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OpenSUSE 10.3 Released

  Submitted by te_lanus SuSE, openSUSE 124 Comments

OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released today. “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!”

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124 Comments

  1. 2007-10-04 3:45 pm
    sardaukar

    Seriously, with so many good distros out there, why touch this software patents honeypot? Or do we like Microsoft’s Linux Div…. *ahem* Novell today?

  2. 2007-10-04 3:48 pm
    thebluesgnr

    SUSE-polished indeed. Brings me back to the days where the first thing I would do after a Red Hat or Debian install was to install Helix/Ximian GNOME.

    Congratulations, openSUSE. This release is looking very nice.

    • 2007-10-07 3:06 am
      PostDeals

      OpenSuse rocks by far the best Linux flavor I have used and I come from Microshaft world.

  3. 2007-10-04 3:48 pm
    toomany

    I’m using Factory since last August, at home and office, and all are rock solid… Zypper run like a charm, desktop responsiveness is very good, very polished desktop… Zero apps closed for bugs.

    Good job OpenSuSE Team!! 😉

  4. 2007-10-04 3:49 pm
    kap1

    can’t wait to try this, looks excellent, especially the new faster bootup speed.

    still probably the most polished distro out there.

    • 2007-10-04 4:18 pm
      hornett

      Yes, I’m not usually a SUSE fan, but this release looks lovely.

      PS. There is more info about the new boot stuff here:

      http://news.opensuse.org/?p=104

      It will be interesting to see if defragmenting on Linux really makes as much difference as they suggest…

      • 2007-10-04 6:17 pm
        sbergman27

        “””

        Yes, I’m not usually a SUSE fan, but this release looks lovely.

        PS. There is more info about the new boot stuff here:

        http://news.opensuse.org/?p=104

        “””

        From the linked article:

        “””

        People claiming that you do not need to defragment on Linux must never boot. On your 10.2 installation above for example, after 2-5 system updates it would probably take 80s to boot instead.

        “””

        Wow. How can I argue with that kind of hard data?

        Seems like it would have been *extremely* easy to demonstrate that with another boot chart… if it were true. Color me skeptical. Unless Suse updates do something particularly egregious, I just don’t see it.

        That one statement is so questionable that it makes me wonder a bit about the whole article.

        Edit: Clarified that I was referring to the parent comment’s linked article and not the main story’s link.

        Edited 2007-10-04 18:35

        • 2007-10-04 10:04 pm
          Luis

          AFAIK, fragmentation only happens in Linux when your hard drive is quite full. It’s normal, since with little space free and randomly spread across the HD, you can just fragment big files to write them. And sure, fragmentation degrades performance (if anyone has a small partition available, a simple test like formatting the partition, copying enough files to fill it up – e.g, your music collection- then delete some files to leave about 10% free space. Now copy a tarball and time how much it takes to untar. Then format the partition again and try extracting that same tarball again with the partition clean. The difference is in the range of 40s vs. 8s).

          So to keep the system fast (not only regarding boot time) it’s always good to keep your HD clean and as empty as possible. It makes a big difference (though convenience vs. performance must be taken into account too, of course).

          • 2007-10-04 10:11 pm
            sbergman27

            “””So to keep the system fast (not only regarding boot time) it’s always good to keep your HD clean and as empty as possible.”””

            No. Keeping it as empty as possible does not do you much more good than simply keeping it less than 95% full. Which ext3 does for you automatically, by reserving 5% for emergency use by root. 5% free space is what the built in fragmentation avoidance algorithms expect.

    • 2007-10-04 4:47 pm
      Doc Pain

      “can’t wait to try this, looks excellent, especially the new faster bootup speed.”

      I’m especially interested in how good german internationalisation is, so it might be possible to hand a set of SuSE CDs / DVDs to my Joe Q. Sixpacks around. 🙂

      As far as I see from the article, i18n cannot be selected at install time (so, for installation and further use) if you get the CDs. It would be great to have designated language specific CDs either wirh KDE or Gnome available for download. DVD seems to be required for german users. Too much work just for testing… 🙂

      I’ll still try the english CDs for KDE or Gnome because I like english systems better than incorrectly or incompletely translated german ones.

      One thing german sixpack style users don’t like about Linux (and SuSE, too): The “out of the box amount” lacks multimedia support for non-open formats. This is due to legal reasons, but they don’t affect Germany. Just as a question: Would it be possible to install things like “win32-codecs” by default and advice the user to uninstall it if its use is not permitted in his country? At least, installing them afterwards on SuSE is very easy.

      Finally, SuSE is a synonym for Linux in Germany, it’s very well known. So I think the new release could encourage users to abandon expensive MICROS~1 products in order to gain more freedom, comfort and security without having to read or type much.

      • 2007-10-04 5:03 pm
        AdamW

        win32-codecs is entirely illegal in Germany. It’s not illegal on patent grounds, it’s illegal on copyright grounds, and Germany had a perfectly serviceable copyright regime last time I checked.

        • 2007-10-04 5:37 pm
          Doc Pain

          “win32-codecs is entirely illegal in Germany. It’s not illegal on patent grounds, it’s illegal on copyright grounds, and Germany had a perfectly serviceable copyright regime last time I checked.”

          Yes, win32-codecs was a bad example. But just imagine how users think: They want it working, no matter if something illegal is required. In Germany, many users use expeinsive MICROS~1 OSes (“Windows XP Professional”) and applications (“Word”, Photoshop) at home without having paid for it. While this situation is normal regarding commercial applications, Linux offers a lot for free – in a legal way. It’s just… users don’t care if something is illegal or not. They want it all working out of the box. And if it doesn’t (due to legal restrictions), they make their decision: “Linux is stupid, it doesn’t play my ripped DVDs and my video files; I’ll stay with my good ‘XP’ where everything works.”

          Oops, I hear the KSK-RIAA-VAG (Command special forces – RIAA – violent assistance group) knocking at my door… 🙂

          • 2007-10-04 6:00 pm
            AdamW

            well, what you say is true, but that doesn’t make it is possible for a commercial entity which can legally have its pants sued off to include a mechanism for installing stuff that’s flat out illegal in most of the world. I don’t think you’ll find an incorporated Linux distributor anywhere who will take that risk.

          • 2007-10-05 2:17 am
            MamiyaOtaru

            They want it all working out of the box. … “Linux is stupid, it doesn’t play my ripped DVDs and my video files; I’ll stay with my good ‘XP’ where everything works.”

            I just did a fresh install of Windows on my machine for gaming purposes (beta of a certain game under NDA. I can get it to run in Wine but not so well yet). Its (Windows’) media capabilities blow. No DVDs, almost no video I play shows anything (even after fetching codecs). It does MP3s out of the box, and that is basically the one advantage it has over Linux out of the box when it comes to media playback.

            Hunting down installers for xvid, OGM, Realplayer and Quicktime (ugh), my ancient copy of PowerDVD etc is a pain, and I wouldn’t trust some giant possibly spyware ridden codec pack. (VLC is nice, but is available on Linux as well, so that’s a wash).

            I just wish we could get over the idea that Linux out of the box is somehow worse than Windows out of the box when it comes to media playback. It isn’t what people are used to (.exe installers) and for a Windows user it may well be harder to get everything running but please let’s realize the issue is what people are used to, not what the platform is capable of.

        • 2007-10-04 8:26 pm
          segedunum

          It’s not illegal on patent grounds, it’s illegal on copyright grounds, and Germany had a perfectly serviceable copyright regime last time I checked.

          I’d love to know how they’ve covered that under copyright, because every single time this has come up in Germany (SanDisk for example) the issue of patents has been used. I was also greatly amused as to how someone from Sisvel got greatly worried about how the whole SanDisk debacle might invalidate patents they claim to hold.

          • 2007-10-04 8:54 pm
            AdamW

            This is about win32-codecs, not MP3 playback. win32-codecs contains several Windows codecs (literally .dll files) ripped straight out of Windows Media Player, QuickTime etc.

          • 2007-10-05 10:13 am
            segedunum

            This is about win32-codecs, not MP3 playback.

            I’d still love to know how they have MP3 covered in Germany though.

            win32-codecs contains several Windows codecs (literally .dll files) ripped straight out of Windows Media Player, QuickTime etc.

            They aren’t really necessary. There is software around that will play these files without touching Windows components. It doesn’t explain why some people seem to be getting excessively paranoid about licensing things. All people are doing is accessing their own files here. I don’t see Open Office needing a license from Microsoft, nor should one be necessary.

          • 2007-10-05 3:17 pm
            AdamW

            “I’d still love to know how they have MP3 covered in Germany though.”

            I think I read in some of the announcements that they bundle the Fluendo MP3 codec (which is free-as-in-beer, just not speech).

            “They aren’t really necessary. There is software around that will play these files without touching Windows components.”

            You mean ffmpeg. Yes, ffmpeg is rather good these days, but it still can’t handle some of the newer / trickier incarnations of WMV. On the whole, though, I agree, which is why I’ve been pushing for PLF to drop win32-codecs (and a few other blatant copyright infringements) so it can be more officially recognized by Mandriva…

        • 2007-10-05 12:10 am
          nelvana2005

          First of all, you don’t need these w32-codecs anymore. Try Debian Etch and you’ll see that most video and audio files will be played out of the box, even without Marillat’s packages.

          Moreover, I am from Germany and here most Linux users simply do not care about this patent stuff. The new copyright and patent laws are from 2003, but up to now, no Linux user has been accused by any copyright holder, not even for the use of libdvdcss2. Moreover, since it is possible now to buy such “multimedia licenses” (Fluendo, LinDVD, etc.), this is nowadays a minor problem in my opinion.

          But we have real severe problems now. A new hacker law (the so-called “Hackerparagraph”) has recently declared most common security tools (e.g. nessus, nmap, etc.) illegal.

          So the download of a Linux distro which contains such tools (~100% of all Linux distros) is currently illegal in Germany.

          This is a real problem, not this patent stuff.

      • 2007-10-04 5:06 pm
        Flatline

        It’s very easy to install codecs…in Yast, you can one-click to add community repositories and they include the codecs, etc. If you play a format that it doesn’t know, it will also walk you through “one-clicking” to install the necessary files.

        One would think that the German translations would be pretty good for Suse, since they were founded in Germany, by the way.

        • 2007-10-04 5:46 pm
          Doc Pain

          “It’s very easy to install codecs…in Yast, you can one-click to add community repositories and they include the codecs, etc.”

          I’ve seen a note on the release notes page, section “Comments”. It really is easy. But it has to be done manually.

          “If you play a format that it doesn’t know, it will also walk you through “one-clicking” to install the necessary files.”

          This is an approach I really like: Assistance in the case of a missing module, similar to the invitation to download plugins for a browser if some strange content has been discovered.

          “One would think that the German translations would be pretty good for Suse, since they were founded in Germany, by the way.”

          Of course, you could assume this relationship to exist, but just because someone’s living in Germany doesn’t imply he has the skills of fundamental language comprehension. Language quality (proper orthography, typography, grammar, punctuation, hyphenation) does not matter. We have a high rate of functional illitracy in Germany, so only very few users will notice anyway. 🙂

          If I go and check, I’ll find errors, for sure. Missing commas, misplaced whitespaces, incorrect upper / lower case, incorrect typesetting… there are lots of possibilities. The spelling police is on its way. 🙂

          I used the term “translation” mostly in concern of how much has been translated in a minimal sufficient way. As it has been explained to me in a PC-BSD thread – just for example -, while KDE is in german, kmplayer (mplayer with KDE frontend) will stay in english because it’s not a part of the KDE system and won’t be affected by its language setting. So what the average user is asking for in first place: Can I select “German” at the first step of installation and will all my applications be in german then?

          • 2007-10-04 5:52 pm
            Flatline

            Fair enough. I am a native English speaker, so I do not really get a look at the quality of the translations.

            By the way, I’ve been running it for a couple of days now (I was lucky enough to find a mirror with the GM uploaded before release), and I have to say that they seem to have addressed most of the glaring problems that I had with 10.1 and 10.2, which were just terrible releases. It is faster than any other Suse distro I’ve tried, and they *finally* seem to have gotten package management back under control. I’m going to have to use it for a while longer before I have a fully informed opinion, of course, but initially I am quite impressed.

  5. 2007-10-04 4:13 pm
    sc3252

    I might give this one a try.

    For some reason I have always liked debs, they gave me that friendly feeling that rpm’s don’t. For any reason I think I will give rpms another go, just because I haven’t installed a new distro in a wihle.:)

  6. 2007-10-04 4:14 pm
    Hiev

    Anyone knows if is hard to install NVIDIA drivers? (not noveu) in OpenSuse?

    In Ubuntu is just one click, how is it in SuSe?

    • 2007-10-04 4:34 pm
      torkn

      Apparently very easy.

      http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA#openSUSE_10.3

      (For me NVIDIA Open GL (3D) drivers have been more stable with openSUSE than with Kubuntu.)

      • 2007-10-04 5:07 pm
        apokryphos

        It helps that NVIDIA provide the RPMs for openSUSE 🙂

        • 2007-10-04 5:19 pm
          torkn

          Yes, of course it does. You’ve probably tried Nvidia’s own standard Open GL Linux driver? With that one Google Earth runs smoothly, but in my case it wasn’t stable.

    • 2007-10-04 4:34 pm
      Doc Pain

      The “Comments” section at the bottom of the linked article may help:

      Comment by greg 2007-10-04 15:01:41

      Also worth noting where you can 1-click the Nvidia driver,

  • 2007-10-04 5:21 pm
    kap1

    nvidia drivers are also one click install in suse.

  • 2007-10-04 10:49 pm
    flanque

    Don’t kid yourself if you think openSuSE’s nvidia driver installation is seemless. It’s not. People, myself included, have a non-functional X after installing them the ‘easy way’.

  • 2007-10-05 12:10 am
    ml2mst

    I’m using Kubuntu Gutsy (Beta) by now and indeed adding/activating the nVIDIA drivers have been simplified. However this is new in Gutsy. This was NOT the case in previous versions of *Ubuntu.

    On the other hand a one click installation/activation of nVIDIA drivers has been available in SUSE Linux since version 9.2, using Yast Online Update (YOU) :-p

    Edited 2007-10-05 00:15

  • 2007-10-04 4:34 pm
    sappyvcv

    The start menu in GNOME looks infinitely better than the KDE one. It’s beautiful.

    • 2007-10-04 11:26 pm
      nutshell42

      The start menu in GNOME looks infinitely better than the KDE one. It’s beautiful.

      Yep.

      Unfortunately the KDE one works better. It gives you more options with less clicks. Now if the programmers of the one and the art team of the other could work together it would be pretty sweet. A man can dream… =)

  • 2007-10-04 5:27 pm
    HeLfReZ

    What I did like when I installed in a couple of days ago, is that there is a new yast module for community repos. Rather than manually adding the regulars like NVdia, Packman, Backports, etc. You just fire up the Community module, and check the repos you want to include, it handles the rest. Simple change, but very welcomed! Most of the popular repos are just a click away.

  • 2007-10-04 5:29 pm
    dindin

    So, whats the major technical/usage/application differences between this and the various *buntu distributions?

    Other than the Virtualization manager (also available on Fedora) I am not sure where the differences are. The reorganization of the Start menu is not that major to make a switch.

    • 2007-10-04 10:50 pm
      flanque

      OpenSuSE has Less fanbois.

      Edited 2007-10-04 22:50

  • 2007-10-04 5:31 pm
    dindin

    The last time I tried 10.2, I had to manually enter repo URLs for updates and upgrades. Has this changed? (maybe I was not using it right then)

    • 2007-10-04 5:50 pm
      mbkumar

      yes, it changed. There is a new addition called community repos. All the repos, like Packman, nvidia and Suse factory ones can be selected just with a few mouse clicks.

  • 2007-10-04 5:42 pm
    shapeshifter

    Suse = Novel = Microsoft = Evil

    Nuff said!

    • 2007-10-04 5:51 pm
      yanik

      yeah I know, that’s what I feel deep down. But opensuse isn’t suse tho. I think I’ll give it a little spin, even if it kind of feel dirty.

      • 2007-10-04 9:26 pm
        Googol

        You really need to get off that totally unwarranted attitude against Novell. Or maybe not, just start using Windows. Because if you ripped out all the parts Suse and now Novell are contributing to you would be sitting as a command line. Novell ist not simply repackaging like 99% of the +100 one-man-show Linux-distris, they contribute substantially to those things you are using to support your case for Linux.

        • 2007-10-04 9:52 pm
          sbergman27

          “””

          You really need to get off that totally unwarranted attitude against Novell.

          “””

          That is debatable.

          “””

          Or maybe not, just start using Windows.

          “””

          Oops. That’s where you start to lose it. Just start using Windows? There’s a little foam at the corner of your mouth, there. 😉

          “””

          Because if you ripped out all the parts Suse and now Novell are contributing to you would be sitting as a command line.

          “””

          OK. Now you are really spouting gibberish. If it weren’t for Novell, we’d all be sitting at a command line all the time? Yeah, right.

          Novell has made contributions to Linux. And they have also acted in ways which are still open for debate.

          The jury is still out on Novell. My bet is that they will continue to take questionable actions to further what they proudly proclaim to be their “Mixed Source” business.

          Why people continue to give them the benefit of what is left of the what started out as a questionable doubt is beyond me.

          Edited 2007-10-04 21:57

          • 2007-10-04 10:12 pm
            grat

            Why people continue to give them the benefit of what is left of the what started out as a questionable doubt is beyond me.

            Because aside from the FSF insisting that Novell is agreeing there are infringed patents in linux, Novell has a track record of opening closed-source code, providing support (and jobs) for open source developers, co-founding the OIN, and suggesting that Sun needs to be a little more forthcoming with the OpenOffice.Org community?

            The following page is about as official a stance as you can get from Novell on patents, yet people ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or even more sickeningly, claim it’s just a front to further Microsoft’s goals.

            http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent

            Novell has said one thing, Steve Ballmer and the FSF have said something different. If you’d rather believe Steve Ballmer, that’s entirely up to you.

          • 2007-10-04 10:31 pm
            sbergman27

            “””

            Because aside from the FSF insisting that Novell is agreeing there are infringed patents in linux, Novell has a track record of opening closed-source code

            “””

            Please don’t associate me too closely with the FSF.

            That said, Novell has a track record of buying Open-Source companies and opening up certain portions of the code, like YAST, which had value to the original company, but little value to them, while keeping their own closed source code close to their chests, proudly proclaiming their mixed-source status. Ransom Love and the old “Caldera, Inc” got roasted by the community for a lot less. (I defended them at the time!)

            I put Balmer and Hovsepian in pretty much the same category. Except that Balmer has the much stronger hand of cards. If I were Hovsepian, I’d feel pretty desperate at this point. And I probably wouldn’t care if I had to damage Linux to save Novell. *If* I were Hovsepian, that is.

            Edited 2007-10-04 22:34

          • 2007-10-05 12:38 am
            grat

            Please don’t associate me too closely with the FSF.

            Fair enough. ;)

            That said, Novell has a track record of buying Open-Source companies and opening up certain portions of the code, like YAST, which had value to the original company, but little value to them, while keeping their own closed source code close to their chests, proudly proclaiming their mixed-source status.

            Novell has the best directory service, and the best identity management tools out there. They may still have the best desktop management package (Zenworks), I haven’t looked at it recently.

            I don’t blame them for not giving those up.

            Don’t forget that openSuSE (the reason for this thread) didn’t really exist prior to Novell– You had two options for SuSE linux, buy the box (I have several), or install from FTP with zero support. You want ISO’s? Tough.

            Now we have the openSuSE distro, the SLES distro, the SLED distro, and the under-appreciated SuSE Build Service, which currently builds packages for SuSE, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva and Ubuntu.

            I put Balmer and Hovsepian in pretty much the same category. Except that Balmer has the much stronger hand of cards. If I were Hovsepian, I’d feel pretty desperate at this point. And I probably wouldn’t care if I had to damage Linux to save Novell. *If* I were Hovsepian, that is.

            Novell is too dependent on Linux to jeopardize it. Damage to Linux *IS* damage to Novell.

            It’s conceivable they could patch up the various closed-source projects and make them run on top of *BSD, but NSS (very nice filesystem) relies on EVMS, and to my knowledge, EVMS doesn’t run under *BSD. Not a total show stopper, but would certainly bring OES deployments to a screeching halt until it was fixed.

            Their current “official” support for the old NetWare 6.5 kernel is to run it in a domU Xen instance– again, doable under *BSD, but not easily– the BSD port of Xen is apparently poorly maintained currently.

            I can’t come up with a single scenario wherein Novell and Linux don’t have common interests, and common enemies– at least, not one that doesn’t require excessive amounts of tinfoil.

          • 2007-10-05 2:22 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            I can’t come up with a single scenario wherein Novell and Linux don’t have common interests, and common enemies– at least, not one that doesn’t require excessive amounts of tinfoil.

            “””

            How about the scenario in which Novell receives $348 million in cash from a company which has declared Linux to be its greatest competitor? Just a thought. But it’s been a long time since anyone gave me $348 million without expecting something in return.

            No tinfoil there. You might want to take your blinders off, though. 😉

            Edited 2007-10-05 02:26

          • 2007-10-05 3:27 am
            grat

            How about the scenario in which Novell receives $348 million in cash from a company which has declared Linux to be its greatest competitor? Just a thought. But it’s been a long time since anyone gave me $348 million without expecting something in return.

            And Novell *is* giving them something in return. They’re making payments to Microsoft over 5 years. They’re co-funding an “interoperability lab”, although I’m waiting to see what actually comes out of that lab.

            Most importantly, Novell isn’t suing over any patents Microsoft might have violated, at least not until 2012.

            If you’re thinking Novell couldn’t win, let’s not forget that Microsoft helped Novell buy SuSE in the first place, by handing them a 536 million dollar settlement for previous anti-trust violations.

            Any company that can extract nearly a billion dollars from Microsoft and *still* threaten them publicly, gets my support.

          • 2007-10-05 4:08 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            Any company that can extract nearly a billion dollars from Microsoft and *still* threaten them publicly, gets my support.

            “””

            They can do it because they are not really a threat to MS. The net $308 million (net) from this last deal is pocket change to MS, but a substantial infusion to Novell.

            Extract? I’m sure that MS rightly considers it money well invested.

            Sorry. But Novell is no Redhat. RedHat could make such a deal, and based upon their track record, and straining my faith a bit, I could actually believe that they had OSS interests at heart. (The wouldn’t do such a thing, though. It wouldn’t make sense for them.)

            But Novell? Come on. Get real. Novell is as old school a corp as old school gets. They see $348 million minus $40 million over 5 years and they jump at it, treating the consequences as an OSS PR problem.

          • 2007-10-05 3:25 am
            SlackerJack

            Well for one Novell had to, in order to make it work because Novell didn’t have a clue how to deal with SUSE/linux. Novell pretty much was going under but they brought SUSE and they are not known for their good business decisions. Some would say the MS deal is a sign of that.

            Novell will do whats best for their customers not for Linux as a whole and the whole deal pretty much says that.

            Edited 2007-10-05 03:28

        • 2007-10-05 9:09 am
          shapeshifter

          just start using Windows

          No, thank you, I’m quite happy with Slackware and Debian.

          Because if you ripped out all the parts Suse and now Novell are contributing to you would be sitting as a command line

          Care to name some?

          Novell ist not simply repackaging like 99% of the +100 one-man-show Linux-distris

          Umm, have they written their own kernel and gnu tools?

          All Novell did was reach deep into their almost empty pocked (after being just about obliterated from the market by Microsoft) and bought themselves Suse and Ximian. Novell itself hasn’t done anything new since Netware. And it took them over half a decade to even start to figure out what to do with Linux.

          • 2007-10-05 9:55 am
            Erunno

            Care to name some?

            You wouldn’t sit on the command line without Novells involvement (and money) but the Linux desktop would be in a far less enjoyable state. For instance, Novell pays developers for GNOME, KDE, Kernel and OpenOffice. They funded the development of Compiz, XGL, AppArmor and Mono (continued funding). There’s bound to be more projects of which I don’t know of. Here’s an additional list with projects where openSUSE team members are involved:

            http://en.opensuse.org/Novell_Supported_Projects

            I’m actually quite surprised that you don’t seem to be aware that you are probably using a lot of Novell-funded code.

    • 2007-10-04 5:52 pm
      Joe User

      Suse = Novel = Microsoft = Evil

      Nuff said!

      I’m evil, so let me grab myself a copy real quick…

      🙂

      • 2007-10-04 10:55 pm
        flanque

        I think most of us have moved beyond this.

    • 2007-10-04 6:22 pm
      hibridmatthias

      Actually, novelty is not evil. If you mean Novell, that is a matter of open vs closed mindedness…

      I think you might have a typo there…:-)

  • 2007-10-04 5:45 pm
    joeca

    Good job SuSE team, the best KDE Distro has gotten better!

  • 2007-10-04 5:54 pm
    tuan

    I’ve just installed it on my laptop. My wireless (Broadcom 1390 WLAN Mini-pci card) doesn’t work, even though it’s on the driver list during the installation. My soundcard (Sigmatel) doesn’t work properly. There’s no sound from the speakers but when I plug in my headphone, I can hear it.

    btw, my laptop model is Dell XPS 1330. Now I need to reboot back to Vista ;) .

    • 2007-10-04 7:23 pm
      HeLfReZ

      Not to rag on anyone, but this is common…the notion that if it doesn’t work properly on my particular machine with no touching it, its a bad release. Again, please don’t take offense to this, its no directed personally at you.

      Guess what, most modems, wireless cards, graphics cards, sound card…dont work on windows without a little help either. With windows its a driver hunt, with linux, more often, it’s supported or not. I have a Sigmatel in my dell, and it worked fine AFTER I unmuted the front speaker channel…Sigmatel HD in dells cards usually have 5.1 channel sound, and by default PCM is usually unmuted, but everything else is muted. Check you volume control, you might be surprised…

      If the wireless is on the driver list, its probably supported, I would suggest taking 10mins to try to confiure it and reboot, or check the website for details. 2minutes to type broadcom 1390 on the opensuse website brought me to a hcl LIST http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Laptops/Dell that says you need ndiswrapper for that particular card, I would bank on a ndiswrapper search returning exactly how to install it…

      Again, I’m not ragging on you, but with any distro it seems that we have been getting alot of, x didnt work on boot so i reinstalled, with no attempt to configure it. I can’t remember the last time I installed any windows distribution and didnt have to install drivers for 60% of the hardware…give it a shot, or at least a day before you back out.. I recommend using a distro for at least a week before writing it off as no good.

      • 2007-10-04 9:02 pm
        sbergman27

        “””

        but this is common…the notion that if it doesn’t work properly on my particular machine with no touching it, its a bad release.

        “””

        If it doesn’t work without technical intervention then the *vast* majority of people are dead in the water with a *ruined* computer: One that was ruined by Linux. I do wish people would stop with this “It’s really OK to have mediocre QA and wreck people’s computers” crap.

        Our OS is popular enough now that we need to be taking responsibility. It’s not “polish” any more. It’s basic QA.

        • 2007-10-04 11:17 pm
          thabrain

          If it doesn’t work without technical intervention then the *vast* majority of people are dead in the water with a *ruined* computer: One that was ruined by Linux. I do wish people would stop with this “It’s really OK to have mediocre QA and wreck people’s computers” crap.

          I know you weren’t trying to come off as belligerent, however your statement is completely ignoring certain tenets of installing Windows and Linux on PC’s

          Without the Dell, HP, Gateway and other OEM’s preloading their drivers on their systems, anyone that formatted their PC with Windows would be on the hunt for every driver needed, as Windows only has a small snapshot of drivers for 3rd party devices.

          Linux actually does better for that, in that most drivers are integrated into the distibution. That’s better QA than the “no-responsibility” position that Microsoft has.

        • 2007-10-05 1:34 am
          butters

          A wireless card that can only work (sometimes) with Windows drivers through ndiswrapper is not a QA issue, it’s a vendor relations issue. Anyone who buys a Broadcom wireless adapter has nobody to complain to besides Broadcom and the OEM that pushes their chips.

          The Sigmatel issue is a different story. That should work OOTB. It the master channel is muted by default, that’s a polish bug.

          My latest foray into Windows land went far worse than expected. My cousin’s computer wouldn’t boot due to what seemed like filesystem corruption. I used an Ubuntu LiveCD to back her data to an external HDD. It had network, sound, graphics, etc. all working properly, and she was really impressed with my “magic CD” (her words).

          Next I wiped the disk and installed XP Pro SP2 from a retail CD. Windows couldn’t detect either of the network adaptors (internal and a USB dongle) or the graphics card. It wouldn’t even tell me the make and model of these devices. I had go back to the LiveCD to get information on the hardware and download the appropriate Windows drivers.

          You’d think that Windows is popular enough that it should be able to support basic PC hardware.

          • 2007-10-05 4:24 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            Next I wiped the disk and installed XP Pro SP2 from a retail CD. Windows couldn’t detect either of the network adaptors (internal and a USB dongle) or the graphics card. It wouldn’t even tell me the make and model of these devices. I had go back to the LiveCD to get information on the hardware and download the appropriate Windows drivers.

            “””

            I dislike Windows as much as anyone. But you were pitting a years old version of Windows against a brand new version of Linux in a contest of hardware detection. The new Linux CD won. How shocking.

          • 2007-10-05 5:11 am
            SlackerJack

            But dont you see, thats the advantage of Linux and most drivers on Windows are out of date anyway.

          • 2007-10-05 5:45 am
            sbergman27

            The way we do things is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If you upgrade a piece of your hardware, expect that you might have to upgrade your OS to get it to work. Or *wait* 6 months or so for the next version to be released. Or run the alpha or beta.

            In a lot of ways, the “load a driver” method that Windows uses makes more sense. Personally, I don’t allow Windows into my home. But their driver distribution model makes a hell of a lot more sense than the crazy way that we have to do things. If we had the required vendor following, we’d do it just like they do:

            Include as much driver support as we can by default, and count upon the overwhelming incentive that vendors have to support our OS to handle the rest.

            It’s a nearly unbeatable combo.

            Edited 2007-10-05 05:49

          • 2007-10-05 5:47 am
            sbergman27

            Dup. My bad. 😉

            Edited 2007-10-05 05:48

    • 2007-10-05 2:18 pm
      bsnipes

      Just a guess: on my laptop I have to enable “External Amplifier” under Kmix or I don’t get sound from the speakers and only from the headphones. Broadcom seem to just suck for drivers. I use a PCMCIA Linksys card in my laptop because of the horrible Broadcom support ( I blame Broadcom for this ).

    • 2007-10-05 2:43 pm
      elsewhere

      I’ve just installed it on my laptop. My wireless (Broadcom 1390 WLAN Mini-pci card) doesn’t work, even though it’s on the driver list during the installation.

      The 1390 is supported natively by the bcm43xx driver, I’m using one myself. It will be auto-detected by the kernel but you’ll need to perform the one-time step of extracting the firmware files from the Windows driver. The provided fw-cutter tool will do this automatically, but openSUSE (and the other distributions) are unable to legally distribute the broadcom firmware, which would admittedly make things even easier.

  • 2007-10-04 6:46 pm
    yanik

    The installer states that I’ll find everything I need in openSUSE 10.2… (in french)

    Too bad I’m installing 10.3 ;)

    Again: openSUSE 10.2 comes with openoffice.org 2.0…

    Edited 2007-10-04 18:52

  • 2007-10-04 7:00 pm
    HangLoose

    My girlfriends laptop is my test lab ;)

    I used SUSE for quite a time, i think till 9, but the 6 cd’s, problems with rpm dependencies and the slooow boot time were responsible for me to go into debian and later ubuntu. Hope this 1-click-install along with the new package management help things.

    Also like someone said I feel more “friendly” with deb’s/apt but Ill give this one a try cos my girlfriend doesn’t need to be changing and updating software constantly and one thing positive about usage.

    Anyway, congratulation suse people.

  • 2007-10-04 7:56 pm
    SamAskani

    At least for me.

    For my 1.5 years old laptop (Sony Vaio), Open SUSE 10.2 is the only one distribution with WPA working with no need of any hacking. Just as simple as selecting my SSID from a list and type a password. Last stable versions of FC, Ubuntu and CentOS have failed on this. I always manage to figure out how to solve this kind of problems but OpenSUSE is the only distribution that gives the feeling that everything can work without hacking the kernel or the network configuration or whatever.

    Besides the stuff of adding repositories of non-free stuff (but which are detailed in the webpage of the distribution), I’m still amazed how polished OpenSUSE is. Well, I accept that YaST can be difficult (and much slower) to install software compared to Synaptic or Yumex.

    Now with version 10.3 bringing an improved software installation and YaST and an even better knetworkmanager, I’m just excited to take this to home this night.

    Personally, I think that OpenSUSE does not receive all the praise that it should have.

  • 2007-10-04 8:37 pm
    systyrant

    Installed the KDE version of openSuse 10.3 and just like the RC and Betas KDE won’t boot into the desktop.

    As for the install, it went fairly smooth. Discovered that I don’t particularly want to download the repositories while trying to install. Have just KDE on a single CD made the install take less than 30 minutes to finish.

    Other than the fact that I still can’t boot into the desktop it all went fairly smoothly.

    • 2007-10-04 10:22 pm
      zegenie

      Are you using SLI? I find that openSuse is the only distro that fails to configure my displays correctly, trying to start my second graphics adapter instead of the first. It installs correctly though, using the first display adapter. Manually changing the PCIID in the xorg.conf file on first bootup (from 2:0:0 to 1:0:0) fixes it though … weird …

      • 2007-10-05 2:27 pm
        systyrant

        Naw. I’m just using a standard Geforce FX 5500. Ubuntu boots fine, Fedora boots fine, Even SLED boots fine. For that matter I believe 10.2 boots fine.

  • 2007-10-04 8:46 pm
    pepsi92

    big pb with grub install on this distro

  • 2007-10-04 9:40 pm
    rahim123

    Can somebody please explain what Kiwi is all about? I don’t have a huge enterprise Linux network (which seems to be the focus of Kiwi), but I have always wanted a good tool like mklivecd that lets me install and tweak my desktop, and then create a liveCD of my currently installed system. Can Kiwi do that, or does it require me to build it off a base ISO and mess with package sources, etc?

  • 2007-10-05 12:30 am
    pllb

    Despite their deal with MS I can’t stay mad at them because they are always putting out quality products and bringing new ideas to the table

  • 2007-10-05 12:33 am
    SlackerJack

    KDE is not that good, they removed the kde3 games and replaced them with a few kde4 games. It’s not good that they put half and half in like this with a stable distro.

    Also they are still sticking to XGL which the nvidia panel dont work with it. V-sync seems to be broken with compiz, i’m running the last RC release.

  • 2007-10-05 3:41 am
    shahid

    60 comments so far and not a single one mentioning the new GTK written YAST configuration tool?

    • 2007-10-05 5:09 am
      SlackerJack

      It shows how biased it is here, yep it looks great and consistent with the GNOME desktop.

      • 2007-10-05 10:19 am
        segedunum

        It shows how biased it is here, yep it looks great and consistent with the GNOME desktop.

        There’s nothing much to say. They’ve re-written a GUI front-end for YaST in GTK, likely reproducing an awful lot of bugs and quirks. Personally, I don’t think there was too much point in re-writing something just to get from one GUI toolkit to another, but, whatever.

        • 2007-10-05 11:56 am
          SlackerJack

          The look of GTK YaST is in tune with the gnome control centre, same layout and consistent. Why should GNOME users have to put up with the Qt/crystal icons inconsistency that was YaST before?

          • 2007-10-05 1:16 pm
            segedunum

            The look of GTK YaST is in tune with the gnome control centre, same layout and consistent. Why should GNOME users have to put up with the Qt/crystal icons inconsistency that was YaST before?

            Because we have people putting effort into integrative stuff like this:

            http://gtk-qt.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

            It is more than capable of going both ways, from GTK to Qt (KDE) and Qt (KDE) to GTK. There is no reason whatsoever, especially considering that YaST is a bunch of modules that can be embedded and launched, for someone to completely reimplement a front-end in a completely different GUI toolkit because they believe things like styles, themes and icons to be unchangeable. It’s not as if GTK is offering you something that Qt can’t do here, and the only reason it has been done is because of looks, which is pretty damn silly. Take a look at these applications, which use GTK, integrated nicely into KDE:

            http://gtk-qt.ecs.soton.ac.uk/images/screenshots/gimppolyester-thum…

            http://gtk-qt.ecs.soton.ac.uk/images/screenshots/firefoxdomino-thum…

            http://gtk-qt.ecs.soton.ac.uk/screenshots.php?eclipseserenity

            Eclipse isn’t going to be ported specifically to Qt and KDE any time soon, but this suffices quite nicely really. I fail to see why this can’t be done in the opposite direction.

          • 2007-10-05 1:24 pm
            joeca

            and the only reason it has been done is because of looks, which is pretty damn silly.

            Non-geeks tend to like uniformity and nice looks. I like them as well so i guess that makes me neither X nor Y but a Z factor?

            If linux will ever get a userbase outside of geekdom, nice looks are required.. Also even with said implementation above, the app’s still do not *feel* right to me outside of their native environment.

            Edited 2007-10-05 13:27

          • 2007-10-05 1:26 pm
            Hiev

            As I remember you trolled that it would take years to make a GTK front end for YAST, and look, it only took some months, but of course, don’t let that stop you in your anti-gtk quest.

          • 2007-10-05 6:42 pm
            Morty

            it only took some months

            That’s verifiable not correct, as it was part of Google’s Summer of Code 2006(and it was started before that:-). Even if it has got 1:1 functionality coverage of YaST already, it took more than some months.

          • 2007-10-05 8:12 pm
            joeca

            At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s done and over with. Now gnome people can enjoy a gtk interface. I don’t even use gnome and I think it was the right decision.

            It goes along with the total presentation you deliver. For example, Fedora and Ubuntu; both have excellent gnome distrobutions. The KDE versions of both are “ghetto wastelands” when compared to their gnome counterparts. They don’t spend much time developing these DE’s. To me it gives off the impresion that they don’t really care much about KDE users. Which may or may not be true, but it leads me to not use there distro.

            Also even with the applications to “convert” gtk apps to qt and the reverse, the menu structures are different(continuity), and icons don’t change often to their new respective DE(look & feel), so it usually comes across half-baked to me.

          • 2007-10-06 1:27 am
            segedunum

            At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s done and over with. Now gnome people can enjoy a gtk interface.

            They aren’t enjoying anything. GTK YaST is an exact reproduction of Qt YaST, except with GTK used as the toolkit:

            http://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/gtk-yast-blueto…

            Basically, it has achieved nothing except create something pretty much identical…………….in another toolkit. I just find that rather pointless.

            Edited 2007-10-06 01:28

          • 2007-10-06 3:02 am
            SlackerJack

            Why dont you just move on, we GNOME users like the new GTK YaST and it makes for a more consistent looking desktop plus no need to load all the kdelibs/icons/theme overhead. On the other side I see the KDE fans moaning about the same thing(why should we have to install GTK).

            Face facts, it’s so biased towards KDE here, thats why GTK YaST was never mentioned until someone intensionally brought it up 60 odd comments later. Now then it’s knocked down by you like GTK YaST shouldn’t be here.

            Edited 2007-10-06 03:06

          • 2007-10-06 1:12 pm
            segedunum

            Why dont you just move on, we GNOME users like the new GTK YaST and it makes for a more consistent looking desktop…

            The consistent looking reimplementation of GTK YaST is simply a reproduction of Qt YaST, except using a different toolkit. There’s nothing different or especially Gnomeish about it at all. Which part of that did you fail to understand?

            I’ll reiterate. Why don’t people just give up on porting GTK to Windows and the Mac and just rewrite applications like the GIMP to use Windows.Forms and Cocoa? Porting Qt to Gnome and GTK and vice versa is simply the same process. That just shows how silly this is.

            …plus no need to load all the kdelibs/icons/theme overhead.

            Sorry sweetheart, but if you want applications, and people do, then libraries are needed. I’ve never understood this daft attitude some people have.

            On the other side I see the KDE fans moaning about the same thing(why should we have to install GTK).

            I don’t see that at all. On a normal KDE install in OpenSuse, GTK is automatically installed. It’s just everyone else who seems to be on this quest to try and eliminate everything but their own favoured toolkit otherwise, there wouldn’t be efforts like QtGTK.

            Now then it’s knocked down by you like GTK YaST shouldn’t be here.

            GTK YaST just shouldn’t be necessary.

          • 2007-10-07 3:20 pm
            sbergman27

            “””

            GTK YaST just shouldn’t be necessary.

            “””

            Actually it’s QT Yast which is, fortunately, no longer necessary. Why support two toolkits when only one is needed? The move to GTK was a solid technical decision.

            The next logical step would be to drop KDE altogether and focus their polishing efforts upon a single DE.

          • 2007-10-08 2:02 am
            john

            The next logical step would be to drop KDE altogether and focus their polishing efforts upon a single DE.

            If I remember correctly, they tried that already, and it blew up in their face. I guess the Ximian boys told Novell management that nobody would care if KDE went away. They quickly found out that not everyone loves Gnome like they do, and Novell had to do a hasty retreat.

            SuSE used to be the premier KDE distro, leaving Gnome fairly well neglected in the process. Now, there seems to be more of a balance between the two desktop environments. Hopefully that’s as far as it goes, otherwise, many of SuSE’s (and now openSUSE’s) long time loyal users will be forced to look for someone to support.

            That might be a win for Gnome, but will it be a win for openSUSE?

          • 2007-10-08 3:39 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            That might be a win for Gnome, but will it be a win for openSUSE?

            “””

            Yes, it would be. Novell thought they could just buy Suse and rip out KDE. They did not realize the inertia they were fighting back then. But that was a *long* time ago. They could drop it now and free up substantial resources. And while there would be wailing, it wouldn’t amount to that much in 2007. It would be worth it.

          • 2007-10-08 5:37 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            Don’t delude yourself. Not everybody is a Gnome (and Ubuntu) zealot. One of the main reasons why I love openSUSE is because they still have one of most polished KDE. If they dropped it (but they are not going to commit suicide, on the contrary, signs show they are going in the opposite direction, look at their early support for KDE 4 components), I’d immediately change distribution.

          • 2007-10-08 5:57 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            Don’t delude yourself. Not everybody is a Gnome (and Ubuntu) zealot.

            “””

            Thanks for revealing yourself so early in your post. 😉

            (Note to self: I’m dealing with an anti-Ubuntu nut, here.)

            “””

            If they dropped it

            …

            I’d immediately change distribution.

            “””

            But Anonymous Penguin, if *you* did that, they’d *die*.

            Don’t overestimate your significance.

          • 2007-10-08 6:17 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            Thanks for revealing yourself so early in your post. 😉

            (Note to self: I’m dealing with an anti-Ubuntu nut, here.)

            (note to self, I am dealing with an Ubuntu zealot, as expected. Why oh why, do I have to find them even in a thread devoted to my favorite distro?)

            Don’t overestimate your significance.

            And you don’t underestimate the significance of *all* KDE lovers.

          • 2007-10-08 6:25 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            note to self, I am dealing with an Ubuntu zealot, as expected.

            “””

            I’m rather partial to Fedora and CentOS. Ubuntu seems best for my laptop, though. Nasty Broadcom chipset in that thing.

            Don’t make so many assumptions about people on this site. You made the assumption that I was an Ubuntu zealot, and pegged yourself as an anti-Ubuntu nut in so doing.

          • 2007-10-08 6:43 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            You… pegged yourself as an anti-Ubuntu nut in so doing

            I have no problems in admitting that I am an anti Ubuntu “nut”. Ubuntu is an ordinary distribution with an agenda. And I can’t forgive them for taking everything from Debian and hardly giving anything in return.

          • 2007-10-08 6:54 am
            sbergman27

            And they’ve done a damn good job of promoting Debian. As I indicated in my previous post, my background is more from the Redhat world. I tried Debian many times over the years, and it tasted bitter. It was Ubuntu which introduced me to the goodness in the Debian world. Apt is faster than yum. The package availability is very nice. Ubuntu stands on the shoulders of the Debian giant. Few would deny that.

            Fedora/RHEL/CentOS administration is better when you are dealing with a lot of users, though. IMO, of course. 😉

          • 2007-10-08 7:07 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            First of all, I like Fedora/RHEL/CentOS (especially the latter). I simply don’t use them because openSUSE and, in second instance, Debian suit my needs better.

            As to Ubuntu, have they promoted Debian or have they promoted just themselves? Because nobody has ever given me a good explanation why they had to fork Debian. Before Ubuntu there had been hundreds of Debian derivatives, but none had ever been a fork.

            Edited 2007-10-08 07:08

          • 2007-10-08 7:14 am
            sbergman27

            “””

            First of all, I like Fedora/RHEL/CentOS (especially the latter). I simply don’t use them because openSUSE and, in second instance, Debian suit my needs better.

            “””

            Fair enough.

            “””

            As to Ubuntu, have they promoted Debian or have they promoted just themselves? Because nobody has ever given me a good explanation why they had to fork Debian. Before Ubuntu there had been hundreds of Debian derivatives, but none had ever been a fork.

            “””

            And none had ever been particularly successful. You really can’t argue with success:

            http://tinyurl.com/39obxz

          • 2007-10-08 7:27 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            And none had ever been particularly successful

            That is open for debate. Take Knoppix, for instance. As a one mane job, without millions $ to back it up, it is amazing what it did for Linux then.

          • 2007-10-08 7:34 am
            sbergman27

            Knoppix was a phenomenon *inside* our little community.

            Like RedHat, Ubuntu has managed to become known outside of it:

            http://tinyurl.com/3e2y3a

            Like I say. You can’t argue with success.

          • 2007-10-09 2:48 am
            Anonymous Penguin

            Knoppix was a phenomenon *inside* our little community.

            I believe that is also open for debate. Everybody I gave a Knoppix CD was pretty impressed with it (at the time people believed Linux was a funny OS where you had to do everything from the CLI).

            Nobody knows what could have happened if Knoppix was better suited for install (that was done later by Kanotix) *and* if somebody had invested millions so that Joe User could get 10 CDs sent home on demand!

          • 2007-10-08 2:34 pm
            Erunno

            And while there would be wailing, it wouldn’t amount to that much in 2007. It would be worth it.

            Novell’s own recent polls have shown that over 2/3 of their openSUSE users choose KDE as their default desktop environment, there’s at all times I’m online a 2:1 ratio in KDE’s favour when looking at the Bittorrent seeds of the 10.3 CDs (I’m seeding both versions at the moment). Why should Novell drop KDE in favour of a *minority* of their userbase? And more importantly, why should openSUSE as a community project alienate a possibly large part of their voluntary contributors if the user preferences mirror the contributor composition?

          • 2007-10-06 4:46 am
            joeca

            They aren’t enjoying anything. GTK YaST is an exact reproduction of Qt YaST, except with GTK used as the toolkit:

            You’ve seriously got to be kidding me…

            – Who are you to tell anyone they don’t like it? I believe that’s up to those users now, not you.

            – Who said it was anything other than the same YaST we’ve used under QT forever but now with a GTK interface? I didn’t…

            Give me a break… Stop trolling.

            Edited 2007-10-06 04:49

          • 2007-10-06 1:33 pm
            segedunum

            You’ve seriously got to be kidding me…

            Nope.

            – Who are you to tell anyone they don’t like it? I believe that’s up to those users now, not you.

            It’s the Emperor’s new clothes syndrome……..

            I’m not telling you anything sweetheart. Take a look at the screenshot. Those are exact reproductions of Qt YaST modules, except reimplemented and rewritten in a different toolkit. Pointless, in other words, and in development terms, lunacy. No one is getting anything different or particularly integrated in the way that people are claiming.

            – Who said it was anything other than the same YaST we’ve used under QT forever but now with a GTK interface? I didn’t…

            I believe that was actually the point. What was the point in rewriting and reimplementing it in GTK if all that was being done was to get the exact same modules, GUI and layout of Qt YaST……….except written in GTK?! I believe this is a classic case of what is called ‘Not Invented Here Syndrome’, and people have been happy to throw that around in the past.

            People have got a couple of options here. Rewrite everything in GTK to get the integration (if you can call it that) people desire (which is obviously just plain daft), or make efforts to integrate Qt better into Gnome, and be open to it, as well as GTK into KDE, just as Qt is ported to Windows and the Mac or GTK is ported to Windows and the Mac – and people don’t seem to complain about that too much ;-). It’s only when people talk about toolkits on Linux desktops that we get this idiocy. That seems to be a serious and obvious issue for some people.

            People are going to squeal, but the fact is that it’s only the KDE guys who are open to making that integration with other toolkits, and GTK, happen. What evidence do we have for that? They’ve actually created a project to make it happen, and GTK applications actually look perfectly fine on KDE now. There’s no reason that can’t happen in the opposite direction, but of course, reimplementing everything in GTK is the better option.

            Give me a break… Stop trolling.

            Yer, and the Emperor is wearing a nice bright, shiny new suit ;-). If you have a decent response to the above, I’m all ears.

            Edited 2007-10-06 13:34

          • 2007-10-06 3:42 pm
            joeca

            OK… sweetheart, it’s obvious this is a waste of my time. Have fun.

          • 2007-10-06 9:37 pm
            andrewg

            You make many valid points and I agree with you. But I would also say that OpenSUSE is a Novell sponsored project. It will be used as the basis for their corporate subscription desktop. Gnome is the default for this income generating distribution and they are pushing Gnome. From that perspective it makes sense to use GTK because unlike GIMP, YAST is a system administration tool. You won’t see Apple develop their admin tools in Qt or Swing and you won’t see Microsoft develop theirs it GTK, Qt or Swing either.

            Now if they had to do an exact copy of Amarok in GTK then they would definitely be crazy.

          • 2007-10-07 11:20 am
            segedunum

            But I would also say that OpenSUSE is a Novell sponsored project. It will be used as the basis for their corporate subscription desktop.

            Yep, valid point. However, GTK YaST was a Google Summer of Code project, and not something that Novell has come up with themselves.

            It will be used as the basis for their corporate subscription desktop. Gnome is the default for this income generating distribution and they are pushing Gnome.

            Valid point. However, if they were producing a ton of system administration tools to go head-to-head with their main rival, Windows 2003, I could just about understand that. However, their main development platform of choice is .Net and Mono – with .Net being their main focus, and Mono being used to port to Linux. There’s no GTK to be found. It’s all Windows based.

            The Server Consolidation Utility in Open Enterprise Server, for example, is written with .Net with Mono merely being used to port it over to Linux. It’s not a native Linux application, and it doesn’t use GTK#. That, in a nutshell, is Novell’s strategy on admin tools, and I know of quite a few Novell admins who are at the end of their tether.

            You won’t see Apple develop their admin tools in Qt or Swing and you won’t see Microsoft develop theirs it GTK, Qt or Swing either.

            No, but you won’t see them rewriting existing tools and reproducing them exactly in their own toolkit of choice.

            Now if they had to do an exact copy of Amarok in GTK then they would definitely be crazy.

            Well, yer………

          • 2007-10-06 1:22 am
            segedunum

            As I remember you trolled that it would take years to make a GTK front end for YAST…

            Nope don’t recall making that comment. I do remember saying that it was pointless though. But then again, it’s easy to role out the troll word.

            and look, it only took some months

            It took more than a few months, and if you actually have a look at it:

            http://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/gtk-yast-blueto…

            They are basically exact reproductions of the Qt YaST modules, except written with GTK. So what exactly were they doing here that was different?

            …don’t let that stop you in your anti-gtk quest.

            Ahhhhhh. I know this is a tender area to broach with some people, but I’m sorry sweetheart, I just don’t believe that re-writing applications in another toolkit is a good idea.

            I mean, why bother porting GTK to Windows and the Mac when you can just rewrite the GIMP’s front-end in Cocoa and Windows.Forms? But of course, that would be silly, wouldn’t it? 😉

  • 2007-10-05 6:04 am
    orfanum

    My G4 is licking its cold blue lips and I am warming up to the idea of a viable alternative to Leopard. This is also going on as a dual boot on my works Vaio – I think soon Windows and OS X are going to be green with envy…

  • 2007-10-05 7:47 am
    Darkelve

    Has anyone timed their boot time? How long does it take for you guys to get from Grub to a KDE desktop?

    Edited 2007-10-05 07:47

    • 2007-10-05 8:45 am
      Kishe

      dont know of grub to kdebut grub to gnome isnt more than 15 seconds.

      it’s amazingly fast.

      • 2007-10-05 9:11 am
        MamiyaOtaru

        I don’t imagine KDE would be much different. The majority of the boot time on a Linux box has nothing to do with the DE. For me, once everything else has started up (network config, mounting filesystems etc) KDM comes up in a few seconds, and from there to the desktop is very fast. With Gnome I’m sure it’s the same way.

        With my system it’s a little longer tha 15 seconds, but that’s nothing to do with KDE; it’s all the stuff before. Improvements there (I’m on Debian) will be what helps. Perhaps Upstart someday, if it makes its way to Debian.

  • 2007-10-06 6:27 am
    netpython

    Nice artwork as usual 🙂

    The devs have undoubtedly adressed a lot of issues.

    Addtition of repos via a Yast button 🙂

    However what’s the use of displaying them if half of the packages fails dependancy checks?

    • 2007-10-06 6:49 am
      netpython

      Third party or community repo packages still badly connect with the mainstream packages. The result is dependancy hell and or dependancy checker timeouts.

  • 2007-10-06 2:45 pm
    mariux

    It never ceases to amaze me that not a single linux distribution can get my monitor setup working correctly. And it’s not like it’s a weird setup, it’s a laptop with an external monitor (and a r300 gfxcard) And if i can’t get it working with me 5 years of gentoo and systems administrator experience, then it’s definitely not ready for the general public.

    All i want is to be able to use my external monitor (1680×1050) when im at home and my internal monitor (1400×1050) when im at school, preferably without having to restart X to switch.

    The fact that my external monitor has a larger resolution than my internal monitor seems to be the first big problem, often i choose 1680×1050 in the display settings but still only get 1400×1050 on the external monitor. This applies even when i have set it to not display any picture on the internal.

    And there also seems to a bug in the driver or xrandr that makes it only see my external monitor as 1024×768, if i’m lucky enough that it sees it at all.

    And in OpenSuSE there is no way of choosing which display i want the output on if i do not want to use both at the same time (that doesn’t work correctly either btw).

    The YaST Display Settings thing detects my Samsung 1680×1050 external monitor and sets the correct settings for it. Only problem is that the picture is displayed on the internal monitor.

    With the next newest fglrx driver i was actually able to switch display and resolution on the fly, only problem is that that driver ruins suspend.

    With r300/xorg/xrandr svn in gentoo i was also able to switch on the fly, though not that one worked perfectly either.

    I will continue to try out new linux distros, but until the problem is fixed im not going to run linux anymore, i’ve grown tired of trying to fix the problem.

    When it comes to OpenSuSE 10.3 except for that problem it seems great. I’ve only tried the KDE version but it’s vanilla enough to still be good, not watered down like kubuntus kde. The Kickoff menu works great, i never normally use the kmenu in regular kde but this one i might actually use, so absolutely an improvement. The bootup was fast (but not THAT fast). The package manager seems alot faster.

    • 2007-10-06 4:09 pm
      netpython

      The YaST Display Settings thing detects my Samsung 1680×1050 external monitor and sets the correct settings for it. Only problem is that the picture is displayed on the internal monitor.

      On my system the monitor was detected as it should but after a reboot i had to maually run sax2 and save the configuration. Otherwise command prompt only.

  • 2007-10-06 2:51 pm
    Caraibes

    I am wondering if any of you could manage to install Skype in openSUSE 10.3 ?

    As of me, I installed the 32 bits Gnome version yesterday, and I simply can’t manage to install Skype… Strange…

    • 2007-10-06 10:09 pm
      suser

      You need to install few qt-packages first.

      libqt4

      libqt4-x11

      libqt4-dbus-1

      • 2007-10-07 12:01 pm
        Caraibes

        Thanks, it worked !

  • 2007-10-06 10:59 pm
    deb2006

    I still have issues with rpm that I never dream of having with deb. So any rpm distribution is not for me. Then there is this tool I actually despise: YaST. Quite useless and senseless. It’s a blob, and it will remain a blob.

    And yes, since I also despise Microsoft, Novell seems to have become some kind of Linux representative from them. So no, sorry, any product from that company is not for me.

    However, having said that: I see that Novell has worked hard on the desktop, and that it even surpasses Ubuntu. The integration of applications and the ease of the desktop is great.

  • 2007-10-07 2:57 am
    NorthWay

    (With apologies to Dijkstra)

    How is it possible to get the most fundamental part _so_ out of whack?

    I spent at least two hours trying to persuade 10.3 to upgrade my 10.2 install.

    – first of all it doesn’t see my mirrored reiser drives as valid targets and you have to tell it to use it

    – second it complains that the x64 version is different from the x32 version (ok, so it is, but when am I supposed to be able to upgrade to a 64bit version then? Don’t tell me to install from scratch please)

    – third it takes _ages_ to think about the dependencies (it feels like a O(N^2) or at least O(x*NlogN) routine at work). I’m talking about minutes before presenting me with a list

    – fourth it keeps looping me through failing dependencies with only small or no differences in what it keeps complaining about. This can drive a man insane (remember that the previous point applies for each time it fails). In the end I gave up and booted back to 10.2.

  • 2007-10-07 8:04 am
    Anonymous Penguin

    I absolutely love it. Running the 32 bit version right now.

    I recommend everybody the 32 bit version. The 64 bit one has still some minor issues.

  • 2007-10-08 3:13 pm
    hibridmatthias

    While I don’t mind the equating of the two DEs, I do worry about all this Novell push toward Gnome/Gtk. They can say that openSuse is for enthusiasts et cetera, but the fact of the matter is, it still functions as the test bed/code base prototype for the enterprise side. All corporations have limited resources for capital reinvestment and development; I can see the possiblity of this leading to the siphoning of resources for KDE to GNOME, leaving the nice polish of KDE they have done in the dust of the past

    Kubuntu is a great example of what I mean. Ubuntu is a nice GNOME distro, but Kubuntu is not as polished as of yet nor does it feel that way, 32 or 64 bit. I have installed and used both for the past 4 releases and it is actually a great example of exactly what I am concerned about happening to the openSuSe distro. Messy X installs, failures to boot, and other annoyances make Kubuntu feel like Ubuntu’s red headed step child.

    I don’t mind if they drop KDE on the enterprise versions at all. The corporate folk can have and probably desire its simplicity and lack of functionality; but I do mind if they start to drop the ball with KDE on the openSuse product. If they decide shift resources from the KDE side, I think alot of users will be very disappointed or might have to look to Mandriva or some decent KDE based distro.

    No this is not an anti Ubuntu/Kubuntu rant..just an iteration of what I see to be a common consensus in this forum with whcih I agree…

    Edited 2007-10-08 15:16