SUSE 8.0

Well, two weeks ago, Ioaded the new SUSE 8.0. It's great!

I had to manually configure my cable modem (using the network adapter confguration), but other than that it recognized everything automatically. Mandrake had recognized the cable modem during installation, but not my HP T46 OfficeJet combo printer-fax-copier.

SUSE 8.0 has the new KDE 3.0, which is noticably faster; I like it. Everything works as it should; there are very few rough edges on this system.

Wine was easy to install from the CD's. This is important to me for one reason. I use an old Windows 3.0 cardfile applet that came standard with Windows 3.0 but not with any later Windos. I have almost 1000 names, addresses, and phone numbers of business contacts on Cardfile, and I do not want to abandon that database nor re-enter the data manually. In fact, Wine runs Cardfile perfectly, whereas Windows 2000 runs it poorly, cutting the edge off of the left side of the cards. This is a big win for me!

The printer works flawlessly.

I am now uisng Mozilla for web browsing, email, and usenet. This is a big improvement because previously I was getting crashes when using Netscape Communicator.

While SUSE 8.0 includes Staroffice 5.2, it does not include the new Staroffice 6.0. However, it does include a release candidate of OpenOffice, and I love this program, which is a worthy replacement for Microsoft Office.

I am completely happy with SUSE 8.0!

The only thing I can't do yet, is run my cron job to automatically run my Python scripts and update my web site. Ah well, there's always tomorrow...