openSUSE 11 RC1 thoughts

[daark.child]

I've just been tinkering with openSUSE 11 RC1 and I am pretty impressed with it so far. The best points in my opinion are the vastly improved package management tools. I think they have improved package management to the point where setting up repos and installing packages is very fast. I would say package management is now as fast as the tools available in Debian based distros. I guess they have learnt their lesson after shoddy package management in openSUSE 10.1.

I also like the polish and attention to detail given to GNOME, KDE3 and KDE4. Currently KDE 4.0.4 is included in RC1 and they have worked hard to make it really slick. The KDE4 installation includes some KDE 3 apps because some KDE3 apps have not yet been ported to KDE4. Some screenshots are available here and here.

In terms of multimedia, all you need to do is use the one click installer at the openSUSE Community website. It enables the Packman repository and auto installs some codecs, java, flash etc. If you use GNOME, you may want to install gstreamer-plugins-bad and gstreamer-plugins-ugly manually because the one click installer did not do that for me (I think it mainly installs Xine based plugins).

I encountered some problems. Pulse Audio keeps throwing a "Connection failed" error when I try to run the volume mixer. I also had issues with Network Manager. The system recognised my wireless card (rt73 USB) and I placed the firmware in /lib/firmware and was good to go. The problem is that I kept getting disconnected a few seconds after connecting. To solve the problem I reconfigured the card, so that it used ifup instead of NetworkManager. The connection then worked perfectly. I am going to report these as bugs if someone else hasn't already done so.

[Natures_End]

Nice! very slick indeed...