Waiting eagerly for OpenSuse 11

Waiting eagerly for OpenSuse 11 and KDE4. I had to get rid of my Linux installation few weeks ago due to a HDD space problem, now holding off till version 11 comes out.
Here is a review and some screenshots of RC1.

 

Looks very nice. Now I don't know whether to try for this or Arch.

 

I'm not a fan of openSUSE or KDE but i might give this a whirl eventually. Also, i wouldn't suggest you try Arch unless your ready to learn and work for your system. If you're lazy and just want things to work, then keep using Ubuntu, if you wanna get messy and configure things 'till the sun explodes then use Arch.

 

Well, I'm more a GNOME person myself as well. But, the school holiday is coming soon, and it's a good way to pass the time. What other distros do you recommend for 'fooling around and exploring'?

 

Gentoo will take a lot of time out of your schedule for sure, but i suggest you just back up all your data and fool around in Ubuntu to see what you can muck with. If you mess up your system you'll be fine with a reinstall, but you'll learn a lot more than if you were trying to be careful with it.

 

Many of the new Linux distros work great immediately once installed. They don't take much effort to install and the learning curve for some - Ubuntu, Mint, OpenGEU . . . - is easy enough that even I don't have much trouble using them. LOL

If you feel like "fooling around and exploring" there are a few distros not quite so easy to install or simple to learn, and probably will keep you busy passing some time: Slackware, Arch and Gentoo come to mind pretty quickly. Gentoo is waaay beyond me, but you may find it a great distro to dive into. Arch gets a lot of votes around this forum, and I know a couple of gents who swear by Slackware, which I think, is the oldest surviving Linux distro.

Personally, I like Ubuntu, Suse, OpenGEU and Mandriva, but someday am going to get Arch or Gentoo up and running, just so I can say I finally did it!

 

'rob.....do you find OpenGEU pretty functional given the E17 desktop? I'm thinking of putting it on another laptop I have.

 

+1

LOL there's a minimum message length of 10 characters???

 

I used to be an Opensuse enthusiast in the past, but all the bloatware eventually got to me. I mean, ten different programs that all do the same thing? It's no wonder that Ubuntu claimed me so easily. I've been glancing over at Opensuse 11, just to see how things are going for the opensuse team, but I've only been mildly impressed at most.... and definitely not impressed enough to switch back. Might give a live CD a shot though......

 

I'd recommend Debian. Its highly customizable, and hence requires more user intervention. Ubuntu is based on the unstable branch of debian, so manytimes Ubuntu instructions apply to debian.

Many distros are based off debian - ubuntu, mint, mepis, Damn small Linux etc, so if u tinker with linux, you'll be dealing with the real stuff.

However, Debian is not too user unfriendly, it requires some intervention (mostly in case of propietary drivers) but not too much.

 

[

QUOTE=wearetheborg;3497704]I'd recommend Debian. Its highly customizable, and hence requires more user intervention. Ubuntu is based on the unstable branch of debian, so manytimes Ubuntu instructions apply to debian.

Many distros are based off debian - ubuntu, mint, mepis, Damn small Linux etc, so if u tinker with linux, you'll be dealing with the real stuff.

However, Debian is not too user unfriendly, it requires some intervention (mostly in case of propietary drivers) but not too much.[/QUOTE]

I am by no means a Linux expert (or anything else for that matter) but I use both Ubuntu (on my laptop) and Debian (on an older desktop) and they are very similar and yes I have used Ubuntu instructions in the past to get things working in Debian. The Ubuntu forums are probably some of the most helpful/active out there and this makes Ubuntu a great 1st distro for that reason alone.​

 

Actually, Mint is based on Ubuntu, and is very different from even that.

 

And Ubuntu is based on Debian, so by transitivity
mint is debian based

 

But very different....

 

I think I might throw this on my 1520 for a bit and give it a try. I had openSuse 10 on my Thinkpad T60 for a while and it worked fine out of the "box".

 

I'm no expert. But so far OpenSuse has turned out to be my favorite distro, partly due to the looks (I guess many would agree that OpenSuse is the best looking distro out there), but mostly because it has proved to be the least difficult to setup and configure. I've had a nightmare with Ubuntu and Beril last time I tried it. And I couldn’t get the mic working in Fedora Core no matter what I did.

I'm sure some of you guys will disagree with me, but this is just my personal experience.

 

Beryl? Isn't that outdated? It's now called Compiz-Fusion.

 

Yeah it is.. but when i tried Ubuntu Beryl was the fancier one, it wasn't re-merged/renamed at the time.

 

You may want to try the latest version now, or even wait for 8.10. There are many changes between releases so you may actually like it more now.

 

Sorry, Zoid, I missed your question 'til now.

I like OpenGEU, but have found that the "dock" gizmo which resembles that in OSX, really isn't to my liking, but otherwise I think the OS is just about as functional as Ubuntu. Everything I've tried works very well and I like the system as 7.04.

The issue which really irks me though, and is the reason I switched from OpenGEU back to Ubuntu, is that the system is based on 7.04. If you update to the latest version, you end up with Ubuntu and lose all the different little odds and ends which differentiate the two distros, the desktop being the only exception I noticed.

My advice (for what little it may be worth lol): stay with Ubuntu.

 

Yeah, I put Xubuntu on my second laptop....(8.04) works great, of course

 

It's gonna be released in T-16? What's up with that?

 

That is a link to a counter I found in the OpenSuse wiki site. Now it reads T-10, 10hrs more to go ?

 

It's out now.

 

Downloading it know.

 

Downloading it as well. I am going to try is as dual boot with Debian on an aging AMD 2600+ desktop.

 

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/static/suse11.html

Above is a review of SUSE 11. It looks like a disappointing distro.

 

Judging from that review, you're right, Bog. 10.3 was nice, I thought, so am now downloading this distro just to give it a shot, and will judge for myself - not that I'm anywhere near proficient enough with Linux that my opinion matters much. LOL

I do enjoy the distro-hopping life into which I've been forced by Zoid's never-ending descriptive yarns of adventure with Linux!

 

What is dissappointing about it ? Seems like a solid update to 10.3

 

Yep, I also don’t see why Bog call it disappointing Maybe it is not a big jump forward (since there a major version change), but there are improvements without any drawbacks (at least according to that review); which is a good thing…

Downloaded the ISO, but wont be able to try it for a couple of days

 

They've thrown together minor improvements that require little original effort on their part; they're just recompiling the system to work with other coder's newer applications. SUSE itself hasn't been improved; they've just updated the 3rd party applications that come with it.

YAST is, according to the review, a monolithic design that is a complete labrynth for users to navigate. I agree with the authors. It makes Vista's control panel childishly simple. Yet, it has been around for years without it being overhauled or terminated altogether.

The number of plugins that Compiz comes with sucks; Ubuntu has had those accessibility plugins since the beginning of Beryl... what the hell?

I agree with this part of the review in particular; making a mediocre release is not okay in the extremely competitive Linux development market, its disappointing.

 

Yeah, judging from the review, it doesn't look like Opensuse 11 has changed too much from 10.3, which is actually not a good thing b/c 10.3 was a very disappointing distro for me since I had a hellish time getting wifi to work. The only thing that looks promising this far in is KDE 4, since it looks like the Opensuse team has finally got it to run stable in their latest release. Has anyone tried out KDE 4 in Opensuse 11 yet?? Care to share the details???

Opensuse 10.1 was my first real distro and what really got me into linux, so of course I have sympathies for how the Opensuse team is doing. It's just that ever since Ubuntu Feisty I've found it really hard to go back....

 

Finally got some time and installed it. So far it is all good. Installation went smoothly, and everything was automatically detected including wi-fi. As I recall Even my external monitor over HDMI was detected and working the very first boot (it was 2am in the morning, so cant recall everything, sorry.....)

After installing nVidia drivers (just one click) I was able to get Compiz fusion working (again one click) right away. The only problem I have left is getting the internal mic to work, but an external mic works.

I consider myself a happy windows user (not a hardcore linux fan/user), therefore my comments don’t carry much weight here, I know. But at least from the view point of a Windows user I find openSuse to be a very good user friendly linux distro. It may not be as advanced as some other distros out there (I don't have enough knowledge to really talk about the technical advancements or drawbacks of opensuse and other distros); but at least it is usable right out of the box, like windows. I’ve been using it from time to time from version 8 and several other distors like Redhat/fedora, mandrake and ubuntu. But always went back to Suse. Maybe because of the fancy GUI

 

I installed it a couple of days ago and installation went OK. Wi Fi is not working so it seems I will be using "ndiswrapper" again. The refresh rate was also set too high causing no picture on bootup but easy to fix by editing the xorg.config file.

 

I also installed it a couple of days ago and like it better than 10.3. Text especially is much crisper and I haven't even bothered to update drivers. Forgot to check out the sound. In 10.3, the sound worked, but could just barely be heard. Will have to see later if there's been an improvement. Have really only spent a few minutes with the update.

 

What is the wireless card , not Intel ?

@bmwrob : I installed MS fonts (with the help of this guide) and made it look better. Now Firefox looks almost as it does in Windows.

 

That the changes in openSUSE 11.0 are insignificant must be a joke.

1.) The main criticism of openSUSE 10.x (besides the Novell-MS deal) was the slow package management and bootup speed. SUSE developers have made "massive efforts" (distrowatch.com) to speed up the package management and it's easily among the fastest out there by now. Furthermore, with *zypper* Suse has developed/integrated an absolutely state-of-the-art command line tool for package management. Bootup speeds have significantly increased from 10.3, too.

2.) KDE 4 is no major improvement?? KDE 4 in openSUSE actually works, especially since they decided to include most new features where they make sense but fall back to KDE 3 apps when features are too unstable (most notable, retaining KDE3 Konqueror was an excellent move).

3.) I like openSUSE's decisions regarding including new software also elsewhere, e.g., they included Firefox 3 (reasonably stable) but avoided to integrate the latest X.org (which would have led to a plethora of problems with the proprietary Nvidia and ATI drivers).

There are so many nice distros out there and it's great if you prefer another one over openSUSE. But that the updates were minor is just not true. It'd be much more appropriate to say Ubuntu 8.04 was a conservative new release in terms of added features than openSUSE 11.0.

 

No it's a Netgear WG311 (I think). It has never worked out of the box with any distro I tried but I had no issues with ndiswrapper. If you have a better idea though I will listen. I will be off from work on Thursday and I plan to get this done then.
Thanks.

 

I tried the live version o Suse 11.0
It booted fine, correct resolution. But Compiz was not enabled, and I could not enable it. So I tried to install the NVIDIA driver according to their instructions. It installed fine, but when I tried to configure it (sax2 -r), the screen blonked a few times then went blank. CTRL+ALT+F2 etc would saty blank. No soft reboot, so I had to do a hard reset.
Somehow Mint, Ubuntu and Suse 11.0 have all failed to install and correctly configure the NVIDIA driver. Looks like SLED 10 will be staying on this system.

 

On all of my boxes, when I install the Nvidia driver via one-click install ( http://opensuse-community.org/1-click-collection), I don't need to configure it via sax2. It just works OOB. Of course, if you require Twinview or the like, you need to configure that. But even then, IMO, it's better to run "nvidia-settings" as root and let it save any changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf than to use sax2.

Btw, the page I provide the link to above also provides a quick-and-dirty way to set up Compiz and friends.

 

Well I switched to Gnome and although I have the Netgear WD311v3 installed with Ndiswrapper I still can't connect to the wireless network.
I must take a break now as Spain is playing Russia in the semis of Euro 08 but I will fiddle with it a bit more right after the game.