I did a total reinstall for 8.1 as I wanted to completely redesign my partition layout to allow space for Slackware and LFS, and as such was expecting a fairly painless install onto a nice freshly formatted piece of disk. ‘Twas not to be … nothing really Bad, but just a series of irritating things to fix once the system was running. And although I had no trouble sorting it all out I suspect that a total newb might have had to spend quite a while reading to fix things.

Now I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing for a newbie to have to do, but SuSE are regarded as a fairly safe bet for beginners and some of the problems – such as the modules for controlling DVD and CDRW drives – hadn’t occurred in 7.3, so why suddenly an issue in 8.1? Most newbies probably want to spend a bit of time learning about commands like ls and cd before they get onto modprobe and gcc.

Maybe I’ll post a bit more about getting 8.1 to the same stage as 7.3 got itself another day. There’s certainly been a fair bit of traffic in alt.os.linux.suse about some of these problems, so it might be helpful to some people.

Anyway, I’ve got to go and configure an X server and compile some winmodem drivers, so I’ll be signing off now. Bye!