the old machine, Windows XP refused to activate itself, complaining that I had copied it to a different computer. The hell I did; I upgraded the motherboard and peripherals. I called the Microsoft begging-and-pleading line, and the gentleman who answered the phone listened to my sob story and agreed to give me a "special one-time key." But like the "free call" at the end of the Lily Tomlin telephone sketch, my "special one-time key" didn't really solve anything in the long run. I didn't dare upgrade my PC again. And in the end, I didn't dare reinstall XP this week to fix its final, fatal confusion.

So: to heck with it. Time for Linux on this box.

Installation

I installed SuSE 9.1, Personal Edition, to give the Linux distribution now owned by Novell a whirl. Installation was smooth and automatic; my Windows drives were recognized, and SuSE offered to resize my Windows partitions to make room for SuSE on the first drive. But there wasn't really enough room, and I'd already determined that all my important files were on the second drive, so I let SuSE devour the entire C: drive.

A nasty problem entirely the fault of my old and busted CD-ROM drive was gracefully detected and accurately reported; that's about all you can ask of software when hardware goes south. I had an ugly old CD burner in there, but I have a much nicer one in the new laptop, so I chucked the now-unreliable drive in favor of a regular CD-ROM drive from the bit bucket. The newer drive installed the OS with gratifying speed.

The installation process had no trouble recognizing any of my major peripherals, including my Hewlett Packard USB-connected all-in-one printer, which was identified by name and correctly set up. That's very refreshing; printing on Linux used to be a major nightmare. HP has been very forthcoming about ensuring Linux support for their printers, including consumer-grade all-in-one gear like mine.

Surprisingly, a very simple but very important peripheral was not recognized: my USB mouse. Fortunately the keyboard is fully supported during installation, and I was able to select the "mouse" category and tell SuSE to look for my USB mouse without resorting to any old-school hackery. Even moderately clueful computer users won't have too much trouble with this issue, but total beginners certainly won't expect it.

My graphics card and monitor were immediately and correctly recognized. SuSE chose a very high screen resolution that I personally find too flickery, but it wasn't difficult to adjust this after installation.

All in all, the installation process was the smoothest I've ever seen from Linux. Granted, I've spent a lot of time with Debian Linux, which has by far the worst installation system of the major distributions. (Debian also has the best package management and, of course, it's truly free-as-in-speech as well as free-as-in-beer, and nobody's trying to upsell you on anything. The next Debian release, rumored to be quite close, features a user-friendly installer.) Still, the failure to pick up my USB mouse on the first try is not really acceptable for a "Personal Edition." Fix it, SuSE.

Using SuSE

SuSE uses the KDE desktop environment, one of two major replacements for the Windows desktop found on Linux; Gnome, of course, is the competing option. Version 3.2 of KDE still takes some time to start up, but the performance is vastly improved over previous releases. KDE does provide a well-thought-out graphical interface. Some find it has entirely too many features and gewgaws, but for users migrating from Windows that's probably a comfort.

The OpenOffice software suite came standard as part of the installation. OpenOffice can do 99% of what Microsoft Office can do, it is 100% free, and it can open your Microsoft Office documents and work with them and save in Microsoft formats. It's the bomb, people. And it's also available on Windows. Please, please stop paying hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office.

SuSE emphasizes the Konqueror web browser; Mozilla doesn't seem to be installed by default. Konqueror works well -- Konqueror was and is the basis for the core of Apple's excellent Safari browser, which is fast becoming the standard browser on Macs. But SuSE's default configuration of Konqueror is a bit too austere, with no obvious Google search feature built in. Of course, you can type google.com and press enter and then bookmark it or add it to the button bar... just like in the old days.

Thou Shalt Enable The Start Button

It's 2004. Every single Linux desktop has something equivalent to the Windows "start" menu. The "start" or "windows" key on the keyboard, while it may bear a hated symbol of monopolistic evil, is useful and should work. It is not difficult to make it work. It should be enabled by default, and in SuSE Personal Edition in two thousand feepin' four, it still isn't. That's just stupid. Fix it, SuSE.

Who Are the People In Your Network Neighborhood?

The aforementioned HP printer is the only printer in the house. I'm mostly an online sort of guy. But from time to time, a person does want to print things. And that person might want to print those things from a Windows laptop elsewhere in their house. And Microsoft Windows will cheerfully facilitate this.

One of the Big Selling Points of Linux (now: free! wait, it was already free!) is SAMBA, a software package that allows Linux to do virtually everything Windows can do in terms of file and printer sharing, quite often better than Windows can do it. But SuSE Personal Edition includes only client-side support for SAMBA; you can see network printers, but you can't share a printer hooked up to your PC. For that, you need SuSE Professional Edition, which isn't free... or you need to take the power-user step of reconfiguring SuSE's system management tool, YaST, to recognize software packages on the SuSE Professional Edition FTP site. You can do that, legally, for free, and you get most of what you would otherwise get by paying for SuSE Professional Edition. But it isn't intuitive by any stretch.

Once I made this change, I was able to install SAMBA server support and offer my printer for use by my Windows XP laptop.

Now, I understand that SuSE would like to hold a few things back for the professional edition and generally avoid confusing home users with stuff they don't need. But basic file sharing and printer sharing is not "stuff we don't need," It's stuff we all use every day... or would like to, if it worked. And with Windows XP, even Windows XP Home Edition, it just works. Fix it, SuSE.

Youthful Frolics

Back to Konqueror for a moment. Macromedia Flash Player is included, and that's important to my daughter, who enjoys games and interactive books on sites like Cartoon Network and Starfall. For the most part, these work all right, until a game calls for the use of the keyboard. For some unspecified reason, the arrow keys are not available to Flash in Konqueror. Which makes most of Eleanor's favorite games completely unplayable. Ouch.

I worked around this by installing the Mozilla browser, which I was able to do gracefully via the menus, and by installing the latest Flash player direct from Macromedia... which I was not able to do via menus of any sort. The installer that Macromedia offers is not difficult to use if you are a little bit comfortable at the command line... but this is a "Personal Edition." You know, for kids. Yes, KDE and Macromedia share responsibility on this, but the company that puts it in a box and suggests you pay $29.95 for a supported copy has to take the fall. Fix it, SuSE.

Conclusions

My overall first impression of SuSE Personal Edition is positive. As a user-friendly Linux distribution that costs zero dollars and zero cents when downloaded or $29.95 in a box with tech support, SuSE Personal Edition is hot stuff. Almost everything went smoothly; the snags and gotchas were either minor, like arrow keys in Flash, or fixable within the user-friendly interface itself, like the mouse problem and, with somewhat more grief and esoteric knowledge required, the printer sharing issue. I would definitely recommend it as an option for those who are "just plain ready to chuck Windows" off a particular PC. Skilled Windows users should find it smooth sailing and a generally positive experience. And, of course, when you connect it to the Internet, the machine doesn't get taken over by horrible viruses and spyware and god knows what else before you can run Windows Update to patch all the security holes. Unlike another operating system I could name. Still, there are problems that SuSE should address, especially the absence of support for the start button and the lack of an intuitive way to share "your" printer with the windows boxes in your house. Also, the default fonts were quite underwhelming.

It's possible that some of these issues are addressed automatically if one is able to receive update patches from SuSE's update service. It may be that one has to actually purchase Personal Edition from SuSE (for $29.95) in order to do that. Trouble is, if that's the case, I should be told so when I try to do it. A simple "it didn't work" error message doesn't tell me what I really need to do, but that's what I received each time I tried asking the system to update itself. Which isn't particularly good marketing.

All in all, a fine operating system and a nearly painless installation, much faster than any Windows installation I've ever done. Based on these early experiences, I give it three penguins out of four.

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