Suse so far

I've been playing with Suse 10.1 for almost a week now. I've certainly had some ups and downs with it. A big part of the problem was my own lack of knowledge in the Linux department.

One of the great features of Suse is Yast2 basically a tool for managing everything. The neat part of it is the software manager. You open it you search for something E.g. "apache" it will then offer a list of modules and indicate if they are installed or not. Those that you want to install you tick then let Suse do its thing. You can add sources if your desired software isn't in the list and it will pick them up from a url or local files.

It took me a while to get apache, mysql and php firing on all cylinders, this might be because of my initial attempt to use Xampp, then deciding I wanted a full blown setup as Xampp isn't recommended for production use. I ended up using Yast2 to uninstall and reinstall everything and all seemed to be fine.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the experience, theres some inconsistencies and definitely a steep learning curve, I'm also not a complete convert by any means but early exploration has been reasonably satisfying.

My next venture is going to be to try and get the very sexy looking xgl setup and see how my old machine copes with it.