Some questions with SuSe

[LadyGrey]

Hi All,
After a couple of years I'm back playing around with Linux. This time instead of Red Hat or Mandriva (lord what an awful name) I'm using SuSe.
So far it seems pretty nice and the GUI is good, still confusing somewhat but that's to be expected. I think everything has been found, video card, sound card, printer. I can even get online, it found the Ethernet connection and DSL modem, using Firefox for that. Just one or two problems, small ones really. My logitech cordless USB mouse seems to go a little wacky but I think that Linux drivers are offered by logitech, haven't really looked yet.
Other problem is the display. I've been into display properties, I think it's KDE? I'm using and I can change the resolution to 800x600 ok, but all the icons, windows, fonts are really really huge. Not at all like the W2K 800x600 display. I like that resolution because I can't see those other smaller ones.
I've been to linuxquestions.org but can't seem to find much on this. Is there a setting I'm over looking? Could it be that my Nvidia card needs to be updated for SuSe, maybe it can't use the updated drivers I have for the card cause they are W2K drivers?
Another display problem seems to be in Firefox. Every web page I open is in a different font, some smaller, some bigger and some I can't even see they are so small. Now, in W2K all the pages display pretty much the same, is there a setting in Firefox to make it like that?
Now I should tell you that I'm running SuSe from a live DVD I burned. Didn't want to install anything till I checked it all out. Could that be part of the problem? Like trying to run the autoupdate, tells me it can't get the server, or something along those lines, is that because it's not really installed on the computer?
Any thoughts are appreciated as always.
LG ;)

[pop pop]

I'm late for work so I only have time for a quick response. I'll post more later.

KDE is a "desktop environment", thus the DE part of KDE. There are a number of others available in Suse that you can use such as Gnome. Each offers diferent things and a different look but they're just GUIs over top of the OS.

If you have an LCD monitor, unless it's very old, likely the "native" resolution is greater than 800x600, more like 1280x1024 these days. If you run at less than that, the icons and things get stretched out and pixelated, not very pretty. You should try to go with the native resolution, unless you don't just want to or need very large icons and fonts--although in Linux there are better ways to enlarge everything to accomodate vision issues. If you have a CRT, well you can run at whatever resolution you want. As for fonts themselves, Suse fonts are different looking, some people just don't like them. A full install will give you other font options including, believe it or not, M$ True Type fonts.

The live CD version of Suse has some limitations because it's completely OSS (open source). One of those limitations is there's no proprietary software like specific vendor's video drivers. What that means is you're not running with an nVidea driver at all right now, but rather with a close approximation, or something that will "just do the job". The good news is that nVidea does provide Linux support and has very recently updated their Linux drivers. The better news is that if and when you actually install Suse on your HDD and do an update, those drivers will become available.

Which brings us to running YaST Online Update (YOU) using the live CD. I really doubt you can do that at all, or very easily anyway. See you're running off the CD and using a RAM drive. Not only that, live CDs generally make, or set, the HDD to "read only" by default unless you change it before you boot...or after. Add to that, if the HDD is formatted NTFS, no version of Linux can't write to it right now anyway. Basically, this means there is nowhere for you to write any updates to.

Suse is a very good choice. Enjoy your journey.

More later.

[jlreich]

I'm back using SUSE myself recently. Trying SUSE 10 64bit version for awhile. You right though I don't really like the fonts in the Linux version of FF either. I am not in SUSE right now and FF is a little different in Linux but you should be able to go into FF's preferences (under the edit toolbar in Linux instead of tools in windows) and click on "content" and change the fonts. It's a little confusing the way the fonts are set up, but you will have play with it for a minute to figure out what you like.

I do really like SUSE. And SUSE 10 comes with Java and such things already configured, so that made things a little easier then when I tried 9.1. It also seemed much easier to install the video drivers for my ATI card, never was able to do it in 9.1. :rolleyes:

About the only thing I have had to do to it was install the latest version of FF. It comes with 1.0.7 installed. And that was pretty painless as well. To be honest though, don't ask me how I did all this stuff as I just kind of copy and pasted the commands from the instructions. :p I did have to change a couple of things in the commands like file name, but that was the easy part.

Anyway It has come a long way since I tried 9.1. The install seemed to take forever, like an hour and a half, but that's including doing the online updates during the install. So I guess it really wasn't that bad. It's actually really good in comparison to installing XP, then doing all the updates and configurations, installing AV/FW, spyware/adware apps and such, installing office programs. All that you need is included in SUSE, including Open Office which is very nice from what I have tinkered with. I even installed it on my windows install after playing with it in SUSE for awhile. :)

Then there is the 5 ISO files to download and burn, or you can do the online installation like pop pop did. I downloaded but I did it over several nights. One night I might have two of the files downloading at the same time before I went to bed, then maybe the next time I was watching a movie on TV I did the same thing.

I have the Live DVD, but have barley given it a spin or two.

Have fun with SUSE. I am. :)