SuSE 9.3 Linux available for free

Since last week the new SuSE Linux Professional version 9.3 is available for download. You can download it from a mirror in your vicinity and install it via FTP.

I succesfully upgraded my laptop (i386) with the new SuSE using the mirror site at University Utrecht (The Netherlands), because it is the nearest site for me.
My first impression is that the new KDE 3.4 looks really wonderfull, perhaps even better than WindowsXp – judge for yourself. Nice tiny and sharp characters and images. Further, the KDE messenger, Kopete works again against MSN (Amis people use MSN for chatting). Also installed is Adobe Reader 7.0, OpenOffice 2.0 and more new stuff.

The installation/upgrade was very easy and straightforward and consists of the following steps:

1. Download the boot.iso located at ../current/boot/boot.iso
2. Burn the iso on a CD.
3. Backup your old system and your important files
4. Start your old system and open a console, resolve the IP number of the FTP site by issueing a ping to your chosen FTP mirror site (ping ftp.nl.uu.net) and write the number down on a piece of paper or remember it.
5. Restart your system from the CD and choose to install from CD.
6. Choose installation from a FTP site. Unfortunately not the name of the FTP site, but the IP number of the FTP site is requested. So use the IP number gathered from step 4. I couldn’t install from the ../9.3 directory directly, because of the period in the directory name. Using the linked ../current directory fixes the problem.
7. Choose fresh install or upgrade. Because I already ran a SuSE 9.1 version, I choose to upgrade.
8. After the installer program finished analysing your system, you may want to change/adjust the default settings (I didn’t have to).
9. Upgrading my system took about 3 hours on a 512 Kbit/sec DSL connection. During this time 400+ software packages where downloaded and installed. That’s quite a long time and you might consider to make a copy of the packages on your local domain and upgrade from there.
10. After reboot be sure the root password is still valid. On my system it somehow changed!? But no panic, getting it back is not that difficult: reboot the system in single user mode; issue the passwd command and change the password. That’s all.

The next install is the new Oracle 10g release 2 database.