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Thread: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

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  1. #1
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    Unhappy i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    and being a user of ubuntu i had expected something relatively easy to setup.

    I played around a few days ago with Mandriva 2009 one and it took a little while to figure it out but i got iyt up and running nicely in the end and i really like it.

    how i wish i oculd say the same about opensuse 11

    the install was easy enough, nothing tuff there and once installed i decided i would get my nvidia fx5500 256meg video card up and running with compiz.

    why not i decided as it i know it works well with ubuntu 8.04, mandriva 2009 one and with the newest drivers i can get it running in ubntu 8.10

    i must confess i found their web site very easy to navigate and in no time i found a link to install drivers for the nvidia cards

    so i tried the first drive i could find and that was the driver labelled as nvidia (Geforce FX, Geforce 6 and newer)
    my card being a fx5500 i assumed it was this driver and let it install. once installed i restarted and i get a text box saying that the x server cant be configured blah,blah,blah
    i assumed it would be like ubuntu when the video driver breaks it will run a "safe mode" style x and allow you to run the gui in a low graphics mode


    WRONG


    you go back to a terminal screen

    so that i tought would be easy fixxed, pop the cd back in the drive and reinstall opensuse 11

    so did that and i thought ok, stupid me, i installed the wrong driver. thats cool. i can live with that.live and learn. i will install the other driver as it must be the right one as this driver has failed to run.

    so i head off to the web page and download the other driver that says nvidia (Geforce 4 and older, TNT) driver and install it and restart pc and about now im thinking im kinda smart and proud of myself untill once again up pops the blue text box saying it cant configure x blah,blah,blah, need to check configs etc, blah,blah,blah

    anyhow i thought well, this sux. so i reloaded opensuse 11 once again and decided to try it winth out 3d running. this sux as i wanted to try out google earth as well, but that aint going to happen.

    i went hunting for info on how to install a pdf printer and again a few quick clicks from the documentation page and i found this info on how to setup a pdf printer

    after the major dissapointment of the video card i was not holding my hopes too high to get it working, but alas i followed the instrucitons and it worked.... amazing

    next i thought i would try and playback a dvd

    i insert a dvd and it telles me it needs to d/l drivers and i have a choice like mandriva 209 one to use the fluendo drivers or d/l the comminity drivers for free, so i opt for the commity free drivers as thats what i use in ubuntu and mandriva 2009 one and they work just fine thanks.

    so i follow the prompts and it takes me to a web site and i need to click on a few buttons and type in passwords etc and it merrily downloads away and aftre a little while it says it has finsished and it was successfull at installing the s/w. so as a force of habbit from being a windows xp user i restart the pc just to be sure all is well

    double click the dvd icon and get it to open with movie player and again it says it can not play as it needs another driver. from memory it was a mpg2 decoder. i went hunting thru the documentation as well and hunting thru the add/remove software in yast i belive it is called and i could not find anything on how to install this driver it was looking for


    so in sheer disgust i removed the cd and walked to my kitchen and place the cd with opensuse 11 on it in to the bin and i seriously doubt i will ever try that distribution ever again.

    incase your wondering the pc im testing it on is a pentium 4 3.4Ghz HT, with 1.5 gig ram, poineer dvd writer, and the hdd for testing purposed is a 20 gig ide samsung. nothing flash, but enough for me to test with, and nvidia fx5500 256 meg video card, and using onboard sound
    Ubuntu user # 16304 www.nocleanfeed.com
    If someone asks you to sudo rm -rf anything, don't do it, and don't run any command with rm in it unless you know exactly what you're doing.things i have learnt changing from Xp pro to Ubuntu

  2. #2
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    Some of your problems seem to be user related i.e. not being familiar with openSUSE. If your display stops working because you have used the wrong driver, you can revert back to the old settings by running "sax2" in the command line as root. According to the nvidia website, the correct driver for the Geforce fx5xxx series is the 173.14.12, so you had probably selected the right driver in the first place and all you needed to do was configure it correctly. I don't really bother with 3D effects and pdf printers, so can't be of much help there.

    As for multimedia stuff, you can enable the Packman community repository (YaST -> Software -> Community repositories) and install libdvdcss, libxine and the various gstreamer plugins. You can even do this via a one click install which is available from here.

  3. #3
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    quite probably was my fault, but farout, when you reload an os and try both drivers and niether works out of the box, and you need to tinker with it, makes you wonder why other ditros can make life easy but with this distro you must tinker with the driver after you d/l it


    no thanks

    not for me, and im sure many others are in the same boat
    Ubuntu user # 16304 www.nocleanfeed.com
    If someone asks you to sudo rm -rf anything, don't do it, and don't run any command with rm in it unless you know exactly what you're doing.things i have learnt changing from Xp pro to Ubuntu

  4. #4
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    Quote Originally Posted by stinger30au View Post
    quite probably was my fault, but farout, when you reload an os and try both drivers and niether works out of the box, and you need to tinker with it, makes you wonder why other ditros can make life easy but with this distro you must tinker with the driver after you d/l it


    no thanks

    not for me, and im sure many others are in the same boat
    Try 11.1 RC1. I have a somewhat new laptop and tried opensuse 11 on it and it didn't go over so well however on 11.1 everything was detected and worked straight out of the box without issue. Ubuntu 8.10 couldn't even do that. Not to come off as a prick but this is why most people consider Ubuntu to be a newb distro is because newcomers to Linux expect everything to work out of the box. Sometimes it takes a bit of tinkering to get everything up and running.
    Last edited by plb; December 6th, 2008 at 04:35 PM.

  5. #5
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    Quote Originally Posted by stinger30au View Post
    quite probably was my fault, but farout, when you reload an os and try both drivers and niether works out of the box, and you need to tinker with it, makes you wonder why other ditros can make life easy but with this distro you must tinker with the driver after you d/l it


    no thanks

    not for me, and im sure many others are in the same boat
    If you can download your own drivers, then I don't see what the big deal is about if a bit of tinkering is needed in order to get your device working properly.

    If ever you try openSUSE again and you install a proprietary graphics driver, run "sax2" after installing the driver, it tends to do a good job of detecting the new proprietary driver and using it. One thing that may save you time, is to revert to using vesa or fbdev when you have problems with graphics settings instead of reloading/reinstalling. Another option would be to use the distros builtin tools to reconfigure the graphics to their original settings. Fedora uses system-config-display, Mandriva XFdrake and openSUSE uses sax2.

  6. #6
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    When I tryed OpenSUSE 11 it was horrible. It looked very nice and at first seemed very nice. Loaded up my music into Banshee and it told me I needed to install some codec's, that's alright, it worked fine. Never tryed playing a dvd. Next I tryed to get my wireless to work. NOT A CHANCE. It wasn't happening, I tryed everything. Downloaded everything I could find to do with wireless drivers and it just wouldn't work. I though oh it isn't that bad, I'll get it working eventually with a big cable draped across the middle of my room so I at least had internet. So I carry on using it for another 1-2 weeks and it suddenyl crashes for no reason. No problem I'll just restart it and it'll be fine. Up pops a screen telling me so and so has crashed or not iniated blah blah blah. Malereproductiveorgans, I left it off for the rest of the day and then came back to it and it worked then it started freezing and crashing more regulary so I switched back to Ubuntu 8.10.

    Sorry for the lack of paragraphing.
    Last edited by andras artois; December 6th, 2008 at 07:44 PM.

  7. #7
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    Re: i took opensuse 11 (gnome) for a spin yesterday

    Not to seem like an openSUSE fanboy, but I think every distro has its flaws and some things really depend on your hardware. For example on my laptop, wireless works out of the box with the latest Fedora, Mandriva and openSUSE releases but Ubuntu just won't play ball. Ubuntu does not autodetect my graphics settings correctly on my desktop computer, but other distros do and where they don't I have both graphical and command line tools to help me fix those problems whereas with Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10, I have to hack my xorg.conf file manually. On other machines, Ubuntu works perfectly out of the box and others don't.

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