After playing with Ubuntu for a while, I decided it was time to test another Linux distribution. This time, I went with OpenSuSE 10.0. As always, installation wasn’t a problem. In less than 25 minutes I had my system up and running. I liked the fact that opensuse, after installing, takes you directly to the login screen. No reboot required. It’s been a while since I installed Windows XP on a machine, but I remember at least a couple of reboots to get my system installed.

Among one of the nicest features of opensuse is the fact that installing FreeNX is a breeze. And it works really good. I just wish I could ‘detach’ from a session, so I can return to the same session later.

The OSS version of SuSE does not include Java support on the installation CDs, but it’s just a matter of adding a repository to the YaST installer to get Java. I installed Java 1.5 and Eclipse 3.1 with no problems.

Administration is somewhat different from other distributions. For example, they provide ‘rcscripts‘, which are just links to the real scripts on /etc/init.d/. At first I found this a little odd, but now I got accustomed to them.

The only thing that I would change is the addition of sudo support, just like Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, you don’t have to use a root account (in fact, you usually don’t assign a password to root) but instead rely on sudo to do everything. The first account you set up has root sudo privileges, and you only need the password for the user to execute something as root. I hope more distributions chose this route.

I have yet to test my full set of hardware, but I’m sure I’ll have little troubles.