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SUSE8.0 Professional: On Gigabyte GA-7 VKML motherboard

SuSE8.0 linux is the latest distribution from Suse GmbH. It is the first commercial linux distribution to ship with the recently released version of the KDE 3.0 .

SuSE8.0 Linux comes in two versions. It comes in a professional edition consisting of 7 CD's and a DVD (a duplicate for those with a DVDROM drive) and a personal version of 4 CDs. The professional version comes with:

a 460-paged reference handbook
a 128 -paged applications book
a 79-paged basics book

The professional version is evaluated here.

Two workstation installations were undertaken on two PCs supplied by Basis Volume . SuSE8.0 has attracted some criticism and two installations (on older and newer motherboards) were decided on for comparison:

PC1: ( Older Motherboard)

Mainboard Gigabyte GA72

CPU: Athlon 1.3 Ghz

Memory 512 Mbytes PC133

VGA: Nvidia TNT2 32MBytes

Monitor: 17 Inch CRT,

Realtek 8139 Network card

Maxtor 20.2 Gbyte UDMA100 HDD

ISDN: Cologne Chip 2BDSO ISDN card

SCSI: Advansysis SCSI card

Printer: Epson 760

TV card: BT848 based TV card

PC2: (Newer Motherboard)

Mainboard Gigabyte GA7VKML with VIA KM266 with onboard VIA 823 audio

CPU: AMD Duron 1200 MHz

Graphics driver: Savage4 embedded in KM266 chipset, 32 Mbytes RAM defined from main memory.

Memory: 512 Mbytes DDR 266 RAM

CDR-ROM: Samsung 10x24x40 CDR ROM

HDD: 40 Gbyte Maxtor ATA 100 hard disk

Monitor:Relysis 15.1 inch LCD

Network Onboard Realtek 8100

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The Installations:

Both installations went without major technical hitches except those detailed below.

SuSE8.0 Bad Features:

Older (Ga72) Mainboard Installation:-

The VIA 686b sound circuitry was not detected in SuSE8.0. On the same PC this was detected with SuSE 7.3.

The KPackage binary installer did not work reliably in KDE3.0). Command line installations of rpms were undertaken instead.

The Newer (GA-7VKML) mainboard installation :-

The VIA 823 audio-chip was detected but no sound was obtained.

The S3 savage or S3 Savage pro graphic chip was not detected within the KM266 chip-set on the mainboard. Instead a Gigabyte Technology 'unsupported in Xfree4.2' device was detected. The graphics system had to be run with an fbdev (which presumedly means frame buffer development) driver.

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SuSE8.0 Good Features:

A) SuSE8.0 on the older GA72 motherboard:

The installation was on a machine for desktop use which also doubles as a light-duty PostgreSQL database server. It contained 512 Mbytes and no swap partition on the hard disk.

The installation with the exception of the audio and KPackage problems gave a fast and trouble free running machine. The correct boot kernel with APM (advanced power management) support was automatically installed. The same machine with SuSE7.3 could only undertake a safe-mode installation in which the APMD was not installed..

Current versions of PostgreSQL and OpenOffice 1.0 downloaded from http://www.postgresql.org and http://www.openoffice.org respectively were installed. Both installations went without difficulties. . The machine has been placed in a small network and has also been performing without any difficulties. There has been much report on the slowness and fragility of KDE3.0 . Our tests have shown SuSE8.0 to be faster than SuSE 7.3 (with KDE2.2.1) and more more predictable than its predecessor SuSE7.3 on this main-board.

B) SuSE Linux 8.0 on the newer GA-7VKML main-board

The Gigabyte GA-7VKML is a relatively new board for the AMD Duron/Athlon processors. It is a microatx board and promises high performance on a small bard area: It contains:

1. Two slots for DDR ram to 1 GByte,

2. VIA 823 audio

3. 3 pci slots

4. The via KM266 chipset which incorporates an S3 Savage pro ASIC for the the graphics interface. It allows allocation up to 32mbytes of system for graphics and mode switching between AGP and PCI. It also has an additional AGP slot if the onboard graphics is unsuitable.

On this test it gave a small, fast and powerful machine. However though most if not all the S3 Savage family of graphics processors are supported in the Xfree4.2 servers in SuSE8, all attempts to use SAX/SAX2 or even command-line xf86config to set up the graphics processor failed. Consequently display performance was limited to using the fbdev driver mentioned previously. The latter gave only 800x600 pixel resolution. Because x-window was not running, it was not possible to switch to the X-window system from the Linux command line using the startx command. It is hoped that in the next version of Xfree86, firms like Gigabyte will collaborate with the Xfree organisation to provide full support of the KM266 used in boards like the promising GA-7VKML.

Other features of SUSE8.0 include:

YAST2 has now matured into YAST and is a highly polished system administration tool. It is useful for configuring just about every utility on the operating system.
The quality of the SuSE manuals. were as ever excellent.

SuSE8.0 comes with hundreds of high quality programs which include:

Linux Kernel 2.4.18,

KFE3.0 and Gnome 1.4 Desktop GUIs.,

Apache 1.3.23 web server,

Samba 2.2.39 LAN server,

DVD writing software,

CUPS (common UNIX printing system)

USB support for mice , keyboards and printers

Xfree86 4.02 with anti aliasing fonts,

All Programs in easy to install rpm format

90 Days Technical support via email.

For information on pricing SuSE8.0 please contact SuSE. To buy SuSE8.0 or a high- perfornance Linux computer using Gigabyte main-boards please contact Basis Volume.

TT