Thoughts on Suse 10.1

[bigtomrodney]

Hey there guys. Well I have installed 10.1 on my Laptop. It's running pretty good. There are a few things that might interest anyone thinking of installing. Good and bad!

Anyway, obviously I was looking to running XGL natively on my OS, rather than booting into Kororaa now and again. The XGL setup is quite easy, though there may be a few teething problems. First things first, before everyone goes off on how hard it is to install for new users.....
...Try looking in the Gnome Control Center. The big button with 3d xgl writtten on it!!

The novell cool solutions page and Suse wiki are both in need of an update. Also a lot of the shortcuts have changed from earlier releases. Just make sure you have xgl, libsvg,libsvg-cairo, mesa and glitz installed. Then go straight to 3d setup and see how that works out.

My second thought is a bit more serious. A decision was made not to install any proprietary kernel modules to prevent GPL conflicts. Fair enough. No more madwifi packages for my wifi card. I can live with that. So off I go to install ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper package comes with a warning that it is completely unsupported by Novell, and no bug reports will be entertained.

Well maybe I can live with that too. But Suse has a completely new network management framework, it really is quite good to look at, has some great utilities. It even recognises my unsupported ndiswrapper module. But hell will it connect? No. I'm gonna leave off on this for a while, hopefully it's something I can correct. It's certainly not anything I've misconfigured unless there are new requirements I'm not aware of.

Anyway, KDE in XGL. Not impressed, but I'm not blaming anyone, it's still early days. It works sure. But you end up using Gnome window decorator so you get kind of a hybrid desktop where nothing is really native. Hopefully it will be nicely integrated with KDE 4 which should be great anyway.

Last thing to note - Suse/Novell did a Mandrake on Gnome. They gheyed it all up and made it look like a windows desktop. The Gnome menu is at the bottom left, whereas it was more default in previous versions. I wasn't crazy on them going for a full Gnome desktop when they announced it, particularly because I always thought their KDE looked more polished than anyone elses. But to switch to Gnome and take everything Gnome away from it?


Anyway on the whole it's pretty good. If I can get networking up on my wifi card I'll be happy, and for those that like Bootsplash themes the new one is pretty slick too.

Enjoy, feel free to throw some feedback on 10.1 at me.

[uninvisible]

Thanks for posting this info! I want to hear more opinions on SuSE 10.1 before i try it out.

[bigtomrodney]

Well a small update - I set up Suse on my server just now, and all is well. Ndiswrapper works fine, in fact very easy as usual and integrates fine with the new network manager. I can confirm that XGL is as easy as I suspected. Simply install xgl and compiz, ensuring you already have glitz, mesa, cairo etc. When you go to the Gnome Control Center the applet will have appeared which will do all of the configuration for you.

I just hope everyne figures this out (read: new users, those who aren't comfortable) before setting links to X/Xgl and delving into the guts of the OS. I'm becoming more and more impressed. I'm thinking my ndiswrapper problems on the laptop are maybe to do with the inf file I used. Also I have since read that although madwifi has been left out novell are trying to get a patch sorted, apparently it's the kernel version that isn't supported and it's currently too unstable.

[gtmtnbiker98]

All in all, I like the minor changes with the GUI; however, I'm not so sure that I like the changes in YaST and the doing away with YOU. That aside, I'm pretty happy that I made the upgrade.

As for production servers, I'm going to give it a month or two so that I can come to grasp with the changes. VSFTPD is all together different running in stand alone as compared to running under xinetd. Now that will take some getting used to.

[Xenon]

I'm loving xgl and rather then playing with all the pretty effects, I am now actually finding functional use for some of them, i.e. displaying the workspaces on a cube does help spacially and makes it feel much more flexible.
I am using GNOME and I'm still unsure over the moving of the taskbars, I realise why this was done, Novell has been doing lots of research into usability http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main and they concluded that having a single task bar looks less cluttered and is more familiar to Windows users. I think I may put it back up top again shortly, I'm running out of space on the taskbar.
The system is running well, SUSE has a habbit on being a little slow, but is doesn't seem too bad. The only thing I was a little upset about was the fact it is still GNOME 2.12, I would have really liked 2.14 but I realise it came out too late in the development of SUSE to be included. I was more annoyed by the fact Fedora Core 5 came out about 3 weeks earlier and was able to use it. It has a few tweaks that greatly help, but I find Fedora's package management very limited on the graphical end and you need to patch the kernel to use any propriatory GPU drivers.
I've gone off topic but oh well!

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah still beating along. Running well though Software management seems slow. I wonder if this is just the packman/guru servers under high load at the moment. Also Guru is having the usual problems of unrecognised media, unexpected packages etc even with auto refresh on.

I'm becoming more and more impressed with the network manager. Still can't get my laptop to connect but I'm beginning to suspect a hardware issue as I have tried drivers from a few sources. My Gnome is back to its defaults now, and KDE actually runs quite well too. I've managed to get it back to the way I like. Will update more.

One other thing, Suse used to sit and analyze my LVM for 10-15 seconds, 10.1 doesn't seem to anymore which is great. I was a bit wary of this release, probably the long wait had my hopes up. I'm really settling into it now.

[uninvisible]

All in all, I like the minor changes with the GUI; however, I'm not so sure that I like the changes in YaST and the doing away with YOU. That aside, I'm pretty happy that I made the upgrade.

I'm curious what changes were made to YaST, and how do you do security updates without YOU?

[techieMoe]

A good thread, but since it's technically not a "question", I moved it to the Coffee Lounge. I look forward to getting to try out SuSE 10.1 myself. I would have just bought the retail box had it not been for the timing. Everything, it seems, has conspired to cost me money at once this week...

[carlosponti]

tom send a copy to Moe for his review

[truoc444]

i've been having problems with sound on my laptop and i also can't believe they ditched the madwifi drivers, but i was able to install them from source and wifi works withough having to use ndiswrapper. i must admit i'm not sure how i feel about it yet. i've really liked previous releases but still have mixed emotions. guess i'm off to play some more