Just tried openSUSE 10.2

[RAV TUX]

I have to say I am impressed!

[Adamant1988]

I've really been impressed by Novell's offerings consistently. It's that god-awful package manager that has thrown me off and turned me to something else every time. Have they fixed that?

Also, how is driver support and so forth in this new release? I look forward to testing it. :)

[RAV TUX]

I've really been impressed by Novell's offerings consistently. It's that god-awful package manager that has thrown me off and turned me to something else every time. Have they fixed that?

Also, how is driver support and so forth in this new release? I look forward to testing it. :)
admittedly I didn't get connected to the internet but I was very impressed...can't give much more details then an initial evaluation.

The hardware detection and drivers are improved first time I have been able to install without event...no autodetect on the internet, lack of set-up was completly lack of knowledge on my part....I am sure it is simple....very impressed over all.

[Adamant1988]

My experience is that it's usually as simple as turning it on.

[RAV TUX]

My experience is that it's usually as simple as turning it on.
not sure why it didn't work for me....but it has been an odd distro day for me today

[tagginannie]

admittedly I didn't get connected to the internet but I was very impressed...can't give much more details then an initial evaluation.

The hardware detection and drivers are improved first time I have been able to install without event...no autodetect on the internet, lack of set-up was completly lack of knowledge on my part....I am sure it is simple....very impressed over all.

Shame on you for supporting the evil empire :tongue:

Suizy :KS

[kazuya]

I am very slightly impressed too, but also dissappointed by the lack of working internet. I can fix this though. It appears polished, but I see Linux Mint or Edgy as being more polished in my book. Opensuse 10.2 seems too much like Xandros or Linspire look-wise.

Look is a subjective thing, but the distro was not as slow as I thought it would be.

It makes sense to use Suse as you may come full circle to it. I would use the other distros anyday of the year over Suse, but you have to give props were props are due.

Dreamlinux is potentially another distro I may try for its look and debian heritage.

[_simon_]

I installed it yesterday (KDE) after playing with the Live DVD for a few days.

So far so good, got everything working - network, 3d drivers, sound, scanner, printer, codecs and beryl.

Only complaint so far is how long the YAST software management takes to open, in comparison Synaptic is blazingly fast!

[irongeek]

One thing I do like about OpenSUSE is it's a lot easier to connect and authenticate against Active Directory with.

[Adamant1988]

not sure why it didn't work for me....but it has been an odd distro day for me today

Well, I've had multiple distributions fail to ACTIVATE my eth0 port. So it was just a matter of going in and turning it on by hand, never had to do it again after that.

[tstrowd]

I wanted to go that way but the install process failed several times. Did you have problems installing at all? It would get to installing Suse files then "freeze". Ubuntu does not have a problem on this machine like Suse does.
What a shame.

[Adamant1988]

I wanted to go that way but the install process failed several times. Did you have problems installing at all? It would get to installing Suse files then "freeze". Ubuntu does not have a problem on this machine like Suse does.
What a shame.

Your issue could be a number of things not directly related to Suse.

Have you checked the md5 for your CD to verify that the burn and the iso are good?

[kenetics]

I've really been impressed by Novell's offerings consistently. It's that god-awful package manager that has thrown me off and turned me to something else every time. Have they fixed that?

Also, how is driver support and so forth in this new release? I look forward to testing it. :)

Very nice desktop, but I have to agree about the package manager. I didn't understand all those networking questions during the install - I just accepted all the defaults (I have a wired network with a D-Link router and cable modem). What's funny is my system failed the connect test during installation. In frustration, I clicked on it a number of times and it started to download stuff and I was able to connect ok. :lol:

[Segovia]

I switched from ubuntu (kubuntu actually) to openSUSE a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've tried most of the KDE-centric distros over the last couple years and openSUSE has been the best for me.

All of my hardware was detected and configured perfectly on install (your mileage may vary). Nvidia drivers (7800 GT) were a piece of cake. No hand editing of xorg.conf and other rubbish. I installed them and they worked perfectly. Took me 60 seconds.

It came with Sun Java, Flash, and mscorefonts preinstalled (DVD download does this). It took me 5 mins to install Azureus and w32codecs and I was good to go for the most part. SUSE's graphical tools (YAST) are just great. I've never used CLI to configure anything in SUSE (Flame on, CLI lovers. I couldn't care less whether or not you approve.)

What really impressed me about SUSE compared to Ubuntu was that SUSE seems very aware that it's users expect things like vid drivers, java, flash, ms codecs/fonts etc., and they make it very easy and painless to obtain them.

A few posters have complained about YAST's package manager. Everything they say is true. It sucks compared to synaptic. However, SMART is easy to install and works in a very similar fashion to synaptic. I continue to use YAST package management. Why? Because it works fine (just slow) and I don't use it often. I've got everything I need installed, and with openSUSE 10.2, ZENworks takes care of all my updates. ZEN was broken in 10.1, but works perfectly on my 10.2 setup.

I don't dislike ubuntu at all, I just think they need to raise the bar a bit. The last couple releases have not addressed many of the biggest beefs that people have with ubuntu.

[Adamant1988]

I switched from ubuntu (kubuntu actually) to openSUSE a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've tried most of the KDE-centric distros over the last couple years and openSUSE has been the best for me.

All of my hardware was detected and configured perfectly on install (your mileage may vary). Nvidia drivers (7800 GT) were a piece of cake. No hand editing of xorg.conf and other rubbish. I installed them and they worked perfectly. Took me 60 seconds.

It came with Sun Java, Flash, and mscorefonts preinstalled (DVD download does this). It took me 5 mins to install Azureus and w32codecs and I was good to go for the most part. SUSE's graphical tools (YAST) are just great. I've never used CLI to configure anything in SUSE (Flame on, CLI lovers. I couldn't care less whether or not you approve.)

What really impressed me about SUSE compared to Ubuntu was that SUSE seems very aware that it's users expect things like vid drivers, java, flash, ms codecs/fonts etc., and they make it very easy and painless to obtain them.

A few posters have complained about YAST's package manager. Everything they say is true. It sucks compared to synaptic. However, SMART is easy to install and works in a very similar fashion to synaptic. I continue to use YAST package management. Why? Because it works fine (just slow) and I don't use it often. I've got everything I need installed, and with openSUSE 10.2, ZENworks takes care of all my updates. ZEN was broken in 10.1, but works perfectly on my 10.2 setup.

I don't dislike ubuntu at all, I just think they need to raise the bar a bit. The last couple releases have not addressed many of the biggest beefs that people have with ubuntu.

So true. OpenSuse 10.2 is a milestone release, it really sets a new standard in quality and professionalism in my opinion.

[tstrowd]

Your issue could be a number of things not directly related to Suse.

Have you checked the md5 for your CD to verify that the burn and the iso are good?

Of course. Ran the MD5 hash check on all 5 Suse 10.1 and 10.2 cd's.
They all said match!
This is a strange problem because i had switched to 2 completely different machines with the same results. I really wanted to try Suse because i had heard of the active directory integration was much easier.
The posts earlier in this thead for active directory links i have tried and they do not work. For instance one of the links says to run Wbinfo to list users. Wbinfo does not exist on this machine.
Installing KRB5 like it says IS NOT and option. The list goes on and on for dead ends for active directory.

[Adamant1988]

Of course. Ran the MD5 hash check on all 5 Suse 10.1 and 10.2 cd's.
They all said match!
This is a strange problem because i had switched to 2 completely different machines with the same results. I really wanted to try Suse because i had heard of the active directory integration was much easier.
The posts earlier in this thead for active directory links i have tried and they do not work. For instance one of the links says to run Wbinfo to list users. Wbinfo does not exist on this machine.
Installing KRB5 like it says IS NOT and option. The list goes on and on for dead ends for active directory.
Did you burn the CDs at a slow speed? (as close to x1 as possible)

[Raffo]

I installed today openSUSE 10.2 on my pc, on the second HD and I think I'm going to format the partition very soon. Nice desktop, but the package manager is a pain in the ***... I've lost 1h to succesfully install nvidia 3d drivers and I think I'm gonna loose my time with suse anymore.

I'm still looking for a good kde centric distro (I don't like kubuntu, I'm now running ubuntu with kde-core installed).

[Jabran Asghar]

Very nice desktop, but I have to agree about the package manager. I didn't understand all those networking questions during the install - I just accepted all the defaults (I have a wired network with a D-Link router and cable modem). What's funny is my system failed the connect test during installation. In frustration, I clicked on it a number of times and it started to download stuff and I was able to connect ok. :lol:

Hi, Just wondering what do you mean by nice desktop? Is it that the default theme and selection of applications is very nice, or its something else? I am just trying to have an idea if I should try Suse 10.2 or not :roll: If you (or anyone else) can be more specific about the additive features/benefits that you see in Suse 10.2 then that may be helpful.


Jabran

[Raffo]

Hi, Just wondering what do you mean by nice desktop? Is it that the default theme and selection of applications is very nice, or its something else? I am just trying to have an idea if I should try Suse 10.2 or not :roll: If you (or anyone else) can be more specific about the additive features/benefits that you see in Suse 10.2 then that may be helpful.


Jabran
For nice desktop I mean a nice default theme. Application selection is not special, I link kerry in the taskbar by default. The new KMenu is very good. The rest is not as good, expecially the package manager...

[Jabran Asghar]

For nice desktop I mean a nice default theme. Application selection is not special, I link kerry in the taskbar by default. The new KMenu is very good. The rest is not as good, expecially the package manager...



Does anyone know which is the default theme on Suse 10.2? I will want to try that on Ubuntu.

[pain of salvation]

Yast and ZenWorks work like a charm for me, but you can remove zenworks and try smart package manager... or even apt.

[tstrowd]

Did you burn the CDs at a slow speed? (as close to x1 as possible)

I guess i'll try going down to 1x.
I have never had a cd burn issue before with anything else at full speed.

[Adamant1988]

I guess i'll try going down to 1x.
I have never had a cd burn issue before with anything else at full speed.

I can't burn anything over 4x on CD without something getting screwed up..

[Segovia]

I'm still looking for a good kde centric distro (I don't like kubuntu, I'm now running ubuntu with kde-core installed).

I don't know what it is you're looking for specifically Raffo, but perhaps you should try PCLinuxOS (http://pclinuxos.com/). It's quite nice in my view - very polished, and is attracting quite a lot of attention lately with the new test version that came out for their "2007" version. They've got a live CD, so you can check it out before you commit to anything.

This is not directed at you specifically, Raffo, but I just wanted to mention that no distro is perfect out of the box. All of them have at least one thing that is a pain in the neck. Rather than jumping from distro to distro trying to find the "perfect" distro, sometimes it's better to just pick something that you think will be around for awhile, has a dedicated dev team, and a philosophy you like, and learn how to make it work exactly as you like. That's one thing that I really love about Ubuntu - the philosophy of the founder, devs, and the community surrounding it.

[Raffo]

I don't know what it is you're looking for specifically Raffo, but perhaps you should try PCLinuxOS (http://pclinuxos.com/). It's quite nice in my view - very polished, and is attracting quite a lot of attention lately with the new test version that came out for their "2007" version. They've got a live CD, so you can check it out before you commit to anything.

This is not directed at you specifically, Raffo, but I just wanted to mention that no distro is perfect out of the box. All of them have at least one thing that is a pain in the neck. Rather than jumping from distro to distro trying to find the "perfect" distro, sometimes it's better to just pick something that you think will be around for awhile, has a dedicated dev team, and a philosophy you like, and learn how to make it work exactly as you like. That's one thing that I really love about Ubuntu - the philosophy of the founder, devs, and the community surrounding it.
First of all, thank you for the reply. I like ubuntu a lot, but I'm looking for a KDE-centric distro. I don't need a new distro right now, I'm fine with ubuntu + kde-core, but I just want to know if there's anything better around. I was disappointed with kubuntu and surprised that all the major distros are supporting GNOME by default. I definitely quote your post :)

EDIT: what I'm missing now is a fully integrated desktop, let me explain myself: when you run openSUSE (kde) you feel that everything is made to work together and that there's a sort of configuration from distro's manteiners. That's why I like my configuration, but I feel strange... but I think we're a little OT, we can continue here, if you want --> http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=361182&highlight=kubuntu

[justin whitaker]

There is much to like with OpenSUSE: professional and eye catching desktop, YAST works well for configuration...software management could be better, but they are working on it.

Once they really get the package management straightened out, OpenSUSE will cease to be like a really beautiful and mouth watering pepper pizza showing up at your door when you ordered pepperoni.

So close!

[julian67]

openSuse Package Management:

This solution works really well for openSuse 10.2 with KDE:

Uninstall zmd/Zen updater.

Install Suseupdater applet (it runs Yast software management) and Smart.

Use Smart with official Suse and also 3rd party repos (principally Packman and Guru and a few others from openSUSE build service (http://software.opensuse.org/) for latest Gnome/KDE/Games/p2p/xgl+compiz etc.
Smart is great for searching for and installing packages, very fast and reliable and excellent at resolving dependencies.

Configure suseupdater applet (add repos) with the same repos as Smart. This will notify you of any updates and identify security fixes (in red script) from regular updates.

Basically this method gives you automatic notification of critical fixes and lets you use something faster to search and install new stuff. This doesn't work well on a Gnome desktop as suseupdater is a KDE app (I've both Gnome and KDE and tried it).

[ronacc]

I saw on one of opensuse's web pages ( I forget which one) they are reccomending NOT to use ZMD/ZEN for updates now.
what version of K3B are you using to burn cd's ? one of the packman versions gave me the same problem , reverting to the version from the install disk cured the problem for me.

[julian67]

k3b 1.0rc5 works flawlessly for me

[Raffo]

openSuse Package Management:

This solution works really well for openSuse 10.2 with KDE:

Uninstall zmd/Zen updater.

Install Suseupdater applet (it runs Yast software management) and Smart.

Use Smart with official Suse and also 3rd party repos (principally Packman and Guru and a few others from openSUSE build service (http://software.opensuse.org/) for latest Gnome/KDE/Games/p2p/xgl+compiz etc.
Smart is great for searching for and installing packages, very fast and reliable and excellent at resolving dependencies.

Configure suseupdater applet (add repos) with the same repos as Smart. This will notify you of any updates and identify security fixes (in red script) from regular updates.

Basically this method gives you automatic notification of critical fixes and lets you use something faster to search and install new stuff. This doesn't work well on a Gnome desktop as suseupdater is a KDE app (I've both Gnome and KDE and tried it).
I followed your solution, now OpenSUSE works good...

[CaptSaltyJack]

Funny, I was using openSUSE 10.2 for about a week and a half, and I switched to Kubuntu. openSUSE is a resource hog.. at least on my system (Athlon64 3500+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 6200LE, running KDE + Beryl). Kubuntu feels much lighter and faster.. and Beryl for sure is a lot smoother in Kubuntu than it ever was in openSUSE.

Plus I don't like the politics of openSUSE and that whole deal with Novell and Microsoft. It pissed off the FSF enough for them to rewrite the GPL and make a GPLv3. What does that tell you??

openSUSE Pros:
* looks slick as hell
* some kinda magical KDE menu they've got there that no one else has (what is that and how do we get it on Kubuntu?!)
* looks nice
* a lot of hardware just "works" without much fiddling around
* nice collection of pre-installed software
* great installer, beats Ubuntu/Kubuntu by far
* did I mention it looks nice?

openSUSE Cons:
* sluggish compared to Ubuntu/Kubuntu
* YaST nowhere near as nice as Synaptic or Adept
* RPM not as nice as DEB
* Novell/Microsoft in bed..some see it as a good thing though
* stuff in the repositories can sometimes be OLD (their beryl is at 0.1.4 for example)
* nvidia drivers via YaST do not work as the wiki explains, you have to manually install


Just my personal opinion of course.

[_simon_]

openSUSE Cons:
* sluggish compared to Ubuntu/Kubuntu
* YaST nowhere near as nice as Synaptic or Adept
* RPM not as nice as DEB
* Novell/Microsoft in bed..some see it as a good thing though
* stuff in the repositories can sometimes be OLD (their beryl is at 0.1.4 for example)
* nvidia drivers via YaST do not work as the wiki explains, you have to manually install

Just my personal opinion of course.

Just want to add my experiences / thoughts :)

*I have actually found openSUSE to respond quicker than Ubuntu (I ran Ubuntu for over a year with and without Beryl). I currently use KDE + Beryl on SUSE (Athlon 3200+, 1Gig, Geforce 128Mb 6800)

*YaST - totally agree, if they sorted the speed issue out it would make a world of difference though.

*RPM v's Deb doesn't really bother me either way.

*Novel + MS, from what I have read won't have any real impact on openSUSE apart from. perhaps better handling of MS formats.

*old apps in repos - yeah bit annoying that one!

*nvidia drivers - I followed the easy guide on the opensuse website and it worked without issue:


* openSUSE 10.2:
o Import the NVIDIA GnuPG key. Type as root in a console: rpm --import 'ftp://download.nvidia.com/novell/repodata/repomd.xml.key'
o Add the YUM repository ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2/ to the package manager (YAST or ZEN).
o Install the packages x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-default
o Restart X.
o Done.



-------------

As for the openSUSE menu, it is called kickoff and I only found out recently that the button is skinable!

There is a Kubuntu version although I found it to be slower, a different size and not all the links worked. They may have ironed out a few things since I tried it though: http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=421&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

For anyone reading this that doesn't know what kickoff (new suse menu is) then here:
http://home.kde.org/~binner/kickoff/sneak_preview.html

What you can't see from the clip is that you do not have to click to open the menu, if you have the menu in a corner then simply placing your pointer into the corner will open the menu. Also, the 'tabs' along the bottom of the menu work on mouse over.

Kickoff button themes for openSUSE:

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=50550

I use the paperclip one :)

[CaptSaltyJack]

See, for me, those instructions you quoted for the nvidia drivers did not work for me. I restarted X...and X failed, came back with an error. I had to change the Device name from "nvidia" to "nv" to even get into X, to troubleshoot..

And maybe your 1GB of RAM gives you better response times in SUSE? I have 512MB on my Linux box currently. Kubuntu seems quicker to me for some reason.

[_simon_]

See, for me, those instructions you quoted for the nvidia drivers did not work for me. I restarted X...and X failed, came back with an error. I had to change the Device name from "nvidia" to "nv" to even get into X, to troubleshoot..

And maybe your 1GB of RAM gives you better response times in SUSE? I have 512MB on my Linux box currently. Kubuntu seems quicker to me for some reason.

I think you are right about the 1Gig making a difference.

If you look at my memory usage most of that 1Gig is being used as cache.

[CaptSaltyJack]

Weird, actually my applications weren't taking up much physical RAM.. 40-60%, the rest was disk cache. But even if I've got 30-40MB free of physical RAM, there's still swap being used for some odd reason.
I ordered 512MB more RAM, should make things a bit zippier.

[pain of salvation]

Funny, I have been using Ubuntu since version 5.10, and openSUSE since version 10.0.

I must say that in my machine (athlonXP 2800+, 512mb RAM, Nvidia GeForce Fx2500 128mb, MOBO Asus A7V8X-X) openSUSE 10.2 runs better than Ubuntu 6.10, even with beagle and ZenWorks.

Also I dont have problems with older packages on the repos. You just need to add the right repos.

Yast is slower than synaptic. But this is not a big problem to me, because I dont install new apps every day. And its not that slooooower than synaptic, it is just... slower. Also you can use smart (that is much better than synaptic/apt), or even apt.

Did not have a problem installing the latest nvidia driver on openSUSE 10.2. But with Ubuntu, I had some problems: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=240965

[darkenedday]

ok, for me openSUSE 10.2 just felt soooo much faster than Kubuntu 6.10, and ALOT less buggy, and also no updates that broke anything (still a bit sore about that) and when u switch to SMART it's just as fast as synaptic, so it's no excuse to blame anything on yast, even though it is a nice tool, just abit slow, I still use it with no problems, and like it. . . I configured everything with absolutely NO use of the cli (well except for about 4 lines to get nvidia + Beryl to work (no xgl)) (for all you cli lovers out there, get off my case, it's not for everyone) the menu is incredible, especially now that I know it's skinable, finally something ebtter than that annoying clone of the win9x and ME menu, openSUSE, for me, has set a standard, and left Kubuntu in the dust, they're going to have to do some serious work in Feisty to bring me back, the only advantage to using ubuntu is these forums, (granted, big advantage) but to me, in every other way, it's obsolete, I'd love to see suse getting as much media attention as ubuntu, I think it's convert WAY more users to linux than ubuntu ever can, in alot of ways it "just works" and would satisy alot of windows users, especially with the add on CD with java and flash installed, hell, if big manufacturers like DELL and HP offered this as a cheaper alternative with all the bells and whistles pre-installed (beryl etc.) i think it would have people praising novell, and now the deal with MS will bring about better interoperability with MS formats (and openoffice in suse already outdoes everyone in that) I just dont think ubuntu or kubuntu are anywhere near as polished, and have alot of kinks to work out, dont get me wrong I like kubuntu, but it's got a LOOOOONGGGGGGG way to go

[wilberfan]

I just tried it, too... (Entirely because of posts in this forum!)

It DOES seem noticeably faster (I'm running Gnome) than Ubuntu. Firefox seems to load faster (although to be fair, I don't have the same number of add-ons loaded yet).

Installing went very smoothly--I was impressed how I didn't have to monkey with anything to get my screen res working properly! :)

However, I haven't been able to get the sound to work (an Audigy SE card) yet, so....

I know one thing for sure, so far: The Ubuntu forums are MUCH better! (You can't even attach .png's over there!)

Does anyone know if there's a forum or thread here that I could get some help with my sound issue under openSuse 10.2?? :confused: ;-)

[karellen]

I've tryed opensuse 10.2 and honestly speaking I didn't like it. I felt slow on my old pentium 4 with 512 mb of ram and an ide harddisk...So I came back to ubuntu (edgy with gnome) which is faster. plus the community is great

[_simon_]

I just tried it, too... (Entirely because of posts in this forum!)

It DOES seem noticeably faster (I'm running Gnome) than Ubuntu. Firefox seems to load faster (although to be fair, I don't have the same number of add-ons loaded yet).

Installing went very smoothly--I was impressed how I didn't have to monkey with anything to get my screen res working properly! :)

However, I haven't been able to get the sound to work (an Audigy SE card) yet, so....

I know one thing for sure, so far: The Ubuntu forums are MUCH better! (You can't even attach .png's over there!)

Does anyone know if there's a forum or thread here that I could get some help with my sound issue under openSuse 10.2?? :confused: ;-)

From Terminal use


alsamixer


Set all the volumes and turn on anything that is off. If your sound then works you can, one by one go through the ones you just turned on / up and turn them off to see which one it was that made it work.

With my Audigy 2 ZS I had to turn "Audigy A" on

[wilberfan]

From Terminal use


alsamixer


Set all the volumes and turn on anything that is off. If your sound then works you can, one by one go through the ones you just turned on / up and turn them off to see which one it was that made it work.

With my Audigy 2 ZS I had to turn "Audigy A" on

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Alsamixer (or KMixer) just shows "Microphone"--ZERO other choices. I can't select anything else from Preferences, either... And the weird thing is, Alsamixer shows it as a "USB Device" with weird numbers after it... It's an internal soundcard--and the YaST hardware manager shows it as "card number 0" with the something-CA0106 driver installed... ](*,)

[Edit] A weirder thing is -- it (the sound) worked fine with the 64-bit version of openSUSE. (I clean-installed the 32-bit version (twice) because I didn't want to bleep around with getting flash-player, et al, working)

[wilberfan]

I just tried it, too... (Entirely because of posts in this forum!)

It DOES seem noticeably faster (I'm running Gnome) than Ubuntu. Firefox seems to load faster (although to be fair, I don't have the same number of add-ons loaded yet).

Installing went very smoothly--I was impressed how I didn't have to monkey with anything to get my screen res working properly! :)

However, I haven't been able to get the sound to work (an Audigy SE card) yet, so....

I know one thing for sure, so far: The Ubuntu forums are MUCH better! (You can't even attach .png's over there!)

Does anyone know if there's a forum or thread here that I could get some help with my sound issue under openSuse 10.2?? :confused: ;-)

PROBLEM SOLVED!!

Turns out that the installer was only putting me in two or three groups: "video", "dialout", and "users", I think... (Who knew from groups?!) A VERY helpful fellow in the #suse IRC group determined that I wasn't in the following groups (as well as the three just mentioned): "audio", "bin", "cdrom", "disk", "floppy", and "games"!

Soon as I put my userid into those groups--BAM!!--audio to spare! And I was allowed to configure my sound card, etc, etc, etc.... :guitar:

[tstrowd]

I can't burn anything over 4x on CD without something getting screwed up..

Would you happen to know when the next release of Opensuse might be coming out?
I like Ubuntu very well and i might stick with it until the next release of Opensuse.
It's just too bad that they do not make Ubuntu work with Active directory which is the only reason i wanted to try openSuse.

[Adamant1988]

Would you happen to know when the next release of Opensuse might be coming out?
I like Ubuntu very well and i might stick with it until the next release of Opensuse.
It's just too bad that they do not make Ubuntu work with Active directory which is the only reason i wanted to try openSuse.

I'll try to look up a roadmap for it later :)

[ekka]

I have just tried the OpenSUSE live DVD and I am impressed with its look and feel. Although I haven’t explored it enough, my sound and the screen resolution are working perfectly, out-the-box, which didn’t happened in Ubuntu Edgy.

The question I want to ask is, I have seen forum members in Ubuntu and elsewhere suggesting the must try distros other that Ubuntu and I don’t remember I have come across OpenSUSE as one of them. Why is that?

-ekka

[Castar]

Many Linux users lately dislike Novell due to its agreement with Microsoft. A lot of people in the community feel that there is a "catch" somewhere.

In my opinion, it's a great product especially if you're interested in KDE.

[RAV TUX]

Many Linux users lately dislike Novell due to its agreement with Microsoft. A lot of people in the community feel that there is a "catch" somewhere.

In my opinion, it's a great product especially if you're interested in KDE.
I actually found it not so good for KDE but a great product if you like Gnome.

[Castar]

I actually found it not so good for KDE but a great product if you like Gnome.

Unfortunately, 10.2 beats Kubuntu Edgy anytime in my opinion. Extremely snappy and stable. Kubuntu is stable but not snappy.

[kazuya]

This is the opposite for many of us. Edgy has tended to look better and work better for some of my colleagues. You do not have a lot of power at users hands to debug issues on their system with SUse. Like RAV said, Suse is best for gnome use not kde. There are many better ones out there.

It is not a horrible product. It jus doesn't work for most of my systems completely. It takes a while to install and setup, while other installs tend to be faster to install and use.

[Bagboy23]

I tried it a short while ago but just like previous posters mentioned; YAST is a major disapointment. It's still broken, and crashes all the time.

[0MG]

Posting this from my Ubuntu Edgy laptop so I haven't completely switched yet, but I recently set up openSUSE 10.2 on my desktop machine and it is really impressive.

I was having all sorts of issues getting my SATA drives working with any *buntu/Debian I threw at it, so I decided to give something else a shot. SUSE allowed me to set up a SATA RAID setup right out of the gate, Beryl/XGL was a cinch to get going...really everything just seemed to work.

I have to echo the previous sentiment regarding yast. It was just not cutting it. Luckily I soon stumbled on to smart like so many others above have mentioned. So far so good, I think I like it better than apt already. I have even installed it here on Ubuntu.

It's been only a couple days, but no real problems so far with openSUSE 10.2. It will be my desktop distro for the short term future, if not longer.

[_simon_]

I tried it a short while ago but just like previous posters mentioned; YAST is a major disapointment. It's still broken, and crashes all the time.

It's not crashed on me yet!

I've noticed the slowness is down to one repo I added. Since disabling it, it's a hell of a lot quicker.

[wilberfan]

I've been using openSuSE 10.2 for over a week now, and I must say there are a few things that have really impressed me:

1) samba actually set itself up! I had Ubuntu running on a second box, and when I clicked on the network icon in SuSE, I was asked if I wanted to install the necessary software. One click did it (maybe two), and I could actually connect to my other box!

2) I got beryl running in a VERY short time! :guitar:
I'd NEVER been able to get beryl running on Ubuntu. It's cooler than aerosol cheese, lemme tell you! (Hats off to the boys in the #suse irc channel for their help with this!)

3) No xorg.conf editing! My screen was easily configurable for the proper res right out of the box. (Well, I'll be editing xorg.conf when I try running beryl under AIGLX instead of XGL.)

4) It feels faster than 'buntu. Even in KDE. I have no hard data, but... Gnome seems to work better on 'buntu, but KDE seems to work MUCH better on SuSE. There are things I like about gnome (straight-forward), but there are also things I like about KDE (all the native apps, and how configurable it is).

There was a major glitch during the install: It only put me in three user groups--which meant I had no access to audio, or peripherals (!) Again, the helpful folks in #suse saved my behind with that one...

Over all, a thumbs up from this 6-month newbie =D>

[edit] I forgot the most important bonus: I've been able to run full 64-bit!! No flash-plugin issues, etc..! :-D

[CaptSaltyJack]

That's so odd that for some people's machines, Ubuntu feels faster than openSUSE, and for other machines, it's the opposite. Why is that? openSUSE felt slow for me. Ubuntu is lightning fast.

And as for Beryl on Ubuntu, this page got me going quickly, with zero problems:
http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu

[wilberfan]

That's so odd that for some people's machines, Ubuntu feels faster than openSUSE, and for other machines, it's the opposite. Why is that? openSUSE felt slow for me. Ubuntu is lightning fast.

And as for Beryl on Ubuntu, this page got me going quickly, with zero problems:
http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu

It IS odd about the speed thing, isn't it? I've got a AMD64x2 4400+ with 2GB's of memory and 2 SATA drives...

I haven't given up on beryl'buntu--especially since I've seen how cool it is!

[CaptSaltyJack]

My machine's stats: AMD Athlon64 3500+, 1GB RAM. The weird thing is, I just saw an iMac in person today, and noticed that the minimize/restore animations on it are really super fluid, whereas Beryl's "Magic Lamp" minimize/restore animations (very similar to Mac OS X) are not as smooth. And I have a GeForce 6200LE, which should be able to handle whatever Beryl dishes out, right? I guess not.

[ltk5]

Suse was the first distro after Mandriva I used when deciding to switch to linux.
But it couldn't recognize my sound card. I did a search for it on the net, but with no luck..
And because I can't live without music, I switched - to ubuntu.
Thanks god we have ubuntu :D !!

[igknighted]

My machine's stats: AMD Athlon64 3500+, 1GB RAM. The weird thing is, I just saw an iMac in person today, and noticed that the minimize/restore animations on it are really super fluid, whereas Beryl's "Magic Lamp" minimize/restore animations (very similar to Mac OS X) are not as smooth. And I have a GeForce 6200LE, which should be able to handle whatever Beryl dishes out, right? I guess not.

Are you using NVIDIA's native compositing? If so that is likely your issue. Try an XGL setup, it will fly. Even manually forcing aiglx should help. Your 6200LE should do an alright job with beryl, but overall I wouldn't expect top of the line performance.

[CaptSaltyJack]

I am using --force-aiglx

[karellen]

on my old p4 2.4 ghz with 512 mb ram ubuntu (edgy) runs faster than opensuse 10.2

[chaosgeisterchen]

My machine's stats: AMD Athlon64 3500+, 1GB RAM. The weird thing is, I just saw an iMac in person today, and noticed that the minimize/restore animations on it are really super fluid, whereas Beryl's "Magic Lamp" minimize/restore animations (very similar to Mac OS X) are not as smooth. And I have a GeForce 6200LE, which should be able to handle whatever Beryl dishes out, right? I guess not.

I can quote you on that. Compared to the mac, Beryl feels very unresponsive ans sluggish, so I finally deactivated it. I am looking forwart do kdecompmgr which should come with KDE4.

My stats:
Intel Core2Duo E6300 1,86 GHz
Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 2048 MB
MSI NX6200 128TDI

[jacksonz123z]

I used to use Fedora, but it was always broken in places. Opensuse would be my favourite if there was no Ubuntu. Opensuse on my PC had ugly fonts a terrible menu and poor package management. It really is hard to beat Synaptic. Opensuse started to remind me of windows bloat, it also seemed to be slow.

[Nemix77]

I like OpenSuse 10.2, was my fist linux distro... I was too new to Linux so I gave up on it and switched to Ubuntu from recommendations.

Still, OpenSuse is great distro might switch back someday...

[chaosgeisterchen]

I would strongly recommend the SuSE developers to create a new package manager to replace YaST at last. A good package manger and updater will improve the opinion on OpenSuSE by far.

[Nemix77]

Well, that's really what put me off SuSE when I first tried it. I think SuSE developers should just try to make YAST work, before finding an alternative.

But I still like SuSe, it just seem very well organized and thought out (kinda reminds me of Windows, thus more productivity is done) even though some may say it's bloat...

[igknighted]

Well, that's really what put me off SuSE when I first tried it. I think SuSE developers should just try to make YAST work, before finding an alternative.

But I still like SuSe, it just seem very well organized and thought out (kinda reminds me of Windows, thus more productivity is done) even though some may say it's bloat...

Traditionally Yast has been one of the top package managers in linux. The fact that there is this much resentment out there about it speaks volumes for how far we've come recently.

[julian67]

Well, that's really what put me off SuSE when I first tried it. I think SuSE developers should just try to make YAST work, before finding an alternative.

But I still like SuSe, it just seem very well organized and thought out (kinda reminds me of Windows, thus more productivity is done) even though some may say it's bloat...

I think YaST did work pretty well before the changes :lolflag: Actually it's only the package management aspect of YaST which is unsatisfactory. That isn't a minor issue but YaST is an extremely comprehensive config tool and everything else seems pretty much faultless. As for the package management I guess the devs want to make something extremely slick and based on mono like f-spot, tomboy and beagle and right now it's something of a work in progress, but at least there's real progress being made. 10.2 is a major improvement over the mess of 10.1's system and if you run KDE the opensuse updater applet is great, it's like the patch notifier in Debian/Ubuntu....only slower :( but I'm sure it will mature into something polished(™) that just works(™) this year. Meanwhile Smart is a great package manager for everything else, so good that Mr Shuttleworth has been talking about dropping apt and using Smart instead. It resolves dependencies at least as well as apt and together with the SuSEconfig tool (which runs automatically) your packages seem to always work fine.

(™)"polished" and "just works"(™) and "network-manager applet just quit on me"(™) are registered trademarks of Mark Shuttleworth ;)

[Nemix77]

Well, gonna be testing Feisty Herd 5 come tomorrow. If all goes well, looks like I'll be waiting on the official release and staying with Ubuntu.

But still got OpenSUSE on disc just in case...


:lolflag:

[julian67]

The new Ubuntu official release could be something great, I'm looking forward to trying it. I got a little bored with running Ubuntu on a virtual machine (not a good test really) so I installed 6.10 again on to HDD just to refesh my memory. Knowing how much trouble people had upgrading from dapper what i'm doing is using only main and universe and I'll see how an upgrade goes. On the VM I went from dapper to 6.10 with only official packages. The distro upgrade process was a little broken (started the official way and it got stuck, tried to complete with apt dist upgrade.....did some and then quit.....finally used the official method again and it cleaned it all up and worked fine). Another thing I'm interested is how practical is a GNU/Linux distro with only free software (as far as that's possible with restricted drivers in a distro). My experience of dapper was of really problematic multimedia support and totem in particular being basically useless and horrible to watch a movie on whatever codecs you had. With all the Gstreamer development and in particular the free Fluendo codecs it seemed time to try again. I'm really impressed! The Fluendo codecs are fantastic for video playback and for music. Movies in totem now look as good as in mplayer or VLC. So right now I have nice testing distro with no nasty proprietary formats on it and everything is sweet. Still a few hardware issues that I'm hoping will be improved in feisty and I'm not sure I'll ever prefer sudo to root and user accounts, but I'm looking forward to running gksu "update-manager -c" in a few weeks time.....and no need to download an enormous iso!

[bluenova]

I REALLY like Suse 10.2, but when it comes down to it, what ever distro I install, after a few months it'll be nothing like the originally installed distro. So that leaves only a few extra things like support forums, package repos and things, and for those extra bits I choose to stay with Ubuntu.

[tallman9]

2 thinks I like about openSUSE 10.2
nice installation
slick desktop
ubuntu is the best anyhow =)

[sloopveedub]

Hi, Just wondering what do you mean by nice desktop? Is it that the default theme and selection of applications is very nice, or its something else? I am just trying to have an idea if I should try Suse 10.2 or not :roll: If you (or anyone else) can be more specific about the additive features/benefits that you see in Suse 10.2 then that may be helpful.


Jabran

Yes, you should try openSuse 10.2! It's not hard to either use a live CD or just repartition and install it on your hard drive to evaluate it. It's a good, stable distro. If you don't like it, just toss the CD or take it off your hard drive.

I did not have any problems installing 10.2. The installer walks you right through it, but also allows you to make changes such as which packages to install right away, how you want it to partition your HD, etc. It seems to have great hardware support overall and was able to automatically detect everything on my system. Basically, it worked "straight out of the box." Unlike Ubuntu, it'll have a root user account setup by default and the you set up your first user account.

The "look" of the desktop is nice in either KDE or Gnome but nothing that can't be done in any other distro. For me, KDE seems to just work a little better than Gnome. Perhaps because KDE was historically Suse's preferred desktop environment? Anyway, there are lots of packages installed by default and it's an easy distro to start using.

Many people will complain about something called Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool). What they are really complaining about is the package management portion. It takes awhile for it to check the package repositories for the list and updates, especially if you have quite a few software sources! Other than that, I think Yast is a great Suse feature! It's sort of the equivalent to the Windows Control Panel -- your one stop spot for all your system's settings: software & updates, hardware, general system setup, user/group setup, security, etc.

[rajeevbhatta]

I am a ubuntu fan ever since i have started using it. I tried opensuse 10.2 today and I have to say it is rock solid.

Every thing works the best in ubuntu but the only thing that pissed me off is (network installation) it never installs the gui. Such stuff can be done manually but better done automatically.

[Robocoastie]

Ok first off I fear not the CLI at all, I run Ubuntu 6.10 server CLI in fact for a shared network drive server and 24/7 Folding@Home cruncher. But for the desktop I've found OpenSuse 10.2 to be fast, and slick. Nvidia drivers, cam driver, everything just works. The only problem is two things:

1) Networking is a pain in the A**. I can't for the life of me get any folders shared or even connect to the aforementioned server. It probably has to do with the entirely different way Suse does things through Yast that I'm not used to and I just don't know what book to use since I've taught myself for so long on debian/Ubuntu methods.

2) So many different repositories for software uggg. Ubuntu's package manager is easy, even easier now that they added faster access to repos with "restricted" software. But Suse's repos are scattered everywhere and I'm not sure just which ones to have. - Dev tools are also not installed by default and are actually kind of hard to find - that burns me actually because I do run into obscure software available only as a tar that needs built. Sometimes I feel like going back to good ole' Slackware and building everything from source if I only had time to understand kernel builds and modules better. But frankly I just don't have that kind of time to sink into it anymore like I did when I first dived into Linux via Slackware 8.0 years ago.

The pro distros like Xandros and Linspire drive me batty because they take sooooo long to update their kernels for latest hardware and some have gotten quite pricey.

[RedDwarf]

1) Networking is a pain in the A**. I can't for the life of me get any folders shared or even connect to the aforementioned server. It probably has to do with the entirely different way Suse does things through Yast that I'm not used to and I just don't know what book to use since I've taught myself for so long on debian/Ubuntu methods.
To me the Gnome/Ubuntu way is too simplistic. Up to where I know you only have the option to share or not to share, there are no option to manage which users have access to which shared folders and so.
KDE (not just openSUSE) allows you to configure just everything, but there are some bugs that exist from YEARS ago ( http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94828 ). Would not be rare if you found some bugs... you will need to learn to avoid them.

But Suse's repos are scattered everywhere and I'm not sure just which ones to have.
Basics
- The "official"
- Non-OSS (if you want...)
- Updates

CODECs and more
- Packman
- Guru

More
- The ones that you need from the Build Service ( http://software.opensuse.org/download/ ). Probably you will want KDE Backports, wine, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org.


The Build Service is still in development, in the future will be better/easier. But you already have a search tool: http://packages.opensuse-community.org/
But that's all. "jengelh", "Schiele", "Scorot"... just forget them.

[Robocoastie]

hi RedDwarf, 10.3 seems to have made selecting the repos far easier so a person doesn't add the wrongs and barf their system up.