Submitted by “The live version of openSUSE 10.3 is now available as a GNOME or KDE CD. Both contain the same software as the 1 CD installation versions would provide you with, but as a live version. The live system can be used as a productive system or rescue system. You can also use it to just check out how openSUSE 10.3 runs on your computer without touching your hard drive. The Live CDs are available as 32bit versions in US English only and also contain, for the first time, an install option on the desktop.”
People still use MicroSuse?
I like Suse, and I would use it… if they dumped Yast.
has it been fixed, as in speeded up ?
has it been fixed, as in speeded up ?
I think OpenSuSE is with 10.3 definitely on the right track. Just couldn’t resist and got myself a retail box a few weeks ago. To my pleasent suprise yes they have improved YasT in terms of responsiveness and added some new feautures. Adding community repos is a few clicks away.Swap space is encrypted by default. Only gnome 2.20 seemed to have problems with encrypted /home and /tmp. But that is hardly SuSE’s fault since kde has no problems displaying folders and documents on the Desktop.
raver31 wrote: I like Suse, and I would use it… if they dumped Yast.
has it been fixed, as in speeded up ?[Sic]
Oh no, not this old and much exaggerated one one again. If you don’t like YaST, don’t use OpenSuSE. YaST is the whole point of it compared to other distros. Also, if you use KDE, which the majority of OpenSuSE users do according to PlanetSuSE, you’ll avoid the alleged slowness of YaST and GTK. Personally I’ve never found YaST to be a problem, and for those new to Linux it’s a godsend compared to the vestigial tools available in the major DEs.
OpenSuSE has two weaknesses, and neither is YaST. One is their highly dubious software installation and updating system. They’ve fiddling with this for years and it gets no better. The other is a lack of polish and thought regarding how people use a PC – on display in such things as the pants MS-style extended menus and too many buttons which all do the same or very similar things.
As for the live CD, surely highly welcome all round.
Few words from an inexperienced Linux user…
I really like openSUSE as a whole, but YaST feels somewhat clunky to me. My laptop has no internet connectivity during the install, so by default it can’t update at all until I can set up the respositories manually. For such a user friendly distribution of Linux, I was very surprised by this. Aside from that and a bit of sluggishness, I never ran into any dependency issues, though the menus that come up when there are questions about dependency resolution feel out of place.
That’s not enough to keep me from loving the OS though. It’s a great release!
Even you skip the update during the install, you can going to “Novell Customer Center Configuration” module from yast and basically run that portion of the install after the fact. I normally end up doing that myself in most cases anyway.
This one can be installed.
I hear quite often people complaining that openSUSE can’t be installed from a LiveCD. Well, there you are people, you got what you wanted
heh, I was installing the new Ubuntu the other day, and to my suprise i HAD to load the whole live-cd(wich took about 15min on this perticular PC) before I could click the “install” icon, and start a pretty slow installer… I really hope you can choose to install from the boot-promt, via either a text-based interface(a la slackware), or a graphical installer(not the whole system loaded in ram) ala debian4. Just think it could be usefull for some technical reasons to not HAVE to load the whole live-cd to install, or just personal taste…
IMHO
Yes, people finally got a live-CD with install option. But, compared to other distros, they are quite late shipping a live-installer. I wonder why? Mandriva has had this option for quite some time now. Later, Ubuntu also had this option and Knoppix had an installer for many years (although it is not designed as an “hd-install-distro” by default). I always have the feeling that Suse is lagging in terms of innovation, but maybe that is just me. (I also find Mandrivas Control Center to be way better than Suses Yast, but different tastes, different approaches.
)
I’ve read on the forum linked to the original article here that some people are having difficulty accessing the repos after they do a live CD install. I think that I also read that suse will be incorporating the live cd into 10.3 so this could be a bug that will soon be fixed.
Anyone having difficulty accessing the repos?
Anyone having difficulty accessing the repos?
Not at all. This whas amongst other things crucial for me when i tested the 10.3 release candidates. Thereis a “knob” in Yast for adding community repos confortably as well. Works like a charm, only not allways during peak hours but that’s not an issue for me.
10.3 is ace, now even better with a live version.
roll on opensuse 11.0 hopefully with:
> KDE 4.1
> X.org 7.4
> Pulseaudio
But quite relevant to a Live CD; can this read and write to an NTFS partition?
If so, it will be extremely handy for me when Windows crashes for a user working remotely. They can pop in the Live disk and continue working off of an external drive.
I hadn’t run Suse since 9.2, and decided to go with a different distro because of the bloat associated with the system, in particular with YAST. This past weekend I decided I’d give 10.3 a shot, since I still had thought of Suse as my second favorite distro. So, I installed openSuse (with Gnome) on a second drive, and was really disappointed in what is happening with this distribution. YAST is still extremely slow. The overall system felt rather bloated, and not as “snappy” as I’ve come to expect.
I was actually surprised to see that my WUSB11 wasn’t recognized, and had to go the ndiswrapper route in order to get that going. But, even prior to that, using my ethernet card on the desktop to surf the web, the speed in which the network was working was really sluggish.
This was also the first experience with using the “slab” menu. It could very well be that I’m just not “used to” it, but I really didn’t like it. I like the traditional menus found in Gnome, in which I didn’t have to wade through so much to get to what I want. It also seemed that there were a few redundant menu items (particularly when it came to installing software). I can’t remember which items it was off the top of my head, but one item was listed 3 times with 3 different names. I felt that was a waste of space.
Appearance wise, it looked great. Suse always does a great job with that. But with the network speed seeming to be “crippled” for some reason (haven’t yet checked to find out what was going on with that), and the bloat in the system will prevent me from using openSuse as a desktop OS for now. I hope they really fine tune things in their next release, because a part of me has always been fond of Suse. But 10.3 didn’t do it for me. Other distros were much snappier on the same machine (even Win XP runs quicker).
Compiz worked great with openSuse 10.3 by the way.
Edited 2007-11-05 14:56
“I hadn’t run Suse since 9.2, and decided to go with a different distro because of the bloat associated with the system, in particular with YAST.”
My last SuSE experience was with version 5.1, it was called “S.u.S.E. Linux 5.1” these times and included a 2.0.32 kernel. 🙂
“This past weekend I decided I’d give 10.3 a shot, since I still had thought of Suse as my second favorite distro. So, I installed openSuse (with Gnome) on a second drive, and was really disappointed in what is happening with this distribution.”
I didn’t install any of them, but tried out both. My biggest disappointment was the bad internationalisation – but please, don’t get me wrong, maybe it’s better when it is installed instead of just run from the live CD. I selected “German” at a very early point, and some entries really were in German, but the majority of text was still in English, especially error messages that make the average user unhappy.
Maybe it sounds a bit arrogant, but regarding Linux distributions, if I select “German”, I don’t want to see any English message on my screen. And initially, SuSE came from Germany (S.u.S.E. GmbH Fürth). Both KDE or Gnome Live CDs tend to scare the typical German who gets into panic if words “Application”, “Loading”, “Printer Setup”, “Language setting” or “ARTS error” appear. Even if a Linux distribution works like a charm, one english word can make the user abandon it. “But it’s not in German!” is reason enough not to try any further.
“But, even prior to that, using my ethernet card on the desktop to surf the web, the speed in which the network was working was really sluggish.”
Can confirm, tried three different types (bad RealTek, better Intel and 3Com). But, maybe this is due to live CD instead of installation…
“This was also the first experience with using the “slab” menu. It could very well be that I’m just not “used to” it, but I really didn’t like it. I like the traditional menus found in Gnome, in which I didn’t have to wade through so much to get to what I want.”
Hmmm… I think browsing the menues just to look around what’s available was a bit more… comfortable… the “old fashioned” way. In some cases, I think I can guess what the appearance has been inspired by. 🙂
“Appearance wise, it looked great.”
See? This is very individual. I found it looks strange. The mouse cursor has a strange shape and colour. 🙂
“I hope they really fine tune things in their next release, because a part of me has always been fond of Suse. But 10.3 didn’t do it for me. Other distros were much snappier on the same machine (even Win XP runs quicker).”
You have a point there. I tried it on different systems that run FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Fedora which all feel more responsive. But as I said before, maybe I need to install SuSE onto hard disk in order to get better results.
“Compiz worked great with openSuse 10.3 by the way.”
I will have to check this… no idea if my old ATI Radeon 9000 RV250 is supported.
Edited 2007-11-06 11:53
Maybe it sounds a bit arrogant, but regarding Linux distributions, if I select “German”, I don’t want to see any English message on my screen.
I don’t consider that arrogant at all. Every bit of text should be in the language that you select.
no idea if my old ATI Radeon 9000 RV250 is supported.
The desktop I tried it out on has a ATI Radeon 9600 SE in it, which has only 128MB on board memory. I’m not sure about your card. Is that the version with the 64 or 128 on board memory? If it’s 128, then I’m pretty sure it’ll work.
“I don’t consider that arrogant at all. Every bit of text should be in the language that you select. “
Even a sloppy translation would be better than none. Most users won’t notice spelling errors as long as the primary meaning can be recognized.
Of course, I don’t expect any of the core systems of Linux, its kernel, the modules and the GNU utilities, to be translated to German. It’s not neccessary: Users who require any output of them are able to understand the english output, they simply don’t need a german output there because they are educated enough.
But what about the GUI applications that the average user will want to use? Here, you simply cannot afford a person who has an aversion towards reading text in any way to be scared by text in a language he can’t or does not want to understand?
Just imagine your Linux system would report “Das Blitzen von Fehler, Anschluß nicht gefunden, Komponentmodul /gerät/tonquelle0 in /sonstige/anfang/netzwerk.konf Zeile 25, Hoppla rums bums, Speicher voll, muttu rundlutschen!” Just imagine how Linux would not be used in America if it would be entirely in German. 🙂
I don’t know if there’s a way to set the language system wide (read: as wide as it is supported) instead of just localizing KDE or Gnome core components – with no effect on non-core components and non-KDE or non-Gnome applications. As far as I know, these “big” systems do not use the “small” GNU gettext system. For example, in BSD you set the environmental variable LC_ALL to de_DE.ISO8859-15 and you can profit from any program that uses gettext for output – it will be in German then, if supported.