Have had great success with oSUSE 10.2

[Malachi151]

I have read a few bad reviews of SuSE 10.2 for some reason. I've had really good success with it though.

So far I have:

1) Upgraded my dual boot Dell Precision 390 with CoreDuo processor and ATI FireGL graphics card. (6 months old)

2) Upgraded my dual boot Acer Centrino notebook. (2 years old)

3) Installed from scratch on an old Dell workstation (5 years old)

4) Installed on Windows Virtual PC.

5) Went back and installed from scratch on my main workstation, keeping the dual boot.

I've done everything with the single DVD.

I started by first upgrading my laptop mainly because I couldn't get the wireless networking to work with 10.1. That went off without a hitch and didn't take long at all. I quickly got my wireless connection working with 10.2.

On my workstation I also upgraded, but then soon saw the ATI graphics problem, but easily found the new self installing ATI drivers for Linux and got that fixed.

FYI: Drivers & Software

Unfortunately, though, I had installed only the Gnome interface on my workstation but wanted to try the KDE, especially after the menu change to the Gnome system which I didn't like.

I tried this out by installing the KDE interface on a Windows Virtual PC first, and I had no problem there. In fact it seemed like the ATI driver wasn't an issue on the VM.

Once I saw that I really did prefer the KDE interface I decided to go ahead and just reinstall the system on my workstation. All of my data (home) is on its own partition so that wasn't an issue.

I did make one mistake though here. I had forgotten that I had to make a change to the partition setup when installing and I just went with all defaults and it installed root on the wrong partition causing a screwup with the boot loader.

I forget which way it is, but apparently the SUSE installer will automatically pick the largest partition for (I think) home (or maybe its root) and anyway it got everything screwed up, but it didn't touch my windows partitions so that was fine, and I had backed up my data that it formatted by home folder.

I have two physical drives.

Drive A:

NTFS partition [C:Windows / Primary / Active]
Linux partition [Primary]
Extended partition containing [Linux partition [logical] FAT partition (for Boot Magic) [logical]]

Drive B has:

Linux Swap, NTFS partition, and a FAT 32 partition that I use for putting data on that I want to safely use with both my Linux and Windows systems.

With earlier version of GRUB it wouldn't properly launch Windows for me, so I had to get PM. Its fine now and I just use it.

When I did my reinstall I didn't pay attention and instead of installing root on my primary Linux partition it installed it on my logical partition and I'm not sure where it put Grub, but it automatically disabled Boot Magic and had Grub on some Primary Active partition, such that Grub is what started up instead of Boot Magic.

This time it launched Windows okay, so I guess I could just use Grub, but I decided to get it back to how I had it initially, so I reinstalled again, with KDE and and also all of the Gnome packages and UI as well, and made sure that root was on the primary partition and home was on the logical partition, with Boot Magic enabled, and everything came out perfect again.

I start with boot magic. When I select the Linux partition it then loads Grub, or I can select Windows and go straight to that.

So that all worked without having any problems with my Windows system. (basically because I already had all of the partitions setup correctly, which is the key to it all)

All of my sound cards work, all of my graphics cards work, all of my network cards work, I can browse the windows or linux machines from all my machines (well I haven't setup the Samba shares on the old computer yet, but I don't foresee a problem)

The only thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is change the mouse pointer in KDE? I hate that long skinny finger, and I also don't like the single click launching from the desktop. Does anyone know where you go to change those settings?

The thing is that I read 2 or 3 reviews talking about having problems installing SuSE and hardware incompatibility, but I have had no such problems. On old machines and new everything works. The only thing I had to do with install the ATI driver, but that was easy.

I had it working with no problems on a laptop, old desktop, and new workstation, as well as Windows Virtual PC (and I could not get PCLinuxOS working properly on VPC [screen resolution problems])

So far I really like SuSE 10.2. I can see pretty big improvements over 10.1. Mostly its the same, but a lot of little things got fixed and things just generally work better. Sort of makes 10.1 look like a pre-mature release.

[devils casper]

The only thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is change the mouse pointer in KDE? I hate that long skinny finger, and I also don't like the single click launching from the desktop. Does anyone know where you go to change those settings?

Press Alt+F2 and type kcontrol.
* Peripherals -- Mouse -- Cursor Theme.
* Peripherals -- Mouse -- General -- Double-click to open files and folders.