TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

OpenSuSE kind of got swept under the mat with me because their 11.2 release came after several high-profile releases (Ubuntu, Fedora). I actually didn't notice they'd released 11.2 until someone sent me an email wondering why I hadn't looked at it.

SuSE was at one time my distribution of choice. The main reason then was because I could buy it at a retail store and come home with several discs worth of every piece of software I needed, and I didn't need an internet connection for any of it.

My priorities have changed since then, but the SuSE community trucked along just fine without me. Here's hoping this release is as polished as some I've looked at in the past.

OpenSuSE comes in several flavors: DVD, KDE CD, Gnome CD, and a network install. I chose the KDE edition for a couple of reasons. One, the person who requested this rant specifically mentioned KDE, and also because SuSE has traditionally been a more KDE-focused distribution and I wanted to try them at their best.

Time and bandwidth permitting I may look at the DVD as well, since in my personal experience the most visual polish tends to go to the DVD installer.

Install:

The installers for the individual liveCDs aren't as pretty as the one for the DVD. I really wish this weren't the case, but I guess given the choice between several hundred megs of installer graphics and a copy of Mahjongg, I'll take the latter.

While typing in my user information KDE popped up rather jarringly and asked if I wanted to activate Mouse Keys. I don't know what keystroke I hit to cause it to think that, but I said no.

Next was my partition layout. My first install was on a virtual machine, so I don't care if the whole virtual drive gets wiped out. I was however a little surprised that the default suggestion from the installer was "wipe everything."

The first boot auto-config was more visually appealing then the installer, and I'm guessing that's the kind of look the DVD has. The only thing that marred the experience were the CUPS dialogs that kept popping up.

The system logged me in and I was greeted by a pleasant-looking desktop. I was told there were updates available, and upon closer inspection found that one of them was the Microsoft set of Core TrueType fonts. Some folks are leery about proprietary software, particularly stuff that comes from Microsoft, so consider this your heads up.

I let the updates run (note that it did ask my permission) and did some digging around the apps menu.

Software Selection:

Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP were included. Kopete is the IM of choice. AmaroK is the media player. Java and GCC were not installed.

Apparently the OpenSuSE folks didn't have any issues packing a few games in the mix (hear that, Mandriva?). Included were Mahjongg, Sudoku and KPatience (which has a number of card games including traditional Solitaire).

YaST2 hasn't really changed much in a long time, and I find the interface looking dated and cluttered in contrast to the shininess of KDE 4. Speaking of which, I didn't have any stability issues with KDE this time. There was much rejoicing (hooray).

Modifying system settings with YaST Control Center felt likewise awkward. Perhaps now that the underlying desktop seems stable, SuSE can devote more time to revamping YaST.

I intentionally tried to break something by uninstalling Bluetooth support (my laptop doesn't have it). YaST warned me of a number of things that would be deleted along with it, and I threw caution to the wind and told it to wipe them all.

Before it performed the actions, I was informed that a number of other packages would be updated as well, including Flash player and about a dozen language translations for OpenOffice.

Allow me to get on my soapbox for a moment: The OS should not try to install any languages on my system other than my default, let alone 372 megabytes of them.

This isn't peculiar to OpenSuSE; a lot of distributions (and apps within those distributions) seem to think that I'm some sort of human Rosetta Stone and need to write my correspondences in Russian, Spanish, German, French, Polish and Italian simultaneously. If a system is set up in English(US) I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that English(US) and perhaps English(UK) are the only translations I'll need. If I want more, I'll install them myself.

I thought by the time I finished that soapbox the install would be done. Nope. It seemed to stall at about 39%, so I hit Abort. It didn't actually abort the install (silly me), but it did write "Abort" onto the log each time I tried.

As a last resort I ran XKill and terminated YaST2. This more than likely would leave my packages corrupted, but hey, that's what test systems are for. I decided to uninstall some of the extra languages if I could.

The "Languages" option in YaST Control Center showed English (US) as my primary language and had a list of check boxes for other languages I might want to add. I noticed that no other languages were checked, so why on earth did OpenOffice need all those Russian and Italian translation packages? The world may never know.

I re-launched YaST2 (which turned out was no worse for wear) and de-selected the Italian, Polish, Russian, French and Spanish dictionaries and thesauri, then hit Accept. I was told certain packages would be updated again, but there were less of them this time. I sat back and waited for the train wreck I expected to happen.

While things were downloading I noted with some humor that desktop-translations is the package of the beast. The remaining packages were significantly smaller than 300MB. Most were just a few KB.

I played around a bit after the update had finished and behold! No desktop derailments. Score one for the adaptability of YaST2's package manager.

Conclusion:

OpenSuSE 11.2 has the most stable and unobtrusive version of KDE 4 I've ever used. That's a big win in my book. I'm sick and tired of having to sacrifice stability and features for eye candy and it's good to see that finally I can have both (for the most part).

The only real problems I ran into popped up *after* I started fiddling with things, and to give credit where it's due, SuSE put up with my tinkerings without a crash. What can I say, I'm a fiddler. Now get off my roof.