I finally broke down and bought Suse 8.1 last week. It wasn't something I really needed, because my Suse 7.1 system was still going fine. I had, somehow, screwed up gcc, and fixing it was beyond me. Let's just say that when RPMs don't want to install, don't --force them to. And I wasn't going to install gcc by hand. That's one of 2 items (the other being glibc) that I'm afraid to do by hand.

The installation was simple. Too bad it didn't work for me until I went into safe mode. (More on this later). I'm not sure if it's because I tried to use my existing /home and /opt partitions, or what, but the normal install bombed hard. So safe mode it was, and it worked.

Anyway, once it was up and running, everything seemed okay. Had to recompile my kernel because Suse didn't include support for my IDE chipset in their kernel (come on guys), but that wasn't too big of a deal. What was a big deal was doing the reiserfsck --rebuild-tree because that lack of chipset support corrupted my root directory. Not cool guys.

After playing with it for a week, here are a few quick observations...

• The appearance is fantastic. The icons have a half OSx and half XP look, and it's very nice.
  
• The bundled KDE is very nice. It supports my digital camera right from the file manager.
  
• They've finally included decent CD burning software. It's actually better than Easy CD Creator.
  
• It wants to load an ISDN driver no matter what I do, and I can't stop it. Minor annoyance tho.
  

All of my old software seems to work without any major problems either. JBuilder seems intact. This was my biggest worry.

More to come if anything else pops up.