Submitted by openSUSE 10.2 Alpha4 has been released. It features GNOME 2.15.92 with Novell’s Slab menu, KDE with the Kickoff menu, Xorg 7.1, kernel 2.6.18rc5, lots of improvements on the package management (if it was as bad as SLED 10’s, they’d better), and other improvements.
The biggest improvement I’d like to see is to their web-based package management and web-based install. I think it is awful right now.
These SUSE developers are just great! As I said in 1 comment awhile back, I am getting tired of the developemt of the Linux kernel, but OpenSUSE is the 1 distro I’m passionate about, I would just like to see them take some of PCLinuxOS’s polishing tips and tricks and I think it would really be smoking. OpenSUSE is the only distro I support buying the retail version more than just downloading, to get the whole thing and show some sort of financial support of the project. Other than OpenSUSE and SLED, my money is exclusively spent on BSD’s and BSD books. I’m really expecting 10.2 should not be the crapshoot 10.1 was, since they will have had a full 6 months to work out XGL/Compiz, the package managment system, settings for hardware, that kind of stuff. I think 10.2 Alpha 1 was more of an update and bug fix, but now they really seem to be steamrolling with the development.
If they made development DVD isos availble I am pretty sure many more people would test them.
Go OpenSUSE team!
While I don’t have time/energy to test out alpha versions I’m certainly looking forward to 10.2 final.
As a former long-time Suse user, I felt it was a duty for me to test the 10.1 release with its new XGL interface and all. Now, I haven’t used Suse Linux since 9.3. I’ve been off running Debian and its various spinoffs (*buntu, Mepis, Linspire), Mandriva, Fedora…and the very latest, PCLinuxOS .93a. When I booted up Suse, I was astonished as to how slow it has gotten. Now, it was never a speed demon, but I used to run it on an old 600 P3 and got by fine using KDE. Now, I have a newer Athlon XP 2800+ system, and it just crawled. You could count in the time you clicked on the Kmenu and it actually opened. There was just noticeable pauses and lack of response in everything. I thought there was a SuperSuse fork that was supposedly folded into the OpenSuse project?
PCLinuxOS, on the otherhand, is an absolute rocket. However, Suse has always had the most polished look and feel of all distros. I’m just terribly disappointed as to how sluggish it has gotten. Is Novell even aware of how slow it is? I originally got into Linux because of its performance. I know KDE has grown to be quite a hog, but come on. If a small community distro like PCLinuxOS can figure out how to make it perform fast, I’d think the resources at Novell could do even better!
Honestly, I think such a showing as the bugginess and slowness of Suse Linux 10.1 just gives the entire Linux community a bad reputation.
If you make the taskbar into multiple rows, you can’t flick your mouse to the bottom left or top left (if you put the panel on the top) and have the slab menu open, because the button seems to sit in the middle. Even Vista fixes this issue! With all the usability they’ve put into it I’m surprised that got past.
Unfortunately bugzilla.novell.com has been down for me the past few days, but I guess that’s just my ISP.
Edited 2006-09-08 00:12
SLED 10 was the first version of Suse that I’ve ever used and like(probably because it was the first with good Gnome support), and probably the first Linux distribution that’d I’d even consider as a day to day OS. So how does OpenSuse compare, especially with the polish of SLED.
Well, on this Alpha it’s easy to see it’s not quite polished yet.
The application browser and control center from Slab don’t start at all because of critical errors. This is because a beta version of gnome-session will make applications crash when a critical error is found; unsetting the G_DEBUG variable is a quick fix.
For some reason applications like f-spot and banshee are not installed by default (banshee is not even available. Anyone knows what’s up with that?). Evolution doesn’t appear on the Slab default setup because the .desktop file is named evolution-2.8.desktop, and slab expects evolution.desktop. As a result the default favorites menu is quite empty, with only 3 apps (firefox, ooo-writer and nautilus-home).
The default theme is Clarius (gtk), Gilouche (metacity) and GNOME (icon theme). I believe they’ll change it back to Gilouche once the GNOME 2.16 transition is done. Speaking of themes, on SLED the default Qt theme matches the Gilouche color scheme, which doesn’t happen here. And YaST is not using Tango icons that match your GNOME desktop, but it uses the same style as KDE.
About YaST; when you launch it from a non root account it doesn’t ask for a root password, so you can do pretty much nothing from it.
About speed, it’s not noticeably faster or slower than Ubuntu and Fedora.
About YaST; when you launch it from a non root account it doesn’t ask for a root password, so you can do pretty much nothing from it.
It does(or at least did) however ask you for the root password the first time you try to do something that requires one. I consider this a good and sensible approach. First of all in a multi user envitonment most users don’t know the root password so being able to open YaST and see everything they can do without a root password is a good thing. Secondly I personally think that in general asking for the root should be done at the last possible moment. As in only when I actually try to view or write to a file I don’t have permission for.
The problem is that on this release any module that requires root privileges is not visible when you run YaST from a normal user account.
dagw is correct according to good system design, the root password should not be required until the last minute. I don’t use SUSE or YaST, but if YaST is designed properly, it would would in a way analogous to this: If a module requires root permissions to use any functionality at all or view any status, that module should be displayed anyway in a list and when you click on it you’ll get a request for a root password.
dagw is correct according to good system design, the root password should not be required until the last minute. I don’t use SUSE or YaST, but if YaST is designed properly, it would would in a way analogous to this: If a module requires root permissions to use any functionality at all or view any status, that module should be displayed anyway in a list and when you click on it you’ll get a request for a root password.
There is nothing in Yast a non-admin user would need or want to see. The configuration modules are for system settings, server configuration and package management. In other words, everything in Yast requires root privileges.
We’re not talking about a desktop control panel where the user may want to configure personal settings or toggle to admin mode to configure global ones. Everything in Yast is global, there’s no local environment settings.
So the only thing accomplished by not launching Yast with admin privileges is that the user is forced to authenticate for each individual configuration module they launch. That’s not good design, that’s an oversight that I imagine will probably be addressed.
If that is the case then I stand corrected. But I’m fairly sure there where a at least a fair few settings like for example keyboard layout, Language settings and mouse buttons and mouse sensitivity that individual users might like to configure themselves. Hopefully there is a seperate menu where users can set these things.
If that is the case then I stand corrected. But I’m fairly sure there where a at least a fair few settings like for example keyboard layout, Language settings and mouse buttons and mouse sensitivity that individual users might like to configure themselves. Hopefully there is a seperate menu where users can set these things.
Sure there is, that’s all covered by the standard KDE control panel (kcontrol). That’s actually a good example of what you were referring to. In KControl, standard users can only modify or configure their local environment settings. But in certain modules there is an Administrator button that launches a kdesu dialog for the root password, once authenticated the user can modify global settings. Options only available to admin users are greyed out for regular users. It works pretty well and creates minimum confusion, at least IMHO.
That I agree is a bug. They should somehow be visible, but somehow clearly marked as needing root privs no matter how you log in. Perhaps there can be a button to toggle between showing only things I can change and showing everything.
” I know KDE has grown to be quite a hog, but come on.”
Since when has KDE grown to be quite a hog??? I compiled KDE for my LFS system, and did not have to do any optimisations to make KDE perform, it simply performs out of the box. The performance of KDE in PCLinuxOS and openSUSE seems equal to me. The only place where I feel openSUSE is slow is with the boot time, and this has little to do with KDE.
KDE 3.5.5.
Gnome 2.16
X.org 7.2 (for hot-plug/plug-n-play functionality)
Koffice 1.6
Openoffice.org 2.0.4.
Kernel 2.6.18. with nVidia chipset drivers backported from 2.6.19
Slab & Kickoff
Taskjuggler when using KDE
Digicam 0.9
I’ve installed every Suse/openSuse final release since 9.1, but this is probably the one I’ll be most anticipating. I found the last one to be something of a letdown, but with all the things they were in the middle of implementing at the time, I guess it’s not surprising. Now hopefully they’ll have ironed out the problems and we’ll get a return to real solidity in this release.
Wishlist: Non-buggy, perhaps speed-improved package management, new Gnome and KDE menus, easy enabling of Compiz/XGL (or AIGLX), KDE interface to Beagle that’s as good as Gnome’s, excellent Yast integration regardless of whether KDE or Gnome is used, return of the KDE SU ‘Remember my password’ checkbox!
Edited 2006-09-08 10:40
edit –
i’d also like to see XGL as easily configurable in KDE as it is in Gnome
…what about SUPER? Is it still being worked on? I’d love to install a i686-based OpenSUSE distro!
I first spent over an hour trying to figure out how the network install works, because I really don’t want to waste 6 CDs just for an alpha build of an OS. Whatever I tried, I got a HTTP 302 error. After a bit of googling, I found out what that meant (but why on earth isn’t the installer capable of finding out the redirect itself?) and tried with a working path instead. All went fine until it tried to install the actual kernel package, which didn’t pass their MD5 checksum. So I was forced to cancel the installation and try with CDs anyway.
The network install hinted that it only needed the first CD (it referenced to CD1, and nothing else), so I decided it was worth wasting at least one CD for this alpha. After all, I really want to try the new start menu in Gnome that I hope will eventually replace the worthless default Gnome main menu. So I burned CD1 on disc and tried again. All went fine until it said “Next: CD2, 10:03″ and counting.
It turns out OpenSUSE 10.2 Alpha4 needs to use five (5) CDs just for the default install! What an insane waste of time, effort and CDs! I decided it’s not worth it just to have a look at a new start menu.
Earth to OpenSUSE developers: Stop this multiple-CDs-like-Fedora insanity and pick the best tools for each task. At the very least, make just CD1 the required CD and the rest of them optional. Ubuntu has no problem presenting me with a fully functional OS with just one CD. Why should you have to struggle this much to install OpenSUSE? I’m sure many other Linux testers like myself find this situation offputting.
Earth to OpenSUSE developers: Stop this multiple-CDs-like-Fedora insanity and pick the best tools for each task. At the very least, make just CD1 the required CD and the rest of them optional. Ubuntu has no problem presenting me with a fully functional OS with just one CD. Why should you have to struggle this much to install OpenSUSE? I’m sure many other Linux testers like myself find this situation offputting.
There’s a specific .iso download for network installs, seperate from CD 1 and it’s much smaller. I agree though the network install leaves much room for improvement. A little ridiculous that it can’t resolve fqdns (at least when I tried in 10.1) or recover from interrupted downloads.
For a typical install, unless something has changed, you only need disks 1-3 for a default install.
Also, I believe you can do a default install without a WM/DE using only Disc 1 and then use Yast to install additional packages online.
The issue with disk count has been discussed, and last I heard they were trying to rationalize it. But the other thing to remember is that distros like Fedora and Suse are comprehensive distros, whereas with *buntu you invariably wind up downloading numerous extra packages after the fact (at least I always do).
Maybe not an issue for people with broadband, but considering a number of linux users still have dialup, it’s nice that they have options, particularly with Suse’s ability to download update patches without necessarily have to download and reinstall entire uploaded packages.
Still, I agree they should put better logic into the CD design and set guidelines for which CDs are actually required so that users have a better idea of what they should be downloading. The only thing more frustrating than wasting time downloading 5 CDs is finding out you didn’t actually need all 5.
Nobody complains when they would have to download three separate CDs, one for Ubuntu, one for Kubuntu, and one for Xubuntu, in case they would want to test what is not much more than three different desktops on the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Fedora Core has a DVD/ 5 CDs with all these three desktops included plus a lot of features Ubuntu doesn’t have, such as SELinux, and yet people are annoyed at its size. So too Suse, a very complete distro, is negatively contrasted as against Ubuntu.
Which again shows how brilliant Ubuntu’s marketing is. But since many a Gnome user is not goig to stop using K3B, if more and more people have DVD-burners, Ubuntu’s install disks, too, will expand in size.
does somebody can say if this release is faster and lighter then suse 10.1?
I hope so.Will there be a retail 10.2?Because 10.1 is so f*cked up i can hardly wait for a decent working SuSE release that doesn’t let me be a paying guinee pig.:-)
Edited 2006-09-09 15:17
only the package manager have some problem… and now is ok…..
on 10 machines, i only got the package manager problem one time…… no so bad
does somebody can say if this release is faster and lighter then suse 10.1?
Alpha would be too soon to tell if there will be improvements there, that sort of refinement and tweaking won’t happen until later in the dev cycle. I haven’t seen anything in the changelogs or dev mailing list to indicate anything dramatic in the pipe performance wise, though.
Even so, as with SL10.1, disabling zmd-novell and beagle solves approx. 98% of the performance issues, so I imagine it will be the same with 10.2.
yast package manangement is very slow to start
suse boot time is also too long