bart at solozone.com schrieb: > I use both SuSE 9.0 and 9.1 and I am ready to upgrade to 9.2. But I hear it > has partially proprietary kernel? Moreover, they do not put all their > programs on CDs but only on a two sided(?) DVD and my 9.2 does not have a DVD > reader; the other one does or very soon will (tomorrow). > Do you folks think I would be better off with Fedora? if so which? Will I be > missing programs, of which SuSE gives one a big number?
I'm using SuSE 9.2 on a few machines and I don't see it having something proprietary in the kernel, they just deliver some proprietary drivers (in seperate packages) that you can install to support some hardware that doesn't hgave free drivers. But you'd have to download and install those drivers also for other Linux distros if you want to use that hardware - the others just might not include them in the standard distribution. SuSE 9.2 doesn't have very big changes to 9.1, it's just an update to all the software, and the kernel is a 2.6.8 with the usual set of patches applied (as with any other distro). The source code of that kernel is supplied as a source rpm package as well. The main thing is that some packages are only on the (double-layer, not double-sided) DVD, most of them are packages that most users don't need - the only not-so-good thing I spotted is that Scribus is one of those packages. But you might be better off to install a newer Scribus like 1.2.1 anyway. I'm still very satisfied with SuSE, also with 9.2, and I didn't see them go more proprietary - on the contrary, they (Novell) even are about to release their big (and IMO great) configuration tool YaST as open source. Robert Kaiser
