SuSE 10.1 workstation image

We need a new workstation image as SuSE 9.3 won't be supported for very much longer (ends Easter 2007). In order that I don't have to do this this again in six months I'm going for SuSE 10.1 rather than 10.0. I have considered Debian but am still not totally convinced about the improvement in the release cycle. Ubuntu needs too much messing about to make it work the way I want it to. Redhat isn't free (as in beer).

Needless to say going to SuSE 10.1 is going to involve changes and compromise.

Good things about 10.1

• security updates until May 2008, may be able to stretch this further by judicious use of rpms from SLES 10.
• working automounter
• much better removable media handling (in fact this is debatable: it only works for GNOME and KDE. Those of us who like fvwm will finally have to enter the 21st century)
• allegedly new and improved update mechanism (in fact: buggy and totally unreliable new update mechanism, but I live in hope of fixes and anyway it's the sysadmin's problem not the user's)
• gcc 4 and gfortran

Problems with 10.1 that I can't currently fix (I'm not going to bore everyone with the list of bad things I've fixed)

• no gcc3 package, so some stuff won't work. They supply g77 out of gcc 3 so why not gcc itself?
• Pathscale don't support it yet