Suse Linux Office Desktop

This is SuSE's first stab into the competitive Linux desktop market, and is fundamentally SuSE Linux 8.1 Personal with the latest set of patches and some extras. You get Star Office 6, Crossover Office and Plugin, plus Acronis OS Selector.

Star Office is fully compatible with Microsoft Office formats, while the Crossover software lets you install Office. It also supports Lotus Notes and enables many Windows web browser plug-ins to work in their Linux equivalents.

Acronis' software also lets you repartition and resize partitions, including NTFS. Installation is straightforward with a number of customisation options.

The standard software set installs KDE and Gnome desktop environments, although the former is better configured by SuSE; Gnome was unstable and badly put together.

We had a few problems getting our test PC up and running; the video settings were difficult to change, and the method of selection is clunky.

The printer, soundcard, mouse and modem were all identified and configured, but the DVD-Rom drive was not, and we had difficulty accessing our CD-RW drive through KDE.

Web browsing is catered for by Konqueror and Mozilla, and worked perfectly with the common web formats. File browsing on the whole was fine; clicking on a pdf file opened up Adobe Acrobat and MP3 files gave us the XMMS media player.

Despite Crossover Office being installed, clicking on Windows.exe files gave a 'not found' error.

The update process was tedious - it took over half an hour just to get a list of updates, even before downloads began. The Yast2 set-up tool is otherwise easy to use, making it simple to add users or change settings.

Contact: SuSE Linux 020 8846 3918
www.suse.co.ukSystem requirements:

• 200MHz processor
• 64MB of Ram
• 400MB hard disk space