SuSE Linux 9.2 Upgrade...
My SuSE 9.2 Update came in today, and my first comment is that Novell is very prominent in the packaging. This is not a big surprise to me, considering all calls and e-mails I make with them regarding the ability to purchase an Update in Canada; more specifically, they announced towards the middle of October that you could pre-order SuSE. In the UK and Germany, you could purchase both the Upgrade and the Full-Version, but in the US and Canada, well, only the Full-Version. A day or so after it officially came out is when I was finally able to order it, and then it was back-ordered. Arrhgg... In the two or so other times in dealing with SuSE, it wasn't like this.
On the other hand, this is the first time that the DVD actually worked in my system. I am not sure if its my system or the other SuSE distributions, but the latest DVD is labeled and it works, and I was happy not changing the CD's around. The installer was much more refined than the last time, and very smooth. Towards the end, however, I guess I answered the question about the Firewall incorrectly, since when my box came back up, the network was not operational, and since my machines are dependent on my network, this resulted in the machine being painfully slow.
It actually took longer to solve this problem than I thought. I tried tweaking the /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2, but it still got stuck in the NFS mount problem. I then disabled the NFS drives from the fstab, and I was finally able to get it into X, but the remaining system was still slow, so I finally decided to get out of X via CTRL-ALT-F1, and logged into a normal shell. Here, I was able to go into yast and disable the firewall.
Once that was done, I rebooted, and I was then able to login for the first time. The new KDE 3.3 is nice, but I quickly noticed that my system was not normal; in previous versions of SuSE, I used the terminal Eterm, and it is no longer provided by SuSE and the downloadable RPM fails miserably because of missing dependencies that are no longer available. This was disappointing, and I am now trying to get used to konsole.
The worst of this is that it seems that this package was removed without any notification; there were some conflicts, but nothing regarding Eterm. Some of the conflicts I received had to do with the upgrade to Apache TomCat 5.0, where the packages for the installed 4.x version had an upgrade, but it decided to install 5.0 instead.
Also, in the last update, I was wondering about the XFree86 status in 9.1. Well, it seems that in 9.2, they have also moved the move to X.org, and this transition seemed seamless so far.
Overall, there were a few bumps in the road, but it seems nice so far. And at least, I still have pine (which I can't say the same for Fedora Core).