Looked at trying this out with a view to contrasting the commercialness
(?) of this distro to the free offerings. I'm using the eval version, so
it has only cost the download time.

This is able to install by resizing an existing ntfs ( probably fat, too )
partition, and installing it into the resulting space. Or so I thought.

Install client is a 1.2GHz athlon with 512Mb. The only oddity is the
MAtrox G550/dual head setup. Monitors are good old Viewsonic E70's.

Left it to it's own devices and inserted the next ( of 3 ) cd's when
requested. Looked like a typical SuSE install, so no dramas there.

First hitch. Logs in to the update server to check up for it's 30
daysworth of free updates. Guess what? Error 404. Not available. Humph.
Google for an alternative. Well, I can't find one anywhere.

Next hitch. Setting up the display. E70 on the left is found fine. Not the
one on the right. I had to manually set that up. This was a real pain just
to get both monitors displaying at 1024x768x24 bit, but no rocket science.

For the dualhead installation, I chose a xinerama install from the options.

Just for a change, I thought I'd use KDE - IIRC it's the SuSE desktop of
choice. Now I don't usually use it, so some what I say below may be
standard functionality.

>From the options I chose above, I expected to have a single, seamless
desktop across the two monitors. Wrong! I have 2 totally separate displays
( menus and all ) that the mouse skips across. Maybe I've misunderstood
how the xinerama virtual display is set up, but I don't think so!
Attempting to move a terminal session from one display to the other leads
to it wrapping back around the same monitor!

So all in all, I'm not too impressed. After all, Novell expect people to
pay for this.

The final kick in the nu^H^Hteeth... reboot into Windoze 2000. Starts
bootstrap ok, then I get a BSOD saying it can't find the boot device.


Well done Novell. Not.


Steve
PS. Anyone want a set of Novell Linux Desktop CD's?
-- 
Due to financial crisis the light at the end of the tunnel is switched off

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