openSUSE
The openSUSE is a binary Linux distro sponsored by Novell. It is one of the first desktop-oriented distros, and has a very active and supportive user community.
Origin – Home Page: USA – openSUSE
Desktops: KDE (default), Gnome
Price: Free and Open Source
Comments: openSUSE has always features a very easy to use GUI installer, it allows you to choose either a KDE or Gnome desktop towards the end of the installation process. LVM is supported, but it’s not the default partitioning scheme. A firewall – enabled by default – is installed.
One of the nicest administrative features of openSUSE is its Control Center. This is not the same as the KDE control center, but a true administrative hub from which you can manipulate and customize your newly installed system. With this Control Center, you may never need to open single configuration file. Virtually every admin task has been GUI-fied.
The firewall, which was installed and enabled by default can be customized from here, and if you partitioned the hard drive using LVM, you can grow, resize, and perform other LVM-related task from the Control Center. Fedora is the only other distro with this LVM admin feature.
The Control Center has a listing of all the community-supported package repositories, so all you need to do to add a new repo is just check it. This comes in handy when you need to install application not available in the official repos.
This distro comes with the usual assortment of Internet, multimedia, and other desktop applications. Out of the box, Kaffeine, the default media player will not play commercial DVD videos, And that is because libdvdcss is not installed. However, adding the VideoLAN repo from the Control Center and installing VLC will solve that little problem. Firefox is installed, but lacks the plugins needed to handle multimedia files embedded in Web pages.
For added application security, Novell’s AppArmor is included.
Download/Buy: CD and DVD iso images for 32-bit, 64-bit, and PowerPC systems are available for download.
