openSUSE 10.3 Public Release

Shizawana writes "The latest version of openSUSE was released this week. The site has a sneak peak of all the new features and additions, including highly anticipated changes to the YaST package management. The official announcement of the release offers a few highlights as well: 'The openSUSE team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, the openSUSE project provides free, easy access to the world's most usable Linux distribution, openSUSE. openSUSE is released regularly, is stable, secure, contains the latest free and open source software, and comes with several new technologies. openSUSE 10.3 will be supported with security and other serious updates for a period of 2 years. This version contains new beautiful green artwork, KDE 3.5.7 and parts of KDE 4, SUSE-polished GNOME 2.20, a GTK version of YaST, a new 1-click-install technology, MP3 support out-of-the-box, new and redesigned YaST modules, compiz and compiz fusion advances, virtualisation improvements, OpenOffice.org 2.3, Xfce 4.4.1, and much more! Read on for details of what is new and available in openSUSE 10.3, and for all the necessary download links.'"

Comments

have they fixed bugs?

[sentientbrendan]

I remember trying out suse 10.1, and a fresh install was full of bugs. Various suse utilities seemed to break immediately after running update.

Have they made much progress towards more stable releases (marketing blurb aside)? Is it worth checking out?

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[Culture20]

Parent is not a Troll. zmd.exe (the default updater) is a mono app, and is prone to hanging. I've had to kill zmd and restart novell-zmd several times to get updates to work whenever I notice that a cron-run update is still in the process list 8-10 hours later.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[Maelwryth]

I installed it last night........it's beautiful. Definitely worth checking out :).

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[maxwell demon]

Just throw off zmd from your system and use opensuseupdater instead of zen-updater.

Before I did that, openSUSE managed to make a dual-core system almost unusable: One core was running zmd at nice 0, the other one was running beagled-helper at nice 0. Now I only get one core filled up from time to time, and therefore only need to kill or at least renice when I need full processor power. For normal operation one core is enough, and beagle can have the other one.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[trolltalk.com]

Just remove mono and zdm.exe, and use guru or the smart updater. Mono sucks, pegs the cpu, and IMNSHO (in my not so humble opinion) there is NO excuse for having a file that ends in .exe on a linux box.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[mrsteveman1]

If you knew what you were talking about you would have known that opensuse 10.3 doesn't even have ZMD, not turned on, not included by default, not installed.

Besides that .exe files are PE executables, wine uses them just fine, so does mono. Do you refain from using Wine out of some fear of PE executables? DO you even know what a PE executable is?

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[grommit]

Yeah, 10.1 was easily the worst release of OpenSUSE. 10.2 fixed a lot of problems but IMO it wasn't as good as 9.3. I've tried out 10.3 RC1 and it is *much* better than 10.2. They've done a lot of work on this release and it definitely shows. I had been trying out other distributions recently to see if I want to switch away from OpenSUSE but if 10.3 stays as good as my initial look at it, I'll be sticking with OpenSUSE for a while.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[Grishnakh]

But Miguel works for Novell, since Novell bought his company Ximian, so they can't just leave his crap out of SuSE.

This is one of the reasons why I now use Ubuntu (kubuntu actually), even though I had used SuSE since 6.3. 10.1 was the last version of SuSE I used, and after the zmd debacle and the stupid agreement with Microsoft, I decided to move to greener pastures.

Ubuntu is much nicer; the company really does believe in open-source, they don't believe in signing deals with Microsoft, they don't include Mono crap by default, and apt-get and the universe repositories are far better than rpm and slow, slow, YaST.

Personally, I no longer care if SUSE has cleaned up its act. Too little, too late. Ubuntu is leading the way now.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[und0]

Only thing worse would have been if they wrote their daemon in Python or perl.
There, fixed for you.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[trolltalk.com]

> "But Miguel works for Novell, since Novell bought his company Ximian, so they can't just leave his crap out of SuSE."

Looks like they're actually doing just that as far as the package management system is concerned, and about time.Don't be surprised if openSUSE 11 doesn't have any mono in it by default.

IF Ubuntu was readily available as a horking large DVD with the ability to select all the dev packages, etc., I'd consider it. As it is, I like the ability to slap a DVD in my box, select 7 gigs of software, and come back an hour later to a fairly complete development environment.

... we all have different needs, and different distros fill those niches.

I wasn't happy about the Microsoft agreement either (it was predictable that Microsoft would try to spin it as something it wasn't), and Mono is a real tar baby (in both senses of the term), but I balance that with the work Novell has done with linux, and the heavy lifting they're doing against SCO et al., and I'm sticking with them. They deserve a bit more patience from the community than they've been getting, all things considered.

Re:have they fixed bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look a bit harder :)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/dvd/current/

Thoughts

[TopSpin]

SUSE is being pretty aggressive in terms of key packages like gcc, glibc and the kernel. 10.3 provides GCC 4.2.1, glibc 2.6.1 and the 2.6.22.5 release of the kernel.

My one serious complaint with YaST is the time wasted waiting for the package manager to download metadata every time you enter it. I've taken to just leaving it running on a separate desktop. Please, YaST folks, apply some caching; it should take at most only a few seconds to bring up package manager if it has been run in the last few hours. If I should need to ensure absolutely current metadata provide a simple means to force a full update, otherwise get the thing open as quickly as possible. Yes, it's probably possible to work-around, tweak or otherwise get this behavior now... I want it out of the box.

Re:Thoughts

[mj01nir]

From the 10.3 announcement:

The package management team have been working hard on improving the new openSUSE package management, and there is a lot to show for it now. It is reliable, more mature, and an awful lot faster. There is no more parsing during startup, greater compatibility with tools like yum and smart, and increased speed for the most common use-case: installing a package.

Sounds promising.

Re:Thoughts

[WhiteWolf666]

That hasn't been my experience, and I install quite a few packages via rpm command line.

YaST was borked for 10.1 and 10.2. It made sense to try and use an alternative package manager.

As 10.2 matured, YaST started to work properly, but was slow.

In 10.3, YaST is quite speedy, very capable, and runs very solidly. Plus, the one-click-install thing works really well.

Finally I can be worry free. . .

[saterdaies]

knowing that Micro$oft won't sue me since I'm using an MS approved Linux from Novell! :)

Re:Finally I can be worry free. . .

[kjj]

Actually you can still be sued if you just download a copy because you are not a Novell customer. The coverage does not extend to anyone outside of those paying Novell for a support, not even developers who contribute to the Novell code base.

Re:Finally I can be worry free. . .

[hasbeard]

Actually, I don't think OpenSuse is covered by this agreement.

ok

[User 956]

Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, the openSUSE project provides free, easy access to the world's most usable Linux distribution, openSUSE.

That's an interesting statement. Is there a distribution that aims to hinder the use of Linux everywhere?

Re:ok

[Arcturax]

You haven't heard of Windows?

Re:ok

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. Gentoo!

Re:ok

[nwbvt]

Actually, I think Windows Vista has done more than virtually any OS release to promote the use of Linux.

Sneak peak

[$RANDOMLUSER]

How do you sneak a mountain?

Re:Sneak peak

[maxwell demon]

How do you sneak a mountain? You walk on it with sneakers?

Sneak peak?

[rrohbeck]

Is that a peak that sneaks up on you? Like a volcano or something?

Re:Im sticking with Fedora

[bluelip]

Nah, it's just that Redhat wants to be the aforementioned devil.

One of Many Sneak Peeks

[apokryphos]

The Sneak Peek linked to is only the final one in the series, there was many more:

• Greatly Improved Boot Time, with Stephan Kulow
• 1-Click Install, with Benjamin Weber
• New Package Management, with Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett
• Compiz and Compiz Fusion, with Matthias Hopf and Jigish Gohil
• KDE 4, with Dirk Mueller
• SUSE-Polished GNOME 2.20, with JP Rosevear
• 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support, with Michael Löffler
• Virtualisation, with Frank Kohler
• A Plethora of Improvements, with Andreas Jaeger

Re:21%

[ericrost]

Ubuntu gutsy has a 64 bit flash and java.. I was surprised it wasn't advertised in the new features (as they didn't have adobe flash for 64 bit in feisty). Come on in, the water's fine.

Yes They Have

[TheNinjaroach]

Yes they have fixed those very annoying bugs from 10.1 -- I have been using SUSE since 9.1 and you speak of my most hated release. It seemed Novell crammed a bunch of their Zen Management tools into the 10.1 release and they mostly came out broken. By 10.2, SUSE was back to its standard, highly-polished state.

Sometimes you gotta go backwards before you can go forward. I am usually on top of new SUSE releases, but I'm so pleased with 10.2 I will stay put until a KDE4 version of SUSE is released.

Re:Yes They Have

[NoseyNick]

% cat /etc/SuSE-release
openSUSE 10.2 (i586)
VERSION = 10.2
% rpm --query zen
package zen is not installed
% rpm --query mono
package mono is not installed

10.2 doesn't, nor did 10.1, nor 10.0. What are you talking about?

One Click Install?

[GroundBounce]

Does this violate any Amazon patents?

Yes.

[flydpnkrtn]

Try it you might like it :)

No but seriously the update manager was based on zen-updater in 10.1 and 10.2. That functionality has been removed in openSUSE because a.) you don't need ZENworks stuff updating from your house and b.) it's bloated and kind of broken

Re:"Giver"

[rustalot42684]

Do they have a "Receiver" app too?

Thank you Fluendo for the free MP3 support

[schwaang]

I remember when that was announced a while back, nice to see it in a major free distro.
Too bad the source code isn't freely distributable, but I'll take the binary with thanks.

Re:Great!

[jeevesbond]

I know, don't feed the trolls, I'm sorry but someone might actually believe this idiot and it's not going to take much effort to prove them wrong.

Look at this image: http://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/yast-list_thumb.png that is YaST giving the user the option to install whatever desktop environment they like, under the cursor is XFCE whos tagline is '...and everything goes faster'. It's very lightweight, ideal for older computers and does not include any of the things you're complaining about.

Welcome to the GNU/Linux world, where you get the choice of what software to run. That's rather the point with Vista, Microsoft will force people to upgrade to it even if they have to buy a new computer to do so. My apologies if that offends your sensibilities as an MS fanboy, but I'm afraid we don't support bullying in the form of forced upgrades 'round these parts.

Just after installation of 10.3

[eimikion]

I've just installed a new OpenSUSE. All these little bugs from previous releases are gone. Yast software installer finally works with a good speed. Desktop responsiveness is amazing - KDE 3.7 works faster than GUI of Windows 2000. The default green artwork is very nice and gives a distinct feeling to this distro. Hardware detection is very good. My graphic card - nvidia 7600 and audio card - Creative Audigy 2 were working out of the box. Even installation of ADSL modem was a breeze - it is a cheap Sagem modem, used by the all telcos controlled by France Telecom, and most linux distros has problems with it.

What is especially important to people in countries with stupid law (read USA) - OpenSUSE gives you mp3 playback out of box, due to legal fluendo gstreamer plugins. In addition, there are provided Flash 9, newest Java runtimes, RealPlayer and seamless Wi-Fi support.

In the last year I've tried quite a few linux distros - Fedora, Ubuntu, Sabayon, Mint, Mandriva... nothing even come close to the OpenSUSE. Quality of Deutsch engineering.

Re:MP3 support

[eimikion]

Not true. There is a gst-fluendo-mp3-2.7.rpm package on the goldmaster DVD. MP3 playback works out of the box. Eat this, american law system.

Re:21%

[WhiteWolf666]

32-bit java on 64-bit firefox on 64-bit suse works just fine.

nsplugin has grown in leaps and bounds.

Re:Great!

[sumdumass]

I think you hit on something here. The idea of bloatware is something you are stuck with. If the ability to remove or replace the boat was available instead of being forced onto the user, it would be enhancements instead.

Or at least that is the way I see it. If product X (whatever that may be) offers options and feature A, B, and C, as long as they let me disable them and not load it when I don' need or want them they are specifically options. But if they force me to load and use them when I don't want to need to, then it is bloat. "Bloat" seems to revolve around your needs and wants and ability to not use things in the program or operating system.

Re:Im sticking with Fedora

[hollywoodb]

I'm running Fedora 7 now, and it is really nice. I think Fedora 8 (due in little over a month) will be a nice forward step since it includes things like "Codec Buddy" and the RPMFusion repository (a collaborative effort by formerly separate repositories) should be entering full swing. Fedora is a fast-moving distro though. Fedora 7 is finally settling down (fewer updates) and it has been out for quite a while.

Also, if you're considering running more OSes virtualized and are thinking of considering Xen, CentOS might be worth looking into. For VMWare it doesn't really matter if you run a Debian or RedHat/Fedora system, but CentOS's Xen integration is pretty solid.

I tried OpenSUSE 10.1 and there were a *lot* of things that rubbed me the wrong way. From what I've read 10.3 has addressed basically all of my concerns and I'm downloading the installation DVD now. Their Gnome setup looks nice in screenshots, will have to see how it handles in practice. I doubt it'll pull me away from my beloved Fedora & RHEL, but I feel compelled to give it an honest test.

Re:Im sticking with Fedora

[VGPowerlord]

Fedora might be more quirky...but it's from a company that never made any deals with the Devil.

I haven't done any research, but are you sure Redhat has never made a deal with the BSD groups?

I love SuSE but

[dragin33]

I love SuSE, it's my favorite distro.. But I just find the linux community funny sometimes.. Case in point.. 'MP3 support out of the box.' Come on people that should have been an 'out of the box.' feature in 2000. This is 07' And people wonder why MS still sells their OS.