FC3 vs SUSE 9.2

[granty at bellatlantic.net (Grant Young)]

I just replaced RH 9.0 on my laptop (A Toshiba Tecra M2 with the
Centrino wireless) with Suse 9.2 and the wireless does work for me.  The
install doesn't find and ID the wireless hardware automatically, though.
I had to configure the installation to install the ipfw2200 (?) firmware
and then it works fine after you configure it.  I use 40-bit WEP at home
and it seems to work like a top.  It was the main selling point for me
to get 9.2 so I don't have to plug my old Lucent/WaveLan PC card in
anymore.  You may want to turn off the firewall while you're trying to
configure network stuff.  I found it got in the way of setting up the
printers I share off my Win XP box.

I haven't been a big Suse/KDE fan in the past but I thought I'd take a
shot with 9.2 since Ximian Desktop hasn't updated for awhile and the
lack of decent Centrino support was annoying.  I have to say it's been a
pretty smooth experience overall.  The goofy weirdnesses I had with the
power control features seem to have gone away.  Generally I have to say
it's very nice.

Evolution 2 looks pretty nice and seems to handle my SPAM much better
that 1.4 (actually 1.4 didn't really handle SPAM.)  I do find KDE a bit
eye-candy-ish but the fonts are quite nice.

I'll probably replace my FC2 Core on my desktop at work with FC3 when I
get a chance.  Fedora is clearly becoming the testing ground for Red Hat
releases, which I think is a good thing.  But I think Linux
distributions are becoming more detail specific.

This was the first install from DVD I've done and I must say it was
really nice not to have to switch disks.  I don't think the installs
could get much easier.  I did run through it first, playing with the
options, especially the software selection, before I committed to
actually doing the install.  That's where I found the 2200 firmware
hadn't been selected (yast probably should be fixed to detect this).

So more of a first impressions of 9.2 rather than a review but hopefully
the firmware install tip will help out.

On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 01:58 -0500, David Kramer wrote:
> I can't find a single comparison between the two.  Very strange.
> 
> Though in my searching I found two interesting things.
> 
> 1) It appears SUSE falsely advertised 9.2's ability to work with Centrino 
> wireless out of the box.  Given that was my main reason for getting it, I'm 
> mighty pissed.  I haven't tried it on my laptop yet, so I'm not going to bomb 
> their headquarters uet, but they will hear from me if it doesn't work.
> 
> 2) distrowatch.com seems to be down.  Looks like a DNS issue though.
> $ host -v distrowatch.com
> Trying "distrowatch.com"
> ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54694
> ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
> 
> ;; QUESTION SECTION:
> ;distrowatch.com.               IN      A
> 
> ;; ANSWER SECTION:
> distrowatch.com.        283     IN      CNAME   distrowatch.com.
> 
> Received 47 bytes from 127.0.0.1#53 in 9 ms
> 
> $ ping distrowatch.com
> ping: unknown host distrowatch.com
> 
> 
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