TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Between the deal Novell just made with Microsoft and the countless statements and counter-statements by lawyers and armchair analysts, it's easy to forget that Novell does make a free Linux desktop product. The latest iteration of this is openSuSE 10.2.

I think it's important to note with all the furor regarding Novell and Microsoft that the SuSE team almost certainly had no say in what kinds of deals the Novell management made, and it's still possible that openSuSE will fork completely, leaving those of us with a distaste for corporate ass-wiping with an unencumbered product.

Install:

If you've ever installed SuSE or openSuSE before, you know what to expect here. The installer runs YaST2 and steps you through various screens (language, license, install type, etc). There's really nothing new here from 10.1 or before.

SuSE is not a distribution for the faint of harddrive space. I didn't change any of the default settings and the install weighed in at around 2GB. The upside to this (and something I've appreciated in the past) is that you get a lot of software either in the default install or installable off the DVD, making this a lot easier to get working if you're on slow or no internet.

10.2 isn't going to win any awards for quick booting. I guess I've just been spoiled by Ubuntu and Zenwalk lately. Upon first boot a dialog popped up that said openSuSE was trying to "Synchronize with ZenWorks".

I admit I'm not up to speed on all the goings on in the SuSE world, so I did some investigation. Apparently (upon cursory examination) it's some sort of package manager similar to apt and based on the Ximian Red Carpet software Novell bought a few years back.

While I was performing the initial setup dialogs after rebooting I noticed something odd. I chose to test my X graphical setup and when I was brought back to the setup dialog my mouse could not click the "Next" button. The pointer moved around but whenever I tried to click on something nothing happened.

I thought at first that YaST2 had frozen but when I hit TAB I was able to select the various options and buttons on the screen. It was a very strange error that I've never encountered in SuSE (or any Linux) before.

I chose KDE as my default desktop during the install. Novell likes GNOME and they use it on their enterprise desktop SLED. Regular SuSE users are traditionally more fond of KDE (since SuSE used to be strictly KDE-centric). I am one of those users.

The programs menu is... well how can I say this best- confusing. I don't like change in places where I don't consider change necessary. Novell screwed up the programs menu in SLED as well, but I thought (wrongly) that perhaps they'd spare the rest of us their committee-created abomination.

It's a good thing you can at least turn it off. If you right-click on the taskbar and go to "Configure Panel", then go to "Menus" and change the start menu style to "KDE" instead of "SuSE" you'll get your normal start menus back.

My USB drive mounted and unmounted correctly. I installed gcc and the kernel-headers from the DVD and was able to get my official Nvidia drivers working. There's something to be said for little things like including the kernel-source packages on the install media. It's a feature a lot of distributions seem to lack.

When I inserted my media CD, I found out much to my chagrin that the default media player is RealPlayer. That simply wouldn't do, so I opened my test MP3s in AmaroK instead.

Imagine my distaste when I found that AmaroK couldn't play MP3s, and neither could Kaffeine. The only player that can play MP3s on the default install of SuSE 10.2 is Real.

I see this as a bit of corporate ass-kissing on the part of Novell, who probably pays royalties to Real for use of their player. I am not happy about this. Yes, it's nice that you can play MP3s in *something*, but why cripple 2 out of your 3 media players?

If you're going to let Real use the MP3 codec, why not let your others, and if not, why even include Kaffeine or AmaroK to begin with? To add insult to injory, none of the 3 media players including RealPlayer would play my MPG or WMV movie files.

My scanner was detected, however Kooka did not recognize it. My digital camera was detected and DigiKam worked with it properly. It sucked that the device I would have preferred to work (the scanner) because I need it to do actual work was the one that SuSE didn't like.

Software Selection:

Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP were installed, but not GAIM. It was available from the install DVD however. The proper Sun Java VM 1.5 was installed by default, but the Eclipse IDE was not available in any form. I've noted my displeasure with this being omitted before.

Most Annoying Feature:

Lack of support for my scanner, lack of multimedia support in general (and the default use of RealPlayer), and the terrible default start menu they've created all add up to a distribution that I have to work to get the way I want, and can't do any real work on when I do.

Who's it best for?

If you need a lot of software available from the install media, SuSE is handy. However getting your hands on the DVD image without access to broadband could be tricky.

I can't really say I was terribly offended by much in this distribution, but I was greatly disappointed by some things. If this is the best Novell has to offer at this point, I don't feel at a loss by moving on to another Linux.