The SuSE Linux 8.0 install isn’t flawless (see Saturday’s post).  Even though I configured my system for DHCP, the installation program didn’t install the DHCP client, so I couldn’t access my network until I tinkered a bit.  I had to get to the command line for that one.  I guess I could have used the GUI installer, but dang this system is slow!  It’s a 200 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM.  It seemed to run KDE 1.2 just fine, but it’s terribly pokey with the latest SuSE release running KDE 3.  I suspect that it’d run much nicer with more memory, that old machine is maxed out at 64 MB.  Looks like I’ll be buying a new motherboard this week.

A few annoying bits to mention:

• The YAST2 setup program has a very bad user interface.  And I’m talking bad as compared to other text-based interfaces.  Ugh!  The thing borders on unusable, although it seems to work so I’ll cut it some slack.
• Why does SuSE insist on putting some silly background on the console window and scrolling the console output there?  When I’m at the command line, I want white text on a black background.  Leave the silly themes for the GUIs.
• Why won’t the YAST2 setup program recognize the right hand Control and Alt keys on my keyboard?  This is probably some arcane thing I’ll have to change in the NCurses library or something.  You’d think, whatever it is, they would have make the default configuration recognize those two keys.

The above notwithstanding, I’m still impressed by the smoothness of the new SuSE install.  I’ll report again once I install it on a more modern machine.  It’s hardly fair expecting the latest and greatest GUI to be real snappy on 6-year-old hardware.