Novell Launches Linux 2.6 Kernel in SuSE 9.1

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell has had a busy couple of days in the Linux market. Late last week, the company rolled out the personal and professional editions of SuSE Linux 9.1, the first SuSE implementation to employ the 2.6 kernel. SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal is not going to be very interesting to server customers, but if you have a hankering to build a Linux desktop, this one will be a radical improvement compared to prior SuSE implementations for Linux on PCs. SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional is going to be very useful for 64-bit workstations for developers, and it will also see use in low-end servers because it is significantly less expensive than the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.1 Standard Edition.

Both editions of SuSE 9.1 are based on the new Linux 2.6 kernel, which has inherent performance improvements over the Linux 2.4 kernel, including 64-bit memory addressing on IBM, AMD, and Intel processors and support for file systems that are larger than two terabytes. The Linux 2.6 kernel has much-improved multithreading and multitasking, which means that streaming audio and video work better on desktops and databases and applications work better on servers. SuSE 9.1 also includes the new Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), a new sound system whose development was spearheaded by SuSE in the Linux community. The Linux 2.6 kernel also has a better implementation of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), which allows laptops to burn less juice as they are idling. SuSE 9.1 supports the new Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1 graphical user interfaces. Both SuSE 9.1 Personal and SuSE 9.1 Professional come with the OpenOffice suite, an alternative to Microsoft's Office suite.

SuSE 9.1 Personal comes as a LiveCD, which means end users who are not sure about Linux can boot off of the CD and onto a 32-bit X86 processor and not actually install Linux on their machines and yet still play around with it. It costs $29.95, which gives customers 30 days of installation support. SuSE 9.1 Professional, which costs $89.95, is aimed at both 32-bit and 64-bit processors and includes 2,500 applications, including Samba 3 for linking into Windows networks that use Active Directory, the Quanta Plus HTML editor, and the KDevelop 3.0 C, C++, and Java tool. And while SuSE is not advertising this, SuSE 9.1 Professional will run all of the standard Linux server programs such as Sendmail, Apache, Postfix, and so forth. It will make an excellent uniprocessor server operating system for companies that do not want to shell out $799 for a server implementation of Linux. SuSE is offering SuSE 9.1 as a trial download now and will begin shipping it in early May.

One last thing: For enthusiasts of the Cyrix C3 X86 clone processors from VIA Technologies, we hear that SuSE Linux 9.1 will support these chips. Up until now, SuSE has not supported these chips, while Red Hat has. We plan to test this on our own puppy C3 server, and we'll let you know how it goes.