05.10.08

Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: A Week in the Life of OpenSUSE (and Many Reviews)

Posted in GNU/Linux, Opensuse, Kernel at 1:11 am by Roy Schestowitz

It’s a refreshing (but unwelcome) change to see OpenSUSE getting more coverage. The past week brought quite a few distro reviews that involve OpenSUSE. Let’s look at some of them very quickly.

OpenSUSE 10.3

Here is what seems largely like a rave about OpenSUSE 10.3.

So far, everything seems to be working OK except for wifi, which I still need to do some tweaking on. It may require a different driver from what SUSE detected (it seems to think I’m running a Latitude D400, while it’s really a D600). For the interim, I’m online via Ethernet connected to an SMC8014 cable modem/router.

Lawson had his article from the Scottish press included in ECT. He reviewed the OpenSUSE-based PC from Shuttle.

Shuttle’s LinuXPC SD3002Q is a superbly built, small PC with an Apple-like brushed aluminum casing and Linux preinstalled, notes Steve Lawson of the Scottish Daily Record. However, there’s little room for upgrades on the system.

OpenSUSE 11.0

It’s maturing quickly (just over a month before final the release) and Ars Technica took it for a spin.

We tested the openSUSE 11 beta 2 LiveCD installers, which are available with either GNOME or KDE 4. We installed both flavors so that we could see both desktop environments in action. The LiveCD images booted without any problems and provided a reasonably functional desktop experience. In both the KDE and GNOME environments, an icon on the desktop provides easy access to the installer.

Bill Beebe also gave it a shot (beta 2, same as above).

I’m posting this from my Gateway M685 running the openSUSE 11 beta 2 Live CD and Firefox 3 beta 5. It is, simply put, very good. The version I booted and tested was the KDE 4 desktop (KDE 4.0.3 release 17). I can’t do much more than a cursory report as I did not install it. I’ll touch on what caught my eye.

[…]

Annoyances aside. I really like the KDE 4 desktop and where it’s going. And I really like openSUSE 11. I may wind up installing it on rhea over Mandriva just to see if some of the issues I found with openSUSE 10.3 have been addressed. I like the fact that the latest kernel is shipping (2.6.25), and I also like that the latest gcc (4.3.1) is being used and looks to be shipping with openSUSE 11. I grow increasingly optimistic with each release.

From Gabriel Stein:

Well, on last two days I installed the openSUSE 11 Beta2 using a liveCD with KDE 4. Amazing. Congratulations openSUSE Team. Its really a great job! Is so easy to use the installer, with good interactivity.

But, nothing is perfect.

And another last one:

openSUSE 11 is currently in beta still, and will be officially released in June. I downloaded and installed it using the KDE 4 LiveCD, but was rather disappointed with what I saw.

[…]

Conclusion

Though I can’t say openSUSE 11 is ready (it is in beta after all), I was hoping for a smoother experience at this stage. Most of the things which did not work for me here, worked with other distros, but not all. PC-BSD seems to crash when using the Netopia WiFi Pen for a while, and other distros, such as Ubuntu, could not complete WPA authentication either.

Miscellaneous

Moving on to the OpenSUSE community, person of OpenSUSE last week was kernel guru and device drivers extraordinaire Greg Kroah-Hartman.

This weekend ‘People of openSUSE’ brings to light long time Kernel hacker and Novell employee Greg Kroah-Hartman interview. Greg KH today’s working full time on Linux Driver Project is the current maintainer of the Kernel package for openSUSE 11.0.

A new blogging platform was announced for people involved in OpenSUSE, but there haven’t been many (or any) noteworthy blog items.

This site offers blog hosting for openSUSE members. The blogs should be focused on the openSUSE project, e.g. on the distribution, packages, build service, events, etc. Please contact the site administrators if you want to have your blog created.

Last but not least, here is Weekly News, where you can find more pertinent pieces of information about the project.

In this week:

* openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2
* People of openSUSE: Greg Kroah-Hartman
* Jigish Gohil: Sliced sphere in compiz-fusion-git packages
* arstechnica.com: Coming along strong: first look at openSUSE 11 beta 2

Later on we’ll cover SUSE, as opposed to OpenSUSE. We try to keep Saturday postings on a positive tone, so as to avoid them from becoming Beranger-style melancholic rants. █

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