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Re: My (very brief) Love Affair with SuSE 10.1

  • Subject: Re: My (very brief) Love Affair with SuSE 10.1
  • From: William Poaster <willpoast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 10:55:40 +0100
  • Desktop: KDE 3.5.2 Level "a"
  • Leafnode: Ver 1.11.3.rel-2
  • Linux-registered-user: 305646
  • Machine: #1, Drive #1
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Note: I ONLY post through Giganews
  • Organization: Association of International Linux Admins
  • Os: SuSE 10 OSS GM 64bit
  • Pgp-key-id: D074FE94
  • References: <pan.2006.05.19.04.41.51.839794@rapskat.com> <5174707.rmHdrlCUzv@schestowitz.com>
  • Reply-to: willpoast@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • User-agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity.)
  • Xref: news.mcc.ac.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:1110619
It was on Fri, 19 May 2006 09:07:32 +0100 when Roy Schestowitz posted
this:

> __/ [ rapskat ] on Friday 19 May 2006 05:41 \__
> 
> [commenting as I go along reading]

<snip>

<snip>
>> YaST2 is a great tool. It provides a central point from which any and
>> every aspect of the system can be configured, from user desktop
>> preferences to software upgrade and installation.  All were very simple
>> and straightforward to use.  Flash and media worked right away with
>> Firefox, mp3 playback was there, though encrypted DVD playback wasn't.
>> Most of the OSS apps that I've come to expect were installed by default
>> and worked fine.
> 
> 
> YaST is one of these facilities that used to be commercial, but I believed
> it turned GPL (or something close to that) a few years ago. YaST
> complements Control Centre to make the overall management of the computer
> (hardware and software included) as easy as Next -> Next -> Finish. No
> need for command-line utilities, installers and diagnostics. Eva!

They've replaced Susewatcher with Zenupdater & 'rug', which seems to be
the way Novell are now going, instead of using YaST (Personally I
preferred YaST). According to the mailing lists (opensuse.devel) there do
appear to be online update problems with this system ATM, zmd libzypp, &
I've found adding a new source can be slow. Zen asks for signatures,
pgpkeys etc, which isn't a bad thing, & will probably be fine once it's
had a "shakedown voyage" of a month or so. I know the guys are working on
it! :-) 

>> The two major issues that I had with this distro were with graphics and
>> sound.  The sound card, while recognized, was not setup by default. I
>> had to go into the hardware configuration tool and manually set it up,
>> which consisted of just confirming the detected module.  Accelerated
>> graphics were also not setup, even though it seemed that everything
>> needed was already installed, and no option was provided to enable the
>> nvidia drivers. Needless to say without accelerated drivers, getting Xgl
>> to work was out of the question.
>> 
>> I'm sure I could have gone through the motions of installing the kernel
>> headers and compiling the nvidia driver, but it really seemed out of
>> place after the simplicity of everything else.  This distro doesn't seem
>> to encourage manual tweaking much, emphasis was to use the included
>> front ends for all modifications.  Unfortunately, for me this was a deal
>> breaker so I ended up putting Mepis back on the system.

IMHO that wasn't a big deal. Installed the kernel sources, make, & gcc
from the CDs. After d/ling the latest driver from nVIDIA's site, dropped
to level 3 & logged in as root. Did a 'sh NVIDIA-Linux....pkg.1 -q"  &
followed the instructions. When it finished, typed: sax2 -m 0=nvidia & hit
'enter'. Then changed back to level 5, & up came the splashscreen. :-)
I know a newbie would probably want something easier, but it isn't as hard
as it seems IMHO.

> This reminds me of scenarios when people run back to Windows, but hey,
> these are just two flavours of Linux, so I guess the change is minor.

Yes, I suppose it would send the 'lazy' ones back to windows, but the ones
which have had enough of that other OS & want to learn something, would
perhaps persevere.

>> Overall, my impressions of SuSE 10.1 were very positive.  It's
>> definitely a distro that I would recommend, especially to a business
>> customer and/or Applite. Despite the few issues I had with it, it is a
>> very fast and good looking distro that would more than suit the needs of
>> most desktop users.
> 
> 
> *big smile*

It is fast, & updating KDE to 3.5.2 it seemed to be marginally faster
still. :-)

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