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

10.4.6 - 10.1

[Anonymous Coward]

It will catch up in 0.3.6.

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

[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).

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: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