Michael Long wrote at 2003-1-21 21:44 -0500:
Why don't you recommend SuSE 8.1? What would you recommend for a new installation of zope connecting to postgres. My experience with SuSE 8.1 was the ever worst I have had with Linux installations, almost nothing worked:
* upgrade (SuSE 7.3 --> 8.1) hang after all packages had been installed and just before Linux was rebooted * booting the new kernel reported: invalid format * booting the alternate kernel reported that something has been too large * booting the rescue system on the CD hang After 1/2 days of fight, I found out that the hanging was caused because the 8.1 SuSE could no longer work with my USB keyboard (while 7.3 could without problem) Bad experiences continued, after I had connected an old PS2 keyboard: * "lilo" not installable, because of a missing "message" file; worked only after "lilo.conf" was fixed * after "lilo" was installed, the kernel could be booted However, "YaST" found a read only file system and (of course) failed miserably. Cause has been an empty "/etc/init.d/boot.d" directory. Therefore, the initial booting phase (including remounting the file system read/write) was not executed. * VMWare no longer worked, because SuSE 8.1 has disabled APIC support * Java Support for Mozilla broken Already SuSE 7.3 had promissed to include Netscape 6 but in fact, only had the old Netscape 4.78. SuSE 8.1, too, was unable to provide a fully workable Web browser. * The installation reported problems for 17 packages. It told me which ones but I could not get any information why. * The installation support apparently did not understand my USB keyboard problem (told me about safe settings and some obscure kernel parameters which did not affect the keyboard problem in any way). After about 2 weeks, I myself found out that SuSE 8.1 just did not include the kernel module for the USB keyboard driver.... * The installation support refused to tell anything about the Java Mozilla problem. It offered me commercial support... That was enough bad experience. I decided to use Debian Linux in the future. Dieter