Suse Linux Professional 9.3 64bit

Novell's distribution aimed at 'power users' rather than companies

Suse Linux Professional 9.3 is positioned by Novell as its 'power user' distribution. Enterprises are meant to play safe with the more conservative Novell Linux Desktop. The two products are based on the same core, but Suse lives closer to the bleeding edge with a more up-to-date bundle of applications, some of them beta releases.

Despite these cautionary notes, Suse is just as usable and stable as other popular distributions. Version 9.3 uses the 2.6 kernel, and comes with lots of applications, including a pre-release Open Office 2, Linphone Voice over IP, and Bluetooth and wireless networking support.

Suse's 64bit edition is included along with the standard 32bit build. The 64bit edition is installed by default on systems that support it. When you install, the only 64bit indication is a tiny '64bit' caption on the very first screen. It's easy to miss and you could install the 64bit edition without realising. Only the presence of the lib64 directories show that you have entered the world of 64bit computing.

On the surface, most things work the same as on 32bit systems and existing programs execute seamlessly. Linux has an advantage over proprietary operating systems, in that most software is distributed as source code. Provided that the developers take care to make their code 64bit compatible, the software compiles equally well for either platform. The result is that most packages in Suse Linux are true 64bit. There are some important exceptions, such as Open Office and Adobe Acrobat, but thanks to the flexibility of the hybrid AMD and Intel processors, 32bit code also runs with full performance.

It turns out that Suse Linux is an excellent platform for 64bit computing. On our Intel EM64T system, everything worked more or less immediately, including USB, Intel Hi-definition audio, and the Nvidia Geforce 5900 PCI Express graphics. We could compile and run 64bit applications, while 32bit applications such as Open Office ran fine as well.

Having said that, 64bit involves some risks and compromises. Driver support is the main issue. AMD has a handy table of current 64bit device driver support for Linux and Windows. Some drivers have fewer features in their 64bit versions, or are still in beta and may cause problems. Even if you are downloading and compiling software from source, you may run into configuration issues or compatibility problems. As with all 64bit systems, applications will typically consume more Ram, because every variable that addresses memory has to allow for larger numbers.

If you have more than 4GB of Ram installed, 64bit is worthwhile since the system will be able to run more applications simultaneously, or applications that deal with very large documents or data structures. Another advantage is that 64bit processors perform some calculations faster, and the AMD64 extensions include extra registers that enhance performance.

Games, Cad systems, statistical processing and large databases are good candidates for 64bits. However, few desktop systems currently have this much Ram. As yet, 64bit is not truly compelling on the desktop, but soon will be as hardware advances.

More generally, Suse 9.3 is an impressive package but not flawless. When you install, you choose between the default KDE, or the Gnome desktop environment. It's not an easy decision since you get a different set of applications as well as different desktops. We ran into minor problems with both. On Gnome there was an empty floating window called Suseplugger that should have been invisible, while the KDE installation failed to mount the Windows NTFS drives on our dual-boot system and we had to edit the fstab configuration file manually.

These are small quirks in an otherwise positive experience, but reinforce the view that Linux is still more suitable for enthusiasts than for everyday users, unless suitable support is at hand.

• Pentium or Athlon with AMD64/EM64T for 64bit (Not Itanium)
• 256MB of Ram or higher
• 2.5GB of disk space