steering AWAY from the xenophobic right wing nuts (Score 4, Insightful)

Im not sure where so many people have got the idea that SuSE is not free any more. SuSE, like all linux, is and always will be free.

Perhaps part of the confusion stems from the commercial (ie paid for by SuSE) software that is bundled with SuSE when you purchase a distro but is not available to download for free. I buy the professional distro EVERY minor version release, not because I need to but because I want to support SuSE. In yast, the SuSE set up tool, you may set the installation medium to be the SuSE ftp site and update all you want. You can install from scratch like this as well and even update your core system (although this will require you to burn a FREE to download cd also)

Just because a company lets you buy their linux distro in a shiny box with a bunch of lovely manuals, some cool stickers (which im glad to say are back in 8.1 after 8.0s notable absence) and literally tens of thousands of software packages, many of which you would otherwise have to PAY FOR, I really dont see why anyone complains.

ISOs are available for non i386 SuSE distros, but as has already been pointed out, downloading nearly 6 gigs when you are not even going to install it all seems a tad wasteful on the old bandwidth. Bandwidth which I might add SuSE have to pay for somewhere along the line. If you can afford the time online to download 7 CDs then you will have no problem installing the system you want over ftp.

SuSE Linux can be downloaded for FREE from: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/