2005-8-11 - OpenSuSE

Originally posted 2005-08-11 - 09:26


In a move I've been saying they needed to do, Novell announced OpenSuSe.org.

Now you can download the latest "development" version of SuSE from them... Compare this to what RedHat did with Fedora. The version you get from Novell is called EVAL, but it is the full deal. You just have to add the commercial and non-free packages you need. See the Goodlinks link for howto.

My Experience

I downloaded, burned and installed this cool new version onto 2 systems: a D505 Latitude and my Dell 4150 Inspiron. Both systems seemed to take the install ok, but something was amiss; I could not put my finger on it...

Mind you, the D505 is triple boot with Ubuntu Hoary primary, SuSE 10 now secondary and WinXP bringing up the rear....(yea, I know the complaints on that one, but it is my work computer).... I must say, once again that Linux beats the commercial-ware from MS hands down. The 4150 is triple boot too, but with Ubuntu, SuSE 9.3 and now OpenSuse 10... it had no issue with the video, but the mouse sucked just the same as the D505 (see below).

ERROR!!!

I got some errors with both installs, but chose the System Update after a few days of just letting sleeping dogs keep their place.

Problems were related to 2 key areas.

The mouse showed the erratic behavior seen in olden times of Windows 3.1 and IRQ conflicts - stall, stop, freeze, move ok, repeat. This was fixed by running the System Update in Yast. Yast indicated I needed to install 2 packages. The scary one was the Kernel... yeah, it had not been installed correctly or was corrupted somehow on install. I rebooted and the mouse issue just disappears and the system performed much faster. Whahoo!! It Lives!!!

Second: the LCD screen on the Dell D505, which I installed this beast, just would not go to the right resolution of 1400x1050. I had indeed installed and had functional the i855 resolution patch too. It turned out the monitor was not identified correctly. I opened a terminal, typed (as root) init 3 to go back to single-user mode for sax2 to function. I then picked the D600 monitor, which is just one step above this model. Initializing init 5 to return to multi-user mode, I found the resolution to be perfect. Wow, what experience will teach ya.

10.0 Beta1 as well as previous version 9.3 are available for download.

Go here to join the party -

https://www.opensuse.org and get your own copy of SuSE.

nomasteryoda - enjoy