On Thursday 01 July 2004 22:33, Robert Frusher wrote: Does anyone know how big
the Suse kernel is? I know the slack 10.0 one I am presently using is around 1.17MB which I reckon is pretty slim.
Probably quite large, It has to be as SuSE's target demographic (for the workstation at least) demands that the distro works pretty much out of the box on almost any box.
I am thinking that the 2.6 kernel with Suse is overloaded... along with their X. For instance my Aitpek tablet worked on Suse, but I would have to recompile stuff to get it going on Slack.
A lot of the judgement between the commercial distros seems to centre around how well they detect hardware. You see it all the time on newsgroups and in the press in comparative tests...Distro Bar detected hardware x correctly however distro foo failed completely.....
Personally I see nothing wrong with this approach. You install the (bloated) kernel....everything works. Then if you are a power user or you really care about speed you can mess about trimming down the config and building a new kernel, or you can sacrifice some performance and stay with the default one.
How is this behaviour any worse than building up from a base config ?
There is no reason why I couldn't take a SuSE installation and trim it down to be as quick as your slackware one, This would probably take no more time than it takes you to build up a slack installation on an unfamiliar box. However it would sort of defeat one of the biggest draws of Distributions like SuSE..and that is that most things just work.
I tried Suse at my Brother in laws uni last year, and thought exactly the same thing... very sluggish... that was an AMD 2100 or something of that calibre.
Do SUSe compile KDE for 686 or lower? optimisations...
I think they compile for i586, however there are also Athlon optimised kernel builds (it should have auto-detected this at the installation)
It comes down to different tools for different jobs, or at least different tools for different people in different circumstances.
W