Rating: 
Summary: Great for power users, but not for the novice
Review: When I decided to take Oracle database administration classes this spring, I faced the choice of buying Windows2000 or a distribution of Linux. Knowing Open Source was the wave of the future, I decided to dive in and get Suse 7.3 Pro; I really didn't want to buy another bloated mediocre Microsoft product (though in all fairness I hear W2K is a lot more stable than other versions of Windows).You can read the product description for yourself and read reviews of the actual OS features elsewhere, so I won't go into the "what you get" paragraph. I think what's useful for most is an answer to "how hard is it to install?" Suse Linux comes with a disk partition utility with its installer. It worked flawlessly and resized my Win98 partition and set up the necessary new partitions for Suse Linux. I then opted to have LILO (Linux Loader which starts right after the BIOS checks) installed on the Master Boot Record. LILO works great and lets you select which partition and thus which OS to boot up. It works flawlessly. Negative points of install:
1. Took me a few days to figure out how to get my DSL connection going.
2. My sound card using the Vortex Aureal sound chip still doesn't work, though Suse.com's support database has a workaround. Unfortunately, I've downloaded the software, but the driver won't compile properly (though I might be missing some developer tools to link/compile it properly...I'm going to have to look at the log files to figure out what's wrong....) [POSTSCRIPT (added 1/29/02):
Okay, I got the soundcard working to play CD audio, but no sound for MP3 and MIDI or video files. If you don't want to be compiling raw code for an Aureal Vortex driver, I suggest you check out Suse.com to see if your sound card is supported by the ALSA sound architecture.] Suse's tech support is very responsive, though they basically pointed me to documents in their extensive support article database. Also, the printed documenation is very thorough and well laid out. Since I bought Linux to install and learn Oracle software, I'd say I'm getting my money's worth. There's SO MUCH GPL(Free) software out there for Linux! There are several different GUIs to put on top of the kernel (I'm using KDE now, and it's great, though I plan to check out others).
Last note: Linux, since it's based on UNIX, is NOT an OS for your grandmother. I'd used various flavors of UNIX back in grad school in the mid '90s, so all those usr/ var/ log/ etc/ ... directories didn't scare me. Even with YaST2 (Suse's equivalent of Windows Control Panels) you'll still need to feel comfortable using a text editor now and then to edit configuration files. Overall, I'm very happy with Suse Linux. The install was smooth and for that reason alone I recommend this company's distribution.
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