Thursday nite I picked up a shiny new copy of Suse 9.0 (or is it SUSE now). Oh how excited I was. But I didn't get home until 9, and I know that if you start an OS upgrade at 9 and have work the next day, the upgrade will fail. It's a universal constant.

So I did it Saturday afternoon. Which was really just as much of a crapshoot, given that I was going out to the movies later that night, and it could have easily failed. But it didn't. So here's the lowdown.

I took the upgrade path, and let it upgrade my old Suse installation. In the past, doing this was a lot like driving a BMW in the snow, lots of gerausche but you didn't get anywhere (see what I did there? It's clever if you can figure it out).

Only geeks are likely to encounter this, and thank god because it takes a geek to solve it. I had packages on my older Suse 8.2 install which were newer than the ones that came with 9.0. Thank APT I suppose, which I had recently run and allowed to update a lot of things. The installer wouldn't proceed until I told it what to do with about 93 broken packages. Luckily there was a blanket option to "upgrade" them all to the version that 9.0 included. That seemed to take care of mostly everything.

I was semi-shocked to see it carried over all of my older display and sound settings, but it was nice to not have to reconfirm them. I was impressed to see it actually went out and fetched the latest nvidia video driver and installed it for me. Another nice touch was being prompted to download all the latest package updates from Suse (security/bugfixes) and have them installed before I even logged in for the first time.

On first boot, my fonts were a little messed up, or more specifically, my GTK/GTK2 app fonts were odd. For some reason, SUSE had included a custom gtkrc which was located deeps in the depths of /opt/gnome which overrode my .gtkrc. Once it was found and eliminated, my gtk apps went back to using the superb QTCurve engine (which grabs all of it's font/color information from qt).

After playing around a bit, I guess they really did backport a lot of stuff from 2.6 into their kernel. It's blazing fast when doing I/O operations. Browsing the filesystem with Konqueror (never slow to begin with) seems to be faster than ever. As soon as I click the "Home" icon on the panel, Konqueror is up and the home directory is loaded. No delays, which is pretty amazing.

All of my older installed applications are working just fine (by older applications, I mean games). I did have to reinstall my vpnclient to connect to work, but I suppose that's to be expected.

Bottom line: Nothing revolutionary... just additions and tweaks to an already good product.