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OpenSUSE 10.1 Review: "Versatile but Uneven" 38

Posted by timothy from the those-darn-lab-boys dept.
capt turnpike writes "Calling it 'solid,' the eWEEK.com lab boys tested OpenSUSE 10.1. The upshot? FTA: "We appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp." What does that mean for Novell's newest version of Linux? And when will it catch up numerically to Apple, which is already at 10.4.6?"
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OpenSUSE 10.1 Review: "Versatile but Uneven" More

OpenSUSE 10.1 Review: "Versatile but Uneven"

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  • Sounds very stupid to me. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Alpha27 ( 211269 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @05:25PM (#15439279)
    It's like when AOL jumped to version 9.0 As if the version number is measure of comparison between different products.

  • 10.4.6 - 10.1 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @05:30PM (#15439323)
    It will catch up in 0.3.6.

  • Novell's ZenWorks killed SuSE 10.1 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The biggest problem with 10.1 is that the entire software management / updater system based on ZenWorks is completely broken. While they're going to patch it next week to get it to at least WORK, it will still take several minutes of maxed out CPU / HD just to check if there are updates, and it will still do so every time you login to X. It also often takes upwards of 15 minutes or more to install packages or change sources. It's not been confirmed, but the new version may still contain the problem of de
    • Dude, you would typically see the enterprise version (SLES or SLED) running on production servers or desktops not the "open" version for want of of a better term. The problems you refer to are well sorted in the enterprise, ZENworks is solid in cross-platform patch management as evidenced by its large worldwide deployment numbers in critical businesses like airlines, healthcare and government organizations. I should know having deployed it on most platforms on three continents. Less FUD, more facts please

  • My impressions of SuSE 10.1 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Carl T ( 749426 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @07:08PM (#15440109) Homepage
    • They've done something to make the software installing part of YaST take ages to start.
    • SuseWatcher no longer exists. I'm not sure how/if the system will notify me if a patch should be downloaded/installed and something then needs restarting (or rebooting...).
    • The lack of codecs for most common audio and video formats is as annoying as ever. I've installed a working xine from Packman.
    • I have found no way to get readable fonts and non-broken widgets in GTK applications. This was bad enough in 10.0 but now it's a lot worse.
    • A KDE issue: I can no longer copy text by marking in a terminal without also doing so in programs like Mozilla and OpenOffice.
    • A good thing: The machine boots a lot quicker than with 9.2.
    • How fast are the logins and is it tightly integrated with Zenworks?

      An A/C poster mentioned this and you mentioned that the autoinstaller has been disabled. I hope its not true and its just a troll.

    • Re:My impressions of SuSE 10.1 (Score:4, Informative)

      by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @08:03PM (#15440519) Homepage Journal
      They've done something to make the software installing part of YaST take ages to start.


      Go to YaST -> Installation Sources
      Check each source to make sure that Refresh is set to "Off"

      They made "ON" the default in 10.1, presumably in response to many folks' complaining about the installer's handling of broken repositories such as Packman. (Great repository for selection, but it's perpetually broken).
  • I want to test it out on my laptop before I blow the Xp partition on it and I want to make sure my wifi card works before I go through the hassle to install Linux.

    • If you're looking at taking the Linux plunge (especially when coming from Win2k/XP), do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu [ubuntu.com] (then add in the KDE packages so you can run in KDE sessions - KDE approximately equals Windows-esque-ish-ness, Gnome approximately equals Mac-esque-ish-ness and Gnome is the default in Ubuntu).

      If you'd like to get a feel for Linux before installing, try out Mepis [mepis.org] (which I'm pretty sure is a LiveCD) or Knoppix [knoppix.org] (which is not very polished, but does give you a KDE desktop to play with

  • My2 cents on Suse 10.1 (I'm using it now.) (Score:4, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @09:28PM (#15440997)
    I have been using Suse for years, back to the 7.x days and Linux in general even longer, I still have my factory original Redhat 3.1 CD. Yes, a single CDR..
    ( http://img436.imageshack.us/img436/7408/dscn20214w e.jpg [imageshack.us] ) I also have a Redhat 5.1 CDR too. Both these discs are fully functional and installable, circa 1994ish ?? I think..

      Anyway, Suse 10.1 SUCKS.. SUCKS with a capital SUCK.
      This weekend I will be downgrading it to 10.0 (I was not too thrilled with 10.0 but it's better than this crap)

      Unless you want a miserable hellish nightmare trying to install *other* apps stay away.
      The Zen thingy is a piece of crap. It won't let me install apt/synaptic which is what I have been using for a few years now.

      I am afraid that this will be my last hurrah with Suse. I'm going to have to bite the bullet and learn Gentoo. Before this year is out I plan to be dual booting OSX and Gentoo..

      Buh bye Suse, you f**ked it up.. It was fun though..

    One thing someone pointed out to me is the "smart" installer. Go to yast and search for "smart" then install it. It's similar (but not the same) as apt/synaptic. It will at least let you get some of the basic packages installed, you also have to paste this into a console, 'smart channel --add http://divine160281.di.funpic.de/smart-channel.txt [funpic.de]' to give you access to third party packages.

    But all in all, I'm very unhappy in general with Suse 10.1 and will be downgrading to 10.0 no matter what. And forget about bling-bling compiz, that's a freaking disaster. You like to torture yourself? Play with compiz. Guaranteed to crash more often that M$ winders..

    Once they get compiz and Xgl debugged I'll be thrilled to play with it again but it's way to unstable for me. I need stability. I have no tolerance for buggy crap.

    • I've had a similar experience with opensuse 10.1 upgrade. I was hoping they would fix the minor annoyances that bugged me in 10.0 -- no support for legacy NVIDIA chipset driver (GeForce 256, GeForce 2, etc..) -- I was hoping for too much apparently.

      The first nasty surprise was the replacement of susewatcher -- zen-updater took its place. I am a KDE user, and it made no sense to me that a KDE oriented desktop distribution would commit the major blunder of replacing a working Qt application with a half-baked

  • SuSE 10.1 = Package management from hell (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kilz ( 741999 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @09:44PM (#15441081)
    Sorry but 10.1 is a sad upgrade. It reminds me of M$ where eye candy is there but there are a lot of bugs. 1. When adding packages that have dependencies that are not installed you have a 50/50 chance of crashing yast 2. Adding repositories is a chore, it takes forever and sometimes they don't install. 3. People are manually installing smart to bypass yast. 4. The new auto loader auto mounts cdroms to /media/TheCd'sName, its different for each CD. This has broken wine and cedega. I loved 10.0, I hated 10.1. The person reviewing the OS must have just installed it and tested the installed software. The only thing that was easier was setting up Xgl. But eye candy isn't any good if you cant install your favorite applications.

  • Doing production (Score:2, Informative)

    by LordBlackader ( 978438 )
    I am using 10.1 on my Compaq presario V4000 laptop. Installation was fine except for my INTEL pro 2200 BG wireless lan card. I had to patch some drivers and at last I got it worked. I am using my laptop for production purposes, so a lot of OpenOffice, krdc, MySQL, Apache and VMWare workstation 5.5. An unsupported patch was nescessary for VMWare to make it work but I am pretty happy with it. It is quicker than 10.0.
  • It's better than SLES 9 on the server I've been setting up, in that curses programs like YaST actually work properly without locking up, and the video drivers for Unichrome work.

    I always hated YaST for package management, so the option of using APT is a big win. I haven't tried the ZenWorks or 'smart' package managers everyone else is talking about.

    Basically, for a server it's OK. I'd rather be running Debian, but the software I need to run is built for SLES.
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