OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 marks the end of Beta series of OpenSUSE 11. With final version scheduled to release in 22 days on 19th June 2008; I felt its time to test what is in-store for us. I was specially interested in the KDE4 version and the new installer.
It was nice to see 200+ seeders for the KDE4 iso of OpenSUSE Beta3, download was a breeze.
Here are my experiences after popping in the LiveCD.
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It was nice to see 200+ seeders for the KDE4 iso of OpenSUSE Beta3, download was a breeze.
Here are my experiences after popping in the LiveCD.
- I have NVIDIA 6200 256mb card and most LiveCDs result in a blank screen while booting. This is due to them using the opensource "nv" driver which is not correct for 6200. I understand that OpenSUSE confirms to opensource software only policy and does not include any propriety driver. However, the boot should include an option to boot in "Safe Mode", a la Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS. There is an option to boot in VESA mode, however, even that results in blank screen. I have to explicitly enter 3 at boot options to boot at init level 3 and then run sax2_vesa to configure xorg.conf and finally run "init 5" to get a GUI. Now, I don't have a problem with this, but we cannot expect a newbie to find this trick. NOTE:: Mandriva Spring 2008 ships with NVIDIA drivers and produces beautiful compiz effects even in LiveCD.
- The default KDE4 GUI is simply amazing and usable. I was expecting KDE4 to be full of bugs, but it proved me wrong. OpenSUSE devs have done a wonderful job and KDE4 looks beautiful, works fast and there are hardly any crashes. The interface is preety neat with a simple eye pleasing wallpaper.
- The new Installer presents a much better ( than OpenSUSE 10.3 ) and intuitive interface. The install is as simple and fast as a PCLinuxOS or Ubuntu install. The installer was able to correctly detect Ubuntu and Windows installed and was able to resize the Windows partition and configure grub entries for OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Windows. This was a big refreshing change from Ubuntu 8.04, which failed to resize my windows partition and I had to log in Windows to make available some free space for Ubuntu.
- I had my first major frustration immidiately after the install. Despite the fact that I configured xorg.conf to use vesa drivers in LiveCD and then did the install, the installed system had "nv" as the driver. Due to this I got a blank screen on first hard drive boot. This time even the boot parameter 3 would not work. The only solution was to boot using Ubuntu partition ( can also use LiveCD), mount the OpenSUSE "root" partition and manually change the Display drivers to vesa in xorg.conf. This perhaps is the biggest problem with OpenSUSE 11. It was such a big putoff, that I was about to abandon my test.
- The urge to discover made to continue and I was greeted with a beautiful KDE4 desktop .
I was amazed by the beauty of the desktop. Just look at the colors and texture of icons, they look fabulous. Even OpenOffice, a primarily GNOME application, looks good.
- Dolphin is the default file manager and presents a light weight interface against heavy Konqueror. I somehow like konqueror more. Dolphine has new Column like view, which resembles finder of MacOSX.
- Konsole is also revamped and integrated well into the new theme.
- There is a KDE4 taskbar applet which indicates any new device that is plugged in. Though not shown in the scrrenshot, it clearly displayed my Sony digital camera and gave an option to open with Dolphin.
- OpenSUSE uses Firefox 3 Beta as the default browser, but this is very stable as compared to that in Ubuntu 8.04. Flash can be installed using YAST2.
- Java 6.0 and java plugins for Firefox can be installed using OpenSUSE 10.3 repositories.
- Infact OpenSUSE 10.3 repos can also be used to install many other essential softwares like adobe reader, multimedia codecs, microsoft fonts etc.
- OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 does not have any binary drivers from NVIDIA. The only option is to download the NVIDIA drivers from here and manually compile and install them. Following software are required to compile NVIDIA drivers
- kernel source,
- make and
- C++ Compiler.
- The NVIDIA drivers can then be installed by running command "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.08.pkg1.run". The installer compiles and installs the correct NVIDIA drivers, optionally it also configures xorg.conf. Now this is easy and expected from anyone using a Beta version of a distribution. I hope testers will have no reason to crib about this.
- After the NVIDIA drivers install, I have almost everything I need in a regular distribution. KDE4 is appears much faster than KDE3 and undoubtedly much prettier. I am yet to come across a system freeze or any major software crashing, though digiKam and Amarok 2 have crashed a couple of times. However, those are still beta softwares.
- The yast updater reported that there are updates available, but no matter what I did, I was not able to use the updater. However, normal YAST2 was prompt and showed 1.3 GB of updates. With a beating heart I updated everything except for the kernel and luckily had no breakage. It was really amazing to perform an Update of 1.3 GB with no error. As I have spent too much time to configure this system, I am not prepared to risk a kernel update and then go through the process of installing NVIDIA drivers again.
