OpenSUSE 10.1 Review: "Versatile but Uneven"

capt turnpike writes "Calling it 'solid,' the eWEEK.com lab boys tested OpenSUSE 10.1. The upshot? FTA: "We appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp." What does that mean for Novell's newest version of Linux? And when will it catch up numerically to Apple, which is already at 10.4.6?"

Comments

numerical catch up

[linvir]

And when will it catch up numerically to Apple, which is already at 10.4.6?

Is there any reason for this being significant? Or are they being very, very, very stupid?

Re:numerical catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're trying to be funny? I've heard of people using the absurd to indicate humor. Though I've never seen it before (and obviously neither have you).

Re:numerical catch up

[linvir]

I know you're trying you damnedest to sounds smart, but my question does actually stem from past events.

Re:numerical catch up

[Erioll]

I've actually had (non-technical) people say to me when I recommend Firefox "But it's only 1.5! IE is all the way up to 6.0!" They honestly think version numbers "greater is better" between different products.

Re:numerical catch up

[biglig2]

Er.. after 3 major revisions and 6 minor ones, I would imagine.

Re:numerical catch up

[WilliamSChips]

Sell 'em Emacs. It's at version 23 or so.

Re:numerical catch up

[FidelCatsro]

I always thought the best way to avoid this was to have the version number go by the date.
Firefox 2006.4 etc.
thus you kind of avoid the version number problem , you can always append A or B is it is an alpha or beta.

Re:numerical catch up

[despisethesun]

Ubuntu does this. To the left of the point is the year and to the right is the month of release. "Breezy", which I'm using right now, is 5.10 or October, 2005. It seems like a good system to me, once you're out of the alpha/beta stages.

Re:numerical catch up

[FidelCatsro]

This could give Jewish projects distinct advantages though;)

Re:numerical catch up

[d99-sbr]

That's because they dropped the 1. around 1.12 or so.

Sounds very stupid to me.

[Alpha27]

It's like when AOL jumped to version 9.0 As if the version number is measure of comparison between different products.

Re:Sounds very stupid to me.

[Gherald]

> It's like when AOL jumped to version 9.0

Eh? I don't see no jump

Re:Sounds very stupid to me.

[Alpha27]

I was under the impression that they jumped version numbers from 5.0 to 9.0 when they did their huge marketing blitz.

10.4.6 - 10.1

[Anonymous Coward]

It will catch up in 0.3.6.

FTA ?

[BenjiTheGreat98]

Shouldn't that be TFA?

The Fucking Article as opposed to Fuck The Article....

Or am I just off on my acronyms today?

Re:FTA ?

[colinrichardday]

From the article?

Re:FTA ?

[BenjiTheGreat98]

Oh yeah! That makes more sense....

Fuck the article? I must not be in a good mood today....

Re:What is OpenSUSE?

[__aaclcg7560]

Maybe so but I had one of the smoothest out-of-the-box experience in setting up OpenSuSE 10.1 on my file server. I kinda missed the old days of rolling your kernal and/or drivers.

Re:What is OpenSUSE?

[allenw]

You must not be using AutoYAST.

Why can't it read the raw ISO files without having to do a loop back mount? Why can't I specify a port for the http method? Why isn't there any really good documentation on how to actually set it up, especially if you're trying to boot it from a non-SuSE or *gasp* a non-Linux box? Telling Joe Admin to run yast2 instserver doesn't do much good if you don't actually have a place to run it from.

I'd love to find a way to make the default console show up in monochrome as well. The color one is s-l-o-w over a serial connection.

I'm not much of a fan of Kickstart, but I'll take it any day of the week over AutoYAST. It has some serious flaws that really need to be taken a look at.

Re:What is OpenSUSE?

[mkosmo]

They probably want to market to a larger audience. Same reason Gentoo now has a GUI installer.

Novell's ZenWorks killed SuSE 10.1

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem with 10.1 is that the entire software management / updater system based on ZenWorks is completely broken. While they're going to patch it next week to get it to at least WORK, it will still take several minutes of maxed out CPU / HD just to check if there are updates, and it will still do so every time you login to X. It also often takes upwards of 15 minutes or more to install packages or change sources. It's not been confirmed, but the new version may still contain the problem of deleting packages without checking if anything depends on them, which could completely break your installation.

Speculation is that Novell forced ZenWorks onto SuSE shortly before release in order to boost ZenWorks Suite sales (which go for $130 / seat). If so, it has seriously backfired. ZenWorks has shown itself to majorly suck.

Lastly, SuSE's official attitude towards it has been "It's not a big issue, we'll see if we can make it better in the next release, if we get around to it."

SuSE can no longer be trusted to run on production servers.

Re:Novell's ZenWorks killed SuSE 10.1

[TheOtherKiwi]

Dude, you would typically see the enterprise version (SLES or SLED) running on production servers or desktops not the "open" version for want of of a better term. The problems you refer to are well sorted in the enterprise, ZENworks is solid in cross-platform patch management as evidenced by its large worldwide deployment numbers in critical businesses like airlines, healthcare and government organizations. I should know having deployed it on most platforms on three continents. Less FUD, more facts please.

My impressions of SuSE 10.1

[Carl T]

• They've done something to make the software installing part of YaST take ages to start.
• SuseWatcher no longer exists. I'm not sure how/if the system will notify me if a patch should be downloaded/installed and something then needs restarting (or rebooting...).
• The lack of codecs for most common audio and video formats is as annoying as ever. I've installed a working xine from Packman.
• I have found no way to get readable fonts and non-broken widgets in GTK applications. This was bad enough in 10.0 but now it's a lot worse.
• A KDE issue: I can no longer copy text by marking in a terminal without also doing so in programs like Mozilla and OpenOffice.
• A good thing: The machine boots a lot quicker than with 9.2.

Re:My impressions of SuSE 10.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed a working xine from Packman.

One problem with these alternative, non-SuSE repositories is I have no idea of their patching policy or quality. If I replace OS components with third party versions then I lose the advantages of having a well maintained distribution that made me choose SuSE in the first place.

Re:My impressions of SuSE 10.1

[Billly Gates]

How fast are the logins and is it tightly integrated with Zenworks?

An A/C poster mentioned this and you mentioned that the autoinstaller has been disabled. I hope its not true and its just a troll.

Re:My impressions of SuSE 10.1

[kimvette]

They've done something to make the software installing part of YaST take ages to start.

Go to YaST -> Installation Sources
Check each source to make sure that Refresh is set to "Off"

They made "ON" the default in 10.1, presumably in response to many folks' complaining about the installer's handling of broken repositories such as Packman. (Great repository for selection, but it's perpetually broken).

Livecd?

[Billly Gates]

I want to test it out on my laptop before I blow the Xp partition on it and I want to make sure my wifi card works before I go through the hassle to install Linux.

"Catch up numerically"?

[schotty]

What the hell does that have to do with anything?

Mad Penguin's review is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater did a review recently and is a much better read. Find it here.

My2 cents on Suse 10.1 (I'm using it now.)

[pair-a-noyd]

I have been using Suse for years, back to the 7.x days and Linux in general even longer, I still have my factory original Redhat 3.1 CD. Yes, a single CDR..
( http://img436.imageshack.us/img436/7408/dscn20214w e.jpg ) I also have a Redhat 5.1 CDR too. Both these discs are fully functional and installable, circa 1994ish ?? I think..

  Anyway, Suse 10.1 SUCKS.. SUCKS with a capital SUCK.
  This weekend I will be downgrading it to 10.0 (I was not too thrilled with 10.0 but it's better than this crap)

  Unless you want a miserable hellish nightmare trying to install *other* apps stay away.
  The Zen thingy is a piece of crap. It won't let me install apt/synaptic which is what I have been using for a few years now.

  I am afraid that this will be my last hurrah with Suse. I'm going to have to bite the bullet and learn Gentoo. Before this year is out I plan to be dual booting OSX and Gentoo..

  Buh bye Suse, you f**ked it up.. It was fun though..

One thing someone pointed out to me is the "smart" installer. Go to yast and search for "smart" then install it. It's similar (but not the same) as apt/synaptic. It will at least let you get some of the basic packages installed, you also have to paste this into a console, 'smart channel --add http://divine160281.di.funpic.de/smart-channel.txt ' to give you access to third party packages.

But all in all, I'm very unhappy in general with Suse 10.1 and will be downgrading to 10.0 no matter what. And forget about bling-bling compiz, that's a freaking disaster. You like to torture yourself? Play with compiz. Guaranteed to crash more often that M$ winders..

Once they get compiz and Xgl debugged I'll be thrilled to play with it again but it's way to unstable for me. I need stability. I have no tolerance for buggy crap.

Re:My2 cents on Suse 10.1 (I'm using it now.)

[Kesha]

I've had a similar experience with opensuse 10.1 upgrade. I was hoping they would fix the minor annoyances that bugged me in 10.0 -- no support for legacy NVIDIA chipset driver (GeForce 256, GeForce 2, etc..) -- I was hoping for too much apparently.

The first nasty surprise was the replacement of susewatcher -- zen-updater took its place. I am a KDE user, and it made no sense to me that a KDE oriented desktop distribution would commit the major blunder of replacing a working Qt application with a half-baked gtk alternative that sticks out like a sore thumb under KDE.

YaST Online Update didn't work. I had to use zen-updater but that hasn't worked for me yet either. I was able to get the updates by going into YaST software management and manually setting the installed packages to update (I had to scroll through the entire list of installed packages and find all the blue ones).

Oh, and to add to the frustration beagle was running in background grinding the harddrive and making my old P3-550MHz crawl even slower.

So, SuSE 10.1 has regressed on the following points:
1. Broken package management.
2. The new GTK package manager looks like a turd under KDE.
3. Installing closed source NVIDIA drivers for legacy cards (GeForce 2) is an excercise in patching both the nvidia driver and the SuSE install (device files have to be created by hand, /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia has to be removed).

So, after updating 2 PCs to 10.1 I ended up downgrading one PC to SuSE 10. I decided not to upgrade my server from SuSE 9.3. The one remaining PC that still has SuSE 10.1 on it will be used to test Kubuntu 6.06 this weekend. If what I've seen in SuSE 10.1 is any indication of where Novell is heading, I will probably move to Kubuntu.

        Paul.

Re:What is OpenSUSE?

[colonwq]

I am far from a OpenSUSE expert but I was able to follow their documentation to do a network install of 10.1 with the files hosted on a RH WS4 computer.

I downloaded the OpenSUSE CDs and net boot image from here
I followed this item
Followed by this one
Then I did this
I then booted off of the cd made from the net boot image. I adjusted the mount points and exports to fit my local enviroment

On a side note: I did the X86_64 install to see how OpenSUSE got the Java plugin to work in Firefox. It was easy for them, they cheated. Their Firefox is a 32bit compiled version

:wq

SuSE 10.1 = Package management from hell

[Kilz]

Sorry but 10.1 is a sad upgrade. It reminds me of M$ where eye candy is there but there are a lot of bugs. 1. When adding packages that have dependencies that are not installed you have a 50/50 chance of crashing yast 2. Adding repositories is a chore, it takes forever and sometimes they don't install. 3. People are manually installing smart to bypass yast. 4. The new auto loader auto mounts cdroms to /media/TheCd'sName, its different for each CD. This has broken wine and cedega. I loved 10.0, I hated 10.1. The person reviewing the OS must have just installed it and tested the installed software. The only thing that was easier was setting up Xgl. But eye candy isn't any good if you cant install your favorite applications.

Dude, go with (k)Ubuntu

[thecampbeln]

If you're looking at taking the Linux plunge (especially when coming from Win2k/XP), do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu (then add in the KDE packages so you can run in KDE sessions - KDE approximately equals Windows-esque-ish-ness, Gnome approximately equals Mac-esque-ish-ness and Gnome is the default in Ubuntu).

If you'd like to get a feel for Linux before installing, try out Mepis (which I'm pretty sure is a LiveCD) or Knoppix (which is not very polished, but does give you a KDE desktop to play with - but Ubuntu is leagues better eye-candy/usability wise).

There is Kubuntu, but it doesn't have Gnome at all, which will eventually cause you problems. You can install Kubuntu then Gnome (which is what I did), but I'd suggest Ubuntu + KDE (as I had to fiddle to get all the necessary parts of Gnome installed under Kubuntu). Then run Automatrix and you've got a fully functional system ready to go.

I started out with SuSE 9.3 (a buddy of mine at work installed it for me). Then within a few weeks 10.0 was out and we did a fresh install. SuSE took a bit of hand holding to get "up and running" (decess for DVDs, mp3 decoding, etc - PackMan is your friend). After playing around in SuSE for a few months (including getting VMware running, then attempting unsuccessfully to install Xandros and Linspire, but successfully getting Win2k running), I got my wife a new laptop (same model as mine with SuSE) and decided to try Kubuntu out.

Frankly for new Linux converts, (k)Ubuntu rocks. The weird issues I have on my SuSE laptop's Synaptic touchpad do not occur under (k)Ubuntu, and it correctly recognized the widescreen monitor (SuSE didn't). Updating is a breeze - just last night I updated her system... 10% of her packages needed to be updated (1500-ish IIRC) and it took a grand total of 25-30 minutes including a kernel update!

I was about to go from SuSE 10.0 to (k)Ubuntu when 10.1 was released a few weeks ago. So I though what the hell and did an update. 10.1 is nice, but it's got some MAJOR issues - the autoupdate, well doesn't, my ATI Drivers no-go-no-mo, Azureus and eventually kTorrent stopped working despite repeated program reinstalls... Basically 10.1 is not for you (or me).

I'll be installing (k)Ubuntu on my laptop this weekend.

I've gotta say, after a bit of a teething process (a good 4-6 weeks of Google searches to get "simple" shit to work, like my ATI drivers, VMware, etc) I'm sooo very much more happy under (k)Ubuntu (even under SuSE 10.0, which is good, just more fiddly)! That 25-30 minute update I mentioned above was while I was surfing the web with 15-20 tabs open in Firefox with the system being responsive the entire time. You just don't get that under Windows!

Good luck on the migration! And if you need help, I'll toss as much your way as I can (being a 4 month old Linux n00b myself).

Doing production

[LordBlackader]

I am using 10.1 on my Compaq presario V4000 laptop. Installation was fine except for my INTEL pro 2200 BG wireless lan card. I had to patch some drivers and at last I got it worked. I am using my laptop for production purposes, so a lot of OpenOffice, krdc, MySQL, Apache and VMWare workstation 5.5. An unsupported patch was nescessary for VMWare to make it work but I am pretty happy with it. It is quicker than 10.0.

It's OK, I guess

[metamatic]

It's better than SLES 9 on the server I've been setting up, in that curses programs like YaST actually work properly without locking up, and the video drivers for Unichrome work.

I always hated YaST for package management, so the option of using APT is a big win. I haven't tried the ZenWorks or 'smart' package managers everyone else is talking about.

Basically, for a server it's OK. I'd rather be running Debian, but the software I need to run is built for SLES.

sdgasdf

[Electrocru]

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