openSUSE 11.1 is Out

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VinDSL

VinDSL

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Apr 11, 2006
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How about that openSUSE 11.1?!?!?

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.1

Man, I'm excited about this release!!!

I'm gonna install the KDE 4 version on my lappy... :D

Anybody else here try it yet?

EDIT

OMG!!! Firefox just crashed - hasn't happened in ages - so I didn't get it!

Guess I'll have to try again tomorrow...

LoL!

That's not a good omen!
 
postmortemIA

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
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what is so exciting about it? it is minor update from 11.0, hardly anything exciting came out in Linux world between 11.0 and 11.1?

About KDE 4, I have yet to find somebody who likes it. Perhaps best part of 11.1 is that lets you install KDE 3.5.7
 
MovingTarget

MovingTarget

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2003
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I have moved from OpenSuSE 10.2 to 10.3 in the past year. Big improvement to say the least. When I first tried KDE 4, it was completely unstable for me and had lots of little "nagging" things about it to the point where it was almost unuseable. However, the progress that has been made with 4.1 has made it much more of a pleasure to use. I'm excited about this new release and have already downloaded/burned it to dvd. I will be waiting on my new hdd to install it though...
 
Gooberlx2

Gooberlx2

Lifer
May 4, 2001
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I think Opensuse does an excellent job with their KDE implementation...that's what I use/recommend.
 
VinDSL

VinDSL

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Apr 11, 2006
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OMG!!!

openSUSE 11.1 recognizes the WiFi card in my Toshiba A215 lappy! :Q

That's a first - never could get it working with Linux before now... :thumbsup:
 
postmortemIA

postmortemIA

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Jul 11, 2006
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SUSE and Novell have been in gnome bandwagon lately, but still KDE is very well supported... default installation option afterall is GNOME 2.24.

My main gripe with KDE 4.x is that many of customizations that I am used to are simply gone, for example try to adjust your taskbar on ways you did in 3.5 releases.

anyway, I tested it on my laptop, seems pretty good. 11.0 did have some bugs: like 3 settigns for backlight forcing you to look at too bright laptop screen, and wifi didn't get DHCP if ifup option was selected.
 
sourceninja

sourceninja

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Mar 8, 2005
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I liked KDE 3.5 a lot. But KDE 4 still doesn't 'feel' right to me. I'm sure they will get it right given time, but i'm not a KDE fan right now.
 
S

soonerproud

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2007
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Originally posted by: Nothinman
If you read the comments, everyone seems to prefer KDE!
Click to expand...

SuSE has always been a KDE-focused distro so that's not terribly surprising.
Click to expand...

In the past that was true. Novell has been slowly moving it to more of a Gnome centric distro without sacrificing the excellent KDE support. If you haven't noticed, all the enterprise versions of SLED or SLES are gnome centric.

 
VinDSL

VinDSL

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Apr 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: postmortemIA
...anyway, I tested it on my laptop, seems pretty good. 11.0 did have some bugs: like 3 settigns for backlight forcing you to look at too bright laptop screen, and wifi didn't get DHCP if ifup option was selected.
Click to expand...

Luckily, my lappy has the screen brightness built into the hardware, so all I have to do is hit Function F6/F7 to adjust it up/down. :D

Anyway, I'm loving 11.1...

I borked my dual monitor setup somehow, last night, trying to tweak it - one of those 3:00 AM things, where you don't know what you did wrong, and it's too late to reverse-engineer your screw up!

So, this morning, I slipped the Live CD into the lappy and reinstalled openSUSE 11.1.

Heh!

Worked just like a Windows recovery. Took about 5 minutes. I didn't have to reconfigure anything, change any settings - I didn't lose anything - and my dual monitors are working correctly again.

This time I'm gonna leave them alone. openSUSE did a great job of auto-configuring my lappy! :)
 
Brainonska511

Brainonska511

Lifer
Dec 10, 2005
27,990
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I tried OpenSuse 11.1 on my laptop, but none of the hotkeys (like volume control) were working and thus gave up on it.

Thus, I went back to Ubuntu Intrepid. I installed Kubuntu Intrepid on my laptop this past weekend and have so far enjoyed KDE 4.1. There are a few quirks though that are somewhat annoying - monitor power control doesn't work with the screensaver turned on; sometimes after logging in, the network manager fails to load. Additionally, a bunch of the customizations are buried where you would not expect them. Though, I do like KDE 4.1's desktop effects - no cube like with Compiz + Ubuntu, but good none-the-less. I hear KDE 4.2 is supposed to fix a bunch of the bugs in 4.1 plus add the feature of hiding the plasmoid widgets that sit on the desktop. I guess I'll have to wait till late January though for that update or just try it when Kubuntu 9.04 comes out.

I think I'm going to switch back to Ubuntu 8.10 tonight. I've noticed that I can't properly resume from standby with Kubuntu :(. Too many little details to make me continue to use this.
 
postmortemIA

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: VinDSL
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
...anyway, I tested it on my laptop, seems pretty good. 11.0 did have some bugs: like 3 settigns for backlight forcing you to look at too bright laptop screen, and wifi didn't get DHCP if ifup option was selected.
Click to expand...

Luckily, my lappy has the screen brightness built into the hardware, so all I have to do is hit Function F6/F7 to adjust it up/down. :D

Anyway, I'm loving 11.1...

I borked my dual monitor setup somehow, last night, trying to tweak it - one of those 3:00 AM things, where you don't know what you did wrong, and it's too late to reverse-engineer your screw up!

So, this morning, I slipped the Live CD into the lappy and reinstalled openSUSE 11.1.

Heh!

Worked just like a Windows recovery. Took about 5 minutes. I didn't have to reconfigure anything, change any settings - I didn't lose anything - and my dual monitors are working correctly again.

This time I'm gonna leave them alone. openSUSE did a great job of auto-configuring my lappy! :)
Click to expand...

well so does mine - but somehow they managed to override the hardware function making it not work properly: one push of Fn+ brightness down will put brightness all way down.

Your dual screen problem smells like bad configured /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. System usually keeps backup, just FYI in case you are not aware of it.
 
VinDSL

VinDSL

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Apr 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: postmortemIA
Your dual screen problem smells like bad configured /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't know what I did wrong...

openSUSE did a pretty good job of auto-configuring my hardware during the install.

When it was done, and I got the Wifi working, I loaded all my favorite Firefox add-ons and started surfing.

I dunno... some ppl like the fonts in Linux distros, but they tend to annoy me, so I started messing with them, trying to make it look like Vista - which I accomplished on Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago, but couldn't remember how I did it off the top of my head...

Then, somewhere along the line I discovered a GUI on the desktop that adjusted the screens on my dual monitors. That worked okay, but it was rather limited, so I decided to go to root and start messing around with the Yast monitor setup.

LoL!

Next thing you know, it was rendering the screens too small on my lappy and too big on my Dell... and the fonts looked like something a legally blind person would use... :D

Anyway, I gave up and decided to start over in the morning - and everything is fine now!
 
postmortemIA

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
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suse likes to autoadjust font DPI in gnome. normal size is 96, check what is yours. it is under appearance, fonts.

bigger DPI is OK for laptop, for desktop you can hanfle 96 or slightly above that.

To make your fonts similar to windows -
1.you need to check the font smoothing, subpixel + full
2. install your windows TTF fonts (arial, courier, verdana, times, etc.) using systemsettings -> font installer
 
VinDSL

VinDSL

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2006
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Merry Christmas!

The relatives just left and I'm playing around on my openSUSE lappy - first time I've had a chance to check out its soft underbelly without interruption!

Actually, the screen res and fonts look GREAT on this panel. They just look funky on my external Dell monitor, but I can live with that for now - I got so many other things to investigate first.

Heh! I'm truly loving this distro!

I'm one of those ppl that try Linux on the desktop, every year or two, and get tired of it the next day - and this has been going on well into the last century, but I think I'm gonna stick it out this time.

Don't get me wrong. IMHO, Linux has always served me well as a server OS. With the exception of a short stint with FreeBSD and a couple of years of IIS, that's all I have used, but Linux has always irritated me on the desktop. I cut my teeth on Debian, been running a Slackware server for years, and currently use CentOS on my production machine. I've just never cared for Linux on the desktop.

Surely there are millions of other ppl that feel the same way...

LoL!

After all these years, I think they finally got it right. We'll see how long the enthusiasm lasts this time... :)
 
Brainonska511

Brainonska511

Lifer
Dec 10, 2005
27,990
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Originally posted by: VinDSL
After all these years, I think they finally got it right. We'll see how long the enthusiasm lasts this time... :)
Click to expand...

I only started using Ubuntu on my laptop because I was bored at the end of the summer and wanted to see if Linux could work well with my laptop. It did - and I've been using Ubuntu almost exclusively since beginning of September. Gave short stints with OpenSuse 11.1, which didn't work properly with my laptop - function keys in particular. Then Kubuntu 8.10, but KDE 4.1 is too unfinished for me to put up with for too long, thus I headed back to Ubuntu 8.10.
 
VinDSL

VinDSL

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Apr 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: Brainonska511
Gave short stints with OpenSuse 11.1, which didn't work properly with my laptop - function keys in particular. Then Kubuntu 8.10, but KDE 4.1 is too unfinished for me to put up with for too long, thus I headed back to Ubuntu 8.10.
Click to expand...

I gave Ubuntu 8.10 a shot, and it worked okay, but I ran into a problem with my WiFi card - sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't - so, I only used it for a day or so.

I can see why ppl like Ubuntu - it's functions almost identically to Windows. Program installs were point n' click.

Speaking of which, I installed Adobe Flash Player 10 a few minutes ago using a RPM - didn't have any luck using the TAR version - had a permission thing going on, even though I SU'ed to root. The RPM install was fairly painless, but both installs required shelling to CLI.

If ppl aren't comfortable goofing around in BASH, openSUSE probably isn't for them. Ubuntu would be a better choice, but Ubuntu isn't necessarily gonna teach them much about Linux.

Personally, having played around with Ubuntu a little, I'm having a hard time not looking down my nose at Ubuntu users - not because I think I'm better than anyone, but it's kinda sad what they're missing out on, you know? No pain - no gain! I don't think Ubuntu users are getting the full experience.

Anyway, I'm not knocking anybody. To each his own... ;)
 
postmortemIA

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
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RPMs can be installed in SUSE without CLI, you just have to open time will package installer, and it will ask you root password.

similar to how the .deb packages are installed in ubuntu.
 
S

soonerproud

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2007
1,874
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Originally posted by: postmortemIA
RPMs can be installed in SUSE without CLI, you just have to open time will package installer, and it will ask you root password.

similar to how the .deb packages are installed in ubuntu.
Click to expand...

The package manager is YAST and yes you can install software through the gui just like Ubuntu and never touch the command line. It is amazing the number of people who are ignorant that Ubuntu is not the only nix that does not require command line knowledge to use. Both Fedora Core and Open Suse are perfectly capable of using the gui to install software and set up the system. The difference is that Ubuntu makes it easier for people to find and use these tools and has simplified them a bit more to be less confusing.

Another difference is that Ubuntu includes repos to obtain most of these codecs out of the box where a little more work to find these repos is required in FC and Open Suse.
 
Brainonska511

Brainonska511

Lifer
Dec 10, 2005
27,990
12,553
136
Originally posted by: VinDSL
snip
Click to expand...

I have no problem working in the command line or doing a little work to get things configured properly. It's just that Ubuntu needs the least tweaking to work properly on my laptop. If it was a desktop, it would be much easier to set up another distribution.

Thus, Ubuntu remains my favorite, for its ease of use. Plus, when something goes wrong in the middle of a quarter at school, I can quickly set Ubuntu back up within 2 hours of starting installation instead of having to remember how I fiddled around with another distribution to get it working properly.

If I ever get around to building another desktop, OpenSuse might be what I look to first...
 
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