Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (what’s with the middle initial?) has reviewed the recently released OpenSUSE 10.2. “Sooner than anyone expected it, Novell’s openSUSE community Linux distribution project has delivered a new version: openSUSE 10.2. As a dyed-in-the-wool SUSE user since S.u.S.E Linux 4.2 first appeared in 1996, I decided to immediately give this version a try.”
The guy only touched on the KDE interface, I am interested in Gnome as I am a SLED user at the moment. If I get a chance I’ll hop on the torrent. What about XGL?
Gnome looks the same as in SLED 10… still no YaST-GTK available on the media…
Xgl is there, and installed by default with the Gnome desktop… :/
Edited 2006-12-09 02:06
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q=node/58
ZMD is *S*T*I*L*L* broken? Come on! They’ve had what…. 8 months to get it right?
Just leave YaST as the primary software installer and let it go. YaST works very well in this area.
It’s not broken and Novell is trying to fix it. That’s politics for you.
that’s politics indeed. they’ve wasted time rewriting good, stable yast-stuff, and it got unstable and slow (duh, gtk, mono…). and the users suffered… i have suse 10.1 on my laptop. most things work nice, but zmd, the stupid updater, beagle – they all suck deeply. dump the mono stuff, kick gtk in the (almost non-existant) balls and focus on the best technology instead of the most politically correct one…
they should have never bought ximian. waste of money.
Ximian did have one awesome application.
Evolution.
well, yes, evolution isn’t a bad app. i’m not a big fan of going the huge, monolithic way (i prefer things like having a shell which embeds several apps) but it works great, and has some very needed stuff (read: we don’t like ms, but we have to work with their software…).
I couldn’t agree more.
Beagle has sucked up so much processing power on half my servers, I dumped the crappy thing immediately.
I advise everyone to do the same.
Besides, Mono isn’t needed or wanted and we already have a very competent Java VM for Linux, all without patent or “shady” deals in the background.
-Hack
ZMD is *S*T*I*L*L* broken? Come on! They’ve had what…. 8 months to get it right?
Yes, ZMD is still very much broken and is still installed by default. I really don’t know why. The words horse, dead and flog come to mind. From the error in the article it looks as if they can’t handle their collections properly – still.
There is actually now a working solution though. What SJVN didn’t realise was that you can now deselect the Zenworks Management pattern at startup and leave the OpenSuse package management to handle package management. This leaves you with a set of tools that are not written in Mono, you don’t have the full Zenworks Desktop Management crap that doesn’t work and you have the new simple Suse Updater applet instead. It’s all worked absolutely fine for me so far. It actually works, with no inexplicable Mono exceptions being thrown.
The software installation has now got better, because what I generally do is not use my DVD after I’ve installed and switch to web based repositories. OpenSuse now has a complete list of them on the site, with the base packages, add-ons, Pacman, nVidia etc. Installing the nVidia drivers was easy. I just installed through YaST, logged out and then did a CTRL+ALT+Backspace to restart the X server. Voila. Not even a reboot.
I got my Atheros wireless card installed with WPA, which has been a chore in the past. I had to manually install the RPMs from madwifi, modprobe the modules and then add them at startup through YaST. I then added the card and my details through YaST. It didn’t appear to work through NetworkManager at first, and then it just started working.
Now that I’ve uninstalled Beagle, and altered the settings for my 19″ monitor it’s not doing too badly.
I just finished an installation of 10.2.
ZMD worked fine on this installation. You can also disalbe it and just use Yast as the package management tool if you want.
Added all the repos for Packman and Guru and away I went with multimedia. Also added Jenghel for VMWare support.
Im quite happy with it so far.
From what I can tell, this release uses GTK+ 2.10, GNOME 2.16 and Mono 1.1.18. All of which are pretty advance and fresh, when compared to SLED 10 which ships with GTK+ 2.8, GNOME 2.12 and Mono 1.1.13.
Certainly worth looking at!
i’m quite sure they’re just slow, unstable and immature, just like they where in 10.1, ready to ruin the wonderfull suse experience the users had until 9.3. i wish novell would stop wasting money on that crap.
i think this man proved that he was an idiot when he promised that novell/ms deal would have no patent issues
as such, his opinion and edicts are valueless and lack merit
wat an idiot, this is what happens when natural selection is supressed, idiots like him get in the gene pool
lol, obviously you don’t understand evolution.
Don’t feel too bad, most people misunderstand it.
Having idiots in the gene pool is good. Having anything in the gene pool is good. The survival of a species is increased by having a board gene pool, less chance of a change in the environment wiping out the whole species.
see: Sickle Cell Anemia in Africa preventing the spread of Malaria
wow it always, takes a chick to convince of my faults and repent
so jessa, proffer your thoughts up and tell us whether nichols is smart,
from what i see, you beleive that having many leaders even if some of them are stupid and antagonistic is a good thing
What are you basing your assumptions about my gender on?
Whether or not Nichols is smart is not my issue. My issue is that you stated natural selection as a means of removing the ‘less intelligent’ which fails to take in to account the many aspects that go in to evolution. The amount on brain power required to survive is actually quite small.
eg. Currently with the wide spread use of contraception and the fact that the ‘intelligent’ tend to go to university and have careers, therefore putting of reproduction until later in life. The ‘less intelligent’ are more likely to breed due to their non-use of contraception.
—
Democracy is only workable when the people involved pay attention, the fact that their are stupid people in government is the fault of the people and amazingly most of them seem pretty fine with it.
First feelings on openSUSE 10.2 after installation and without any tweaking:
It looks dull and also default fonts are not the best ones. Compared to this release, 10.0 and 9.3 are gorgeous. On the performace side, things did not change much. Like every one, my complaint against suse is, its slow and not snappy. The simple test I use is to check the time it takes for firefox window to come up after clicking the icon. If the bouncing clock appears, well its slow. I am still seeing the bouncing clock for a few seconds. And the machine is not an old one. Also I switched to KDE(though I don’t like it) because I didn’t want to deal with zmd crap. YOU without zmd is fast, but it is still not in leage with package managers found in other distros.
Tnx for your quick remarks.I’m glad i didn’t sacrifise a good working gentoo box in order to come to a similar conclusion.
I am dual booting opensuse 10.2 and gentoo. Gentoo is way fast
I like the features and the functionality of Suse–in fact, it’s the only distro that actually sets a particular Xserver option needed to run crash free for my thinkpad T20 S3 video chip–but I agree about the slowness.. menus take time to appear (I tried SLES 10 w/ their fancy Gnome on my low end P4 and boy, that was painful), KDE control panel applet takes several seconds, Yast itself definitely is not snappy and Sax2 is cold mollases slow, etc, etc..
It’s disheartening because I really want to like them and have bought their Pro retail versions in the past. I’ve held off recommending it to friends and family used to the snappiness of WinXP and have been hoping it would improve (especially on older machines which I use for donating), but with the continued sluggish performance and recent buginess, I may just give them up for good now..
Now, WRT firefox.. an interesting observation to me is how many distros launch firefox on my machine in 8-9 secs, while Zen Linux (v3 and v4) launches it in 4 secs, without any kind of preloading .. I’ve always wondered how such performance differences arise..
Edited 2006-12-09 10:11
Alright, this is off-topic, so i expect to be modded down.
jimveta: I like the features and the functionality of Suse–in fact, it’s the only distro that actually sets a particular Xserver option needed to run crash free for my thinkpad T20 S3 video chip–but I agree about the slowness.. menus take time to appear (I tried SLES 10 w/ their fancy Gnome on my low end P4 and boy, that was painful), KDE control panel applet takes several seconds, Yast itself definitely is not snappy and Sax2 is cold mollases slow, etc, etc..
This is very interesting, i have been running and supporting IBM T2xs, incl. T20s, for a long time. My former company particularly choose these Laptops because they were and IMO still are among the most usable and GNU/Linux compatible laptops out there and dead cheap. The distribution of choice was Debian GNU/Linux and while we needed some manual tweaking to setup hibernation, we never experienced any serious problems whatsoever. After my leave last year, they switched to Mandriva 2006, which is reported to setup the T2x series out-of-the-box to full functionality, incl. hibernation.
So i fear your T20 may have a defect, but if openSUSE is able to somehow mitigate this, this is good also. Unfortunatly the graphics power of the T2xs is a little low for modern desktops like Gnome or KDE 🙁
B. Janssen Well, my thinkpad is not defective.. but perhaps my particular revision of the S3 chip is.. apparently there is a known bug that affects a small number S3 chips–from the savage(4) man page:
Option “ShadowStatus” “boolean”
Enables the use of a shadow status register. There is a chip bug in the Savage graphics engine that can cause a bus lock when reading the engine status register under heavy load, such as when scrolling text or dragging windows. The bug affects about 4% of all Savage users without DRI and a large fraction of users with DRI. If your system hangs regularly while scrolling text or dragging windows, try turning this option on. This uses an alternate method of reading the engine status which is slightly more expensive, but avoids the problem. When DRI is enabled then the default is “on” (use shadow status), otherwise the default is “off” (use normal status register).
Looks like I’m in one of the 4%. In any case, I really appreciate Suse’s (Sax2) thoroughness in catching this.
They probably have a build of Firefox with some features disabled. e.g. if you disable Pango you get faster startup time but some characters (for non-English languages) won’t render correctly. And of course if you build against GTK+ 1.2 instead of 2.0 it starts massively faster but looks like crap.
There are several things you can do with a Firefox build to improve startup time, but they’re all compromises that result in a loss of functionality.
They probably have a build of Firefox with some features disabled. e.g. if you disable Pango you get faster startup time but some characters (for non-English languages) won’t render correctly. And of course if you build against GTK+ 1.2 instead of 2.0 it starts massively faster but looks like crap.
There are several things you can do with a Firefox build to improve startup time, but they’re all compromises that result in a loss of functionality.
Yeah, there could be some disabling of functionality going on.. but I have also made comparisons with Pango disabled on other distros (in fact I always disable it) and that itself doesn’t affect startup time much at all, as opposed to run-time performance with scrolling text, etc.
As far as using GTK 1.x vs GTK 2.. I don’t know. I’m assuming the Zen Firefox build is using GTK 2 because it looks the same as in any other distro.
Well, I think the fonts and theme look great. The performance seems faster than previous SUSE releases.
The only issue I had whilst installing it was that it did not recognise my nVidia fx5500 card. It said my video card was unknow so X wouldn’t start. Manually installing the driver fixed this.
Also the Desktop settings program in the control panel to enable XGL, still does not enable the buttons to turn XGL on. You have to use the old shift-click on the disabled buttons to turn XGL on and then its fine. If anyones interested, shift-click was put in as a mechanism to force enabling of the XGL functionality if you were *really*, *really* sure that your graphics card is supported.
Edited 2006-12-09 07:38
Just downloaded it, in the process of installing in vmware (running on ubuntu edgy). If this Zen software update error is going to occur, then that is an outrage. A showstopper. SuSE wouldn’t be unique in this respect. A few weeks ago I installed FC6 amd64 and right after boot-up, a recommended update resulted in a dependency quagmire I couldn’t get out of. So I chose FC6 i386 instead.
Back to 10.2: What’s really crazy here: the yast installation routine doesn’t recognize your custom partitioning scheme. During software selection, it still shows the proposed size for /home (eating up space for root). That’s new, all the versions up to 10.1 didn’t have that.
I have too little room to install what I want, even though in custom partitioning I reserved 9 Gigs for / .
What’s more: if you select individual packages and then go back to an unselected pattern and select it, all your individual additions are discarded. This is maddening. I can’t believe it.
Missing from the standard dvd(!) sources: gnumeric, eclipse. Unbelievable.
Will be back with an update once this baby runs.
I always enjoy reading Vaughn Nichols. But this is not a review, you didn’t really test-drive it.
those patterns don’t sound good. i wish novell didn’t spend time on zmd, but on smart instead… why o why did they make all these obviously stupid decisions, turning suse in a crappy piece of software? they had a winner, build on the best technology. ok, it could have used some improvements, but honestly, they only made it worse. XGL is immature, same with xen, mono, beagle… it’s cool to have the latest stuff, but those technologies will be superseded by better stuff. in a year time, nobody will use compiz (a windowmanager build JUST for openGL? we’ll prefer a stable one, like gnome’s metacity or KDE’s kwin, both with added openGL…). same with beagle – way too slow and unstable. tracker (gnome) and strigi (kde) will kill’em off.
so it has all just been a waste of money. now i wouldn’t object, i wouldn’t be complaining this much, if i didn’t use suse, and if i didn’t think they had some unique, great features… novell is taking a way the great thing suse had (yast, KDE) replacing them with bad stuff (zmd, etc).
All very true. I am almost ready to give up on SUSE and only consider Debian from now on.
When I started with Linux, several years ago, SUSE and Debian were about equal for me, with a slight edge for SUSE. Now it is definitely the other way around.
And I’m guessing with 10.2 we’re still stuck with ext3 for root too…
And I’m guessing with 10.2 we’re still stuck with ext3 for root too…
Yes, unless you change it. I’ve never really liked ext3, because worryingly, it is the only filesystem I’ve used where I can actually hear my hard drive.
you can change that kind of defaults. many people in fact are happy that reiserfs as default fs is ditched.
there have been too many reports about a botched filesystem with reiser. ext3 is even with very old rescue cd’s (the creditcard format ones, like bbc) approachable (as ext2), if you have reiser there, you’re typically bust.
ext3 is a good and reasonable default.
edit: typo
Edited 2006-12-09 17:10
Funny. The open prefix is more frequent in the times of trouble. Will it be enterprise again when things comes better?
They chose the name openSUSE to differentiate between SUSE Linux Enterprise more obviously.
Many people were confused by the differences, now there should be no such confusion…
They name change was announced during later beta’s, at least a month before “times of trouble”…
There is no problem with the convention. The frequency of the word “open” connected with SuSE depends on the troubles (Novell’s). There is no excuse for them. Use Debian !!!
My video card is unsupported. It is an ATI X1600XT, nothing out of this world. The best I can get? Framebuffer!
But even worse, the apt repositories seem gone forever, and it isn’t clear how to set up Smart instead.
That’s not a problem with suse but a problem with xorg. Use the proprietary driver instead.
The proprietary driver doesn’t work:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=198125
Its a pity your card is not supported but i think if you install the prob. ATI drivers things will work for you.
p.s
make sure you have your kernel-source and gcc and g++ installed because you need them for the module to compile.
Setting up smart:
http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Smart
Edited 2006-12-09 21:11
Thanks for your kind post!
I know that wiki: installing SMART is not a problem, but where are the channels? By default you get only Factory and Guru, if I remember correctly.
Till 10.1 I used apt, no problems there, and if I wanted to use SMART, it would import the channels from apt.
>By default you get only Factory and Guru, if I remember
>correctly.
YOu get the security and updates channels, Guru and Packman (Berlinos) also Gnome and KDE channels are available standard.. For other smart channels try:
http://r-101.blogspot.com/2006/11/smart-channels-for-opensuse-101.h…
I use them too but i do not know if they are already for ver. 10.2
Thanks again.
“I use them too but i do not know if they are already for ver. 10.2”
No, I don’t think so, not yet.
I dunno why , but my config just doesnt work with open suse.
it works excelent with fedora 5 and 6 , but not suse.
in 10.1 , it didnt recognized my raid 0 setup ( fedora did )
not in 10.2 , it doesnt recognize my lvm set up ( and fedora did )
when are they going to get it right ?! 10.3 ?
Whatever works is the best choice.On this workstation gentoo works best.But to give an example,on a other workstation with different hardware FreeBSD runs optimal.
in order tom determine wether suse has it wrong or <insret other distro> — did you ever take a look why it doesn’t work? are the config files at a different place ?
sometimes, such stuff happens. I have seen such stuff the other way around and foud out that the non-working versions failed due to not adhering to FHS.
Which one is at fault then ?
I, for a test, updated my laptop with 10.1 from 10.1 (that’s a test-setup) and the LVM was found, in fact no changes at all.
LVM is of no use with this kind of setup but as stated: this is a playground, not a production system.
i am a bit stumped as to why they didn’t take the time to integrate mono 1.2 and compiz 0.3.2., both Novel sponsored technologies that are far advanced of the versions shipping currently in 10.2.
i understand everyone wants SUSE to play it safe after the 10.1 package manager screwup, i just find it odd is all.
as long as YAST automagically offers updates to X.org, Mono, and Compiz i won’t complain too much tho.
[edit] digicam 0.9 and koffice 1.6.1. would have been nice too. [/edit]
Edited 2006-12-09 13:10
I got my laptop all set up and it’s working wonderfully. SUSE has really done it with this release. I didn’t even bother installing ZMD or that zen thing…just YAST and the new openSUSE updater…all is working just fine with low overhead. I don’t even start the updater automatically…I just start it when I want to check for updates.
The rest of the system was easy to set up and tweak to my likings…this was much nicer than Debian for me. They are doing a good job here….I’m very happy…
Thanks, SUSE team
(all comments above are NOT related in the least to the Novell/MS deal, which I have mixed emotions about. The comments are not biased by politics…it’s just a very good distro for me).
To be honest: I find it great. ZMD actually works (and somewhat fast) but as a KDE user I removed it. The OpenSUSE updater works perfectly!
I cannot understand why most postings are so negative. To me this is a great release and they made up for the 10.1 thingie. I must admit that I even *like* the new start menu!
Forget politics. Just use it. And then show me another distro that provides the same polished, complete and stable environment…
I thinks Linux distros are almost ready for prime time the one thing missing are commericial apps and games.
Come on guys the are Linux user that are willing to pay for quality non-free applications!
Come on guys the are Linux user that are willing to pay for quality non-free applications!
Truth be told, I’m not in any hurry to pay for something that many, many people are more than willing to give away at no cost.