and the winner is ... SuSe 10.1 (the operating system review continued)

Novell may become a household name again with the Suse operating system it is positioning to become the best Linux desktop on the market. It is really amazing what they were able to accomplish with Suse 10.1 integrating XGL, MONO and other latest innovations.

I was blown away by the Mono presentation by Miguel de Icaza at Microsoft two weeks ago.

I knew I wanted to give Suse 10.1 a try and I was wondering of how much fiddling around I would have to do to make XGL work. I was after XGL (3D desktop) and also after MONO (.Net on Unix). Well, it's all part of the package! Download your DVD and the only other thing you will need for the 3D desktop is the commercial video driver that supports 3D in hardware. The installation was trivial.

You can get your DVD iso torrent from here. Note: try to avoid downloading over http. It is not the first time I ended up with a corrupted image downloading DVD images with Firefox wasting more then a day. Check "md5" checksum before you install - it may save you tons of time. Look no further then GParted if you need to repartition your drive, resize your partitions etc. Download ISO image and you are ready to go. Gparted supports more filesystems then Partition Magic and it doesn't crash :-). You will need to change partition table using "fdisk" or "cfdisk" before you can run partition resize on them.

One caveat, if you are using Java Swing applications such us Netbeans or LimeWire, you will need to disable XGL because Swing will not work with the XGL.

There is one more reason for the Microsoft to be freaked out. Micorsoft made available Vista 2 and the next office Beta and all other back office offerings in June. I think they are feeling the heat from Apple and Linux. Vista Beta 2 is too slow, too late and too unusable. They really need a feed back like they never needed before. Windows became the most installed desktop operating system ever, thanks to the strong marketing push from the Microsoft, but there's competition and Microsoft may be just too big to respond to the challenge.

Here is a good article with detail instructions on how to customize your installation