![](\"http:\/\/www.horon.com\/upload\/rte\/suse.gif\")
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http:\/\/opensuse.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve played around with Linux on the desktop.\u00a0 I have a couple of servers, but SSH is quite a bit different than an environment that is used to create spreadsheets or listen to music.<\/p>\n In the past I have used Mandrake and Red Hat on the desktop.\u00a0 I have never considered either as a replacement for XP (or Windows 2000 Pro, when I used it).\u00a0 Now Dell is selling machines with SUSE installed on them.\u00a0 I thought I would give it another test run\u2026 and I was thoroughly disappointed.<\/p>\n I downloaded the five CD\u2019s.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t a problem.\u00a0 All the ISO files are available at<\/p>\n http:\/\/en.opensuse.org\/Released_Version<\/a><\/p>\n I had all the file in a couple of hours.\u00a0 I burned them to CD\u2019s and started the installation with disk one.\u00a0 I used a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop (1.7 GHz,\u00a0512 MB\u00a0RAM) with a blank hard drive.\u00a0 The installation went very well.\u00a0 All the components (NIC, video card, sound card, etc) were properly identified and the correct drivers were loaded.\u00a0 It even recognized that my display was optimized for 1024\u00d7768 and set the screen to that resolution.\u00a0 At the end of the installation I was asked if I wanted to do things like setup the firewall and automatic updates.\u00a0 I did the updates and everything worked as it should.<\/p>\n After the installation a reboot took me into the OS.\u00a0 I opened a browser (Firefox) and went to my start page at ProtoPage.\u00a0 It looked bad.\u00a0 The fonts were all goofy and hard to read.\u00a0 I looked at some other content and had mixed results.\u00a0 The UF Blackboard server looked bad (like my ProtoPage site), but Digg was fine.\u00a0 It must be that certain style sheets have fonts that don\u2019t look as good.\u00a0 I could live with all this.\u00a0 The disappointment came when I tried to play some music.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was fairly easy to connect to my Windows server and get to my Music share there.\u00a0 I double-clicked an MP3 file on the server.\u00a0 The music player (Banshee) opened but nothing happened.\u00a0 Hmmm\u2026 I dragged the MP3 over to my desktop, and that worked ok.\u00a0 I then double-clicked the MP3 now on my desktop.\u00a0 This time it does open with the music player, but I get an immediate playback error – you do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. Apparently the MP3 format is obscure enough that you need a special codec to play them.\u00a0 You can guess what happened when I tried to play one of my WMA files.\u00a0 I looked through the Banshee menus to see if there were listing of decoders.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t find a list or anything that explained how I need to add a decoder.<\/p>\n I switched over to something a little more practical – OpenOffice.\u00a0 I\u00a0started a Calc (spreadsheet) session.\u00a0 I use OpenOffice in XP, so I\u2019m used to how things work.\u00a0 I did the million test.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty simple.\u00a0 Type a one in the first cell.\u00a0 In the next down create a formula A1+1.\u00a0 Copy that down and over until you get the number up to 1,000,000.\u00a0 In Excel the whole process takes a few seconds.\u00a0 In OOo, it takes a\u00a0couple of\u00a0minutes (in XP).\u00a0 In SUSE it managed to finish while I had lunch.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the main disappointment with SUSE as a desktop OS.\u00a0 It is just too slow to be useful. Maybe tomorrow I\u2019ll try Red Hat again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" http:\/\/opensuse.org\/ It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve played around with Linux on the desktop.\u00a0 I have a couple of servers, but SSH is quite a bit different than an environment that is used to create spreadsheets or listen to music. … Continue reading