Last night I was experimenting with the installation of various
versions of SuSE Linux. I had received two copies of SuSE 9.0 at Novell’s Brainshare several months back, and also downloaded the .iso images of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 from the Novell SuSE download site.

During one of the sessions at Brainshare the speaker was giving out
‘prizes’ for answering various questions, and so I picked up both SuSE
9.0 ‘personal’ and SuSE 9.0 ‘professional’ … along with several other
little trinkets for the kids.

I have to admit that I was shocked when I could not get three different
versions of SuSE to install on my Dell Optiplex GXa server!

I tried to install SLES 8.0 … after the first CD it told me to insert
the next CD … but had locked the CD drive! No matter what I did
I could not get the CD to eject.

I tried the SuSE 9.0 versions and found that ‘personal’ didn’t include any of the packages that I required.

I tried SuSE 9.0 ‘pro’ and it also died during the first CD with errors installing a package.

I tried RedHat and Fedora … both worked flawlessly.

I installed Fedora … what one Novell friend called a “hobbyist”
operating system … due to the fact that it worked! I want to
know why SuSE wouldn’t install … it really surprised me!