 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 364, 26 July 2010 |
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Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It has been an exciting week for BSD fans. Not only did this past week bring us the release of FreeBSD 8.1 and PC-BSD 8.1, it also ushered in a newly elected FreeBSD Core Team. For the security conscience among us, we have some important news about the latest release from TrueCrypt. In other news, many of us use Flash on a regular basis, but don't like the bulk and security concerns which go hand and hand with Adobe's implementation. Now there is a new challenger to Adobe's Flash on the scene and it should be interesting to see how it compares to GNU's Gnash. This week we will also take a look at the latest release of openSUSE and see how the Novell-sponsored project is doing. Rounding out this issue we'll talk about how to make sure your distribution is more up to date at install time. Happy reading!
Content:
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Taking a Look at openSUSE 11.3
The openSUSE project has been around for a long time (under one name or another) for a Linux distribution. Through the past sixteen years it has gone through a lot of changes and tried several different approaches. While other distros come (with their flash and hype) and go again, openSUSE has progressed steadily and generally with less fanfare. The latest version of openSUSE, 11.3, arrived in mid-July and I decided to take it for a spin. It had been a while since I last installed the lizard on my machines and I was curious to see how things were progressing.
Most of the openSUSE website is done up as a well-organized wiki. Navigation is smooth and the pages are well presented, offering subtle eye-candy while providing a good supply of information. The project also maintains several mailing lists, a forum, community IRC channel, plenty of system documentation and a knowledge base.
The latest edition of openSUSE comes in several flavours. There's an all-in-one DVD, a live CD for GNOME and another live CD for KDE fans. There are also options for performing network installs. Each of these options is available for 32-bit and 64-bit machines in both direct download and bittorrent form. For my test drive I selected the KDE 32-bit live CD and set to work installing it on my test machines.
Booting off the CD brings up a boot menu allowing the user to select the live desktop environment, run the installer or perform a media check. Below the menu are options for accessing documentation and adjusting video and kernel parameters. Opting to try the live environment I was shown a graphical boot screen with a lizard icon and a progress bar until KDE finished loading. The user is presented with a welcome screen with some information on the project and links to get assistance. There's also a link to documentation on how to use the KDE desktop. Closing the welcome screen reveals a tastefully green-themed KDE (version 4.4.4) desktop with a handful of icons for navigating the file system, getting help and kicking off the installer. The CD worked well enough and the only point of interest I found was the large supply of software packages the project has managed to cram onto the CD, which we will cover later.
The openSUSE welcome screen.
(full file size: 1.3MiB, resolution: 1,366x768 pixels)
The installer itself is one of the more polished system installers I've seen. On the surface it has a smooth, simple look while underneath it contains an excellent range of advanced options. The first page kicks off with asking the user for their preferred language and keyboard layout. We're also shown a copy of the distribution's license. On the second screen, we're asked to select a time zone and set the system's clock. The next stage handles partitioning. Here is where openSUSE's installer shines. The partition manager handles regular disk layouts, RAID and volume management. It will also support NFS mounting and encryption. These screens (and sub-screens) are well laid out and make partitioning simple in nearly any environment. The disk partitioner will handle most Linux file system formats, including the ext2/3/4 family, JFS, XFS, Reiser and BtrFS. One thing I especially enjoyed about the partitioner is that it will make suggestions for setting up a root partition, a separate /home partition and recommend swap space, guiding new users through the choices.
Moving on, the installer asks the user to create a non-root account. Here the defaults work well, but experts can adjust settings for password storage and authentication methods. The installer then asks for a root password to be provided and gets to work copying over the necessary files. Once the installation is complete and the system is rebooted, the OS goes through some configuration steps (which are handled automatically) and updates its package repositories (which can be skipped).
The openSUSE system installer.
(full file size: 476KiB, resolution 800x600 pixels)
Let's talk about hardware for a moment. I ran openSUSE on two physical machines, one generic desktop box (2.5GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2GHz CPU, 3GB of RAM, Intel video card). Performance was good on both machines and I encountered no problems with the desktop computer. Resolution was set to the highest available configuration and sound worked out of the box. I ran into a few problems with the laptop. While video and audio also worked well on the laptop, I found my Intel wireless card wasn't detected. The touchpad worked, but didn't handle taps as mouse clicks. I also ran the distro in a VirtualBox virtual machine and found the experience to be above average. The distribution interacts well with the virtual environment, meaning the mouse doesn't need to be captured by the VM. Screen resizing is dynamic, allowing the user to adjust the guest operating system's desktop without needing to logout or restart X. I was also happy to discover openSUSE will operate with as little as 256MB of RAM. I was able to login to KDE and launch YaST to change settings in a VM with just 256MB of memory without using swap space.
The openSUSE installer places about 3.1GB of software on the local drive, giving the user a full application menu right from the start. Included are Firefox 3.6.6, the GIMP, OpenOffice 3.2.1, Kopete, Ktorrent, Kmail, k3b for disc burning, an audio player, a video player, YaST2 for changing system settings, the Kinfocentre and a small selection of games. There are some excellent accessibility tools, an encryption & certificate program, image viewer, file archiver, calculator and text editor. Some items not included were mp3 codecs, popular video codecs and Flash. While these items are not included on the live CD, the distro makes them easy to add. For instance, opening Amarok (the default music player) will notify the user that mp3 playback isn't included and ask if the ability should be added. If the software isn't available in the user's repositories, the OS will take the user to a website where they can read about non-free codecs and install the extra repository simply by clicking a link. A similar process is offered for the video player. I think openSUSE may have one of the most balanced approaches to non-free codecs I've seen so far. While they avoid shipping extra codecs in the installation image, they make it wonderfully easy to add these components while giving their reasons for their policy.
Running Firefox and Ktorrent
(full file size: 361KiB, resolution: 1,366x768 pixels)
The distribution is, in fact, full of small things which show an attention to detail. As an example, when I was running my laptop on battery power, the update manager didn't automatically grab new packages. A default behaviour which the user can override. Trying to run a program (from the command line) which isn't installed would invite the user to run a command to see which repository package (if any) held the desired program and instructions on how to install the missing piece. By default, a number of services are running, but there is a firewall in place, securing things like OpenSSH from the outside world.
I don't think any review of openSUSE would be complete without shining a spotlight on YaST. This is the distribution's all-in-one system configuration tool. The panel is well laid out, arranging its items in categories down the left side and displaying specific tools on the right. There's a Software section, which helps the user manage and search for packages; a Hardware section, for getting information and setting up printers, scanners and sound; a System category for tweaking the bootloader, setting the current date & time and handling backups. There's a group of tools for setting up a network connection, another for local security (such as passwords, user accounts and sudo settings). There is a section for creating and working with virtual environments and a group of AppArmor utilities. Very few distros have such a great, one-stop configuration system -- the exception would probably the latest offerings from Mandriva. However, where Mandriva's controls seem to be aimed at Linux newcomers, YaST appears to be focused on slightly more experienced users. The package manager is probably the best example of this. Like most other package managers, openSUSE's can display installed or available items and provides a search feature. Where it deviates is with the wide selection of filters and tabs for various views. An experienced user will probably look at this layout and be impressed with the buffet of screens, symbols and bulk operations. Novice users are likely to be intimidated by the choices and terminology used. For instance, new users probably won't want to think about their searches being case sensitive or what an RPM Group is.
There were a few small flaws in the otherwise fantastic gem of openSUSE's crown. The AppArmor Profile Wizard wouldn't run on my machine. It provides a helpful error message but, as of time of writing, I haven't gone through the steps to get it running. I found it odd that the distro enables the secure shell server by default, but there's no YaST tool for managing the service. There's a mail server tool and utilities for LDAP, but I didn't find anything for secure shell.
System configuration and package management.
(full file size: 503KiB, resolution: 1,366x768 pixels)
Looking beyond the software itself, the openSUSE project offers 18 months of support for 11.3. For users who want a longer support cycle, Novell provides SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11, with support through to March 2016. The openSUSE project also offers a boxed edition of their distribution, which provides customers with a manual to accompany the installation media. In short, there are a lot of options for SUSE lovers with varying costs and levels of support.
I found the latest release of this distribution to be a solid offering. Some of the previous issues regarding codecs have been corrected, the new KDE desktop is light and fast. I like that openSUSE gives users the option to use the Smolt system profiler and YaST is an excellent control centre. The distro's work with virtualization is great and there is a large selection of software available on the CD. The only thing I'd like to change about this distro is in regards to the package manager. The existing YaST tool for handling software is effective, but I'd like to see a more novice-friendly program added. Ubuntu offers a good example of this where they have a beginner-friendly Software Center and a separate menu entry for Synaptic. The way Linux handles software packages is, in my opinion, one of the operating system's greatest strengths and it's important not to frighten people away from it. Over-all, I see openSUSE 11.3 as a great release, possibly the best we've seen of the lizard yet.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
BSD Conference, FreeBSD picks elects new leaders, Improvements to TrueCrypt and an alternative to Flash
 In November, New York City will host the bi-annual NYCBSDCon. An early timeline for the event is posted here. Of important note is that the conference program committee is currently accepting submissions for presentations concerning the BSD operating systems. If you would like to speak at NYCBSDCon, you can get details here.
In other BSD news, every two years the FreeBSD developers hold an election to decide who will lead the FreeBSD project. The 2010 election is now over and the new (and reelected) Core Team members have been announced. The Core Team is a bit like a board of directors who try to keep FreeBSD healthy and on the right track. Congratulations to the new team!
And for fans of both the GNOME desktop environment and the FreeBSD operating system, we have good news. The GhostBSD operating system is moving toward its 1.5 release and,
in a recent blog post, the developer behind the BSD live disc said "GhostBSD 1.5 will be installable." We took a look at GhostBSD previously and found it to be a solid system.
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For people who want to keep their data away from prying eyes, there are few tools as useful as TrueCrypt. The open source encryption tool has just
launched a new version, 7.0, with a great list of new features. "Among the new features are hardware-accelerated AES, support for devices that use sector sizes other than 512 bytes, ability to configure a volume to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer, favorites organizer, and more." There are also some bug fixes and general improvements, so if you use TrueCrypt, be sure to check out the latest release.
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Many websites use Flash, especially sites which stream video. This has made the technology very popular while Adobe's bloated and buggy implementation has many users frustrated. Now there is a new face on the Flash scene:
Lightspark. The Lightspark project is putting together a fast, clean implementation of the popular web technology. At the moment, there are packages available for the latest Fedora and Ubuntu releases and other Linux users can install from the source code. Has anyone here tried Lightspark? Please share your experiences in the comments section, below.
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 Frederic Crozat announced last week that he will be leaving the employ of Mandriva. Crozat had been with Mandriva for about ten years and worked on that distribution's GNOME implementation, among other things. Though no specific reason for his departure was given, one has to wonder if the company's recent turmoil might be a cause. Regardless of what triggered the departure, there is no doubt Crozat's contributions will be missed.
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When you want to test drive a distro to see how it works with your hardware, there are fewer tools greater than a live CD. The
Debian Live project provides such CDs for people who are interested in playing with Debian. The project features Debian in a number of different flavours (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, 32-bit and 64-bit) with manuals in English and German. Chris Were recently tried the live CD for Debian 5.0.5 and
shared his experiences on his blog.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Adding updates to the install process
Up-to-date-on-arrival asks:
Could you describe how to slipstream updates into a Linux install?
DistroWatch answers:
Slipstreaming is a method of adding patches and new software to installation media. It's generally used to speed up the process of getting a new computer up and running faster. As an example, let's say you've installed Fedora on your home PC, you've added codecs and downloaded all the updates. Now, you're planning to set up Fedora on three or four extra computers. You could go through the same steps again for each machine, or you could find a way to get all the updates and extras in place during the install, saving some time.
There are a few ways to go about adding updated packages to your installation. The easiest way is probably to download all the updates (and extra packages) you want and save them on secondary media. This means you will have your regular install disc, plus another disc with your additional packages. There are tools, such as
APTonCD, which automate the process of taking cached package files and burning them to a CD or DVD, making this an attractive option. It also means you won't have to change your original install disc. The downside to this is that you can easily add and update packages this way, but not remove unwanted ones.
Another option is to make an image of an up-to-date installation. This is a good choice for people who want to have identical installs on similar machines, for instance on an office network. The
Clonezilla project is a great way to take an image of one machine and spread it to other computers on the network. While Clonezilla is fast and a great way to spread identical clones, it does require that the target hardware (especially the hard drive size) be similar to the original hardware.
A third option is to copy and alter your installation media to include the updated/extra packages you want. While this is an attractive option, because it doesn't require extra media or a network, it does require more time and for the user to be comfortable with the command line. Most of the big name Linux distros use live CDs with their software stored in a
SquashFS file. It's possible to make a copy of the contents of this file, update the copy and then create a new disc image based on the updated version. There is a good tutorial on performing these steps
here. A nice aspect of this approach is you can add, remove or update whichever software you wish. On the other hand, making a copy of the original install disc and creating a new image takes time and drive space. Finding the right solution can be a bit of a balancing act.
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| Released Last Week |
Sabayon Linux 5.3 "LXDE" and "Xfce"
The Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux project has announced the availability of two new spins with alternative desktop environments - LXDE and Xfce: "Our crew is happy to announce the immediate availability of Xfce, LXDE and SpinBase/OpenVZ Sabayon 5.3 spins built on top of Sabayon SpinBase ISO images. Under the 'extra spins' umbrella, the Sabayon developers are going to experiment with new stable releases with different package compositions. Consider these extra spins an appetizer of what you will get in the upcoming months: more spins are planned and more external contributions will be accepted. Just like the other regular Sabayon releases, these extra spins are also built daily by our build servers and available in our mirrors inside the 'iso/daily' directory." You can read the rest of the
announcement here.
Tiny Core 3.0
The Tiny Core project, representing only the core needed to boot into a very minimal X desktop typically with wired internet access, has unleashed a major release: "Team Tiny Core is pleased to announce Tiny Core 3.0 is now available. Changelog: New kernel update to 2.6.33.3 (a upx'ed version is also available in the distribution file area ); New 64-bit kernel available in distribution files area; New compressed swap in ram, able to run more and longer, less crashes due to out of ram; New tmpfs root always, no longer possible to exhaust ram in an 'embed' boot via files; New improved virtualization support; New ext4 support in base/base tools; New delta extension updates as the default using zsync; New kernel for support of pci-hotplug modules; New modules for eeepc-laptop and ssb; New kernel-agnostic dep files supported by core functions..." The full
changelog has all the details.
Peppermint OS Ice-07142010
After its "One" flavor products release in May and in June, the Peppermint Team is proud to release its second offering, the "Ice" flavor: "This is not an upgrade to replace Peppermint OS One, but another project that we will be under constant development from here forward. Peppermint Ice was developed around Chromium as its default browser and a brand new SSB [Site Specific Browser] Application was developed by Kendall Weaver named 'Ice' which this new Peppermint variant is named after. The default Cloud Applications are simply included in Peppermint Ice as an example of the flexibility of the Peppermint Ice SSB as opposed to locally installed applications. These defaults can easily be removed and added again later as the user sees fit.
" Here is the full
release announcement.
PC-BSD 8.1
PC-BSD 8.1 has been released: "The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE and KDE 4.4.5. Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are: FreeBSD 8.1-Release; KDE 4.4.5; Numerous fixes to the installation backend; Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning; Improved ZFS support; Bugfixes to desktop tools/utilities. Recommended system requirements: Pentium 4 or higher; 512MB of RAM; 20GB of free hard drive space (either partition, or entire disk)..." You can read the complete
announcement here.
The PC-BSD 8.1 Desktop
(full file size: 320KiB, resolution: 1,024x768 pixels)
ClearOS 5.2
ClearOS 5.2, a CentOS-based open-source Linux server, network and gateway solution for small business and distributed environments, is now available for download: "The primary ClearOS 5.2 changes include: Password policy engine to improve security; Detailed disk usage reporting to improve storage utilization; Network traffic analyzer tool to detect bandwidth challenges; Custom firewall tool to create advanced rules; H.323 support for VoIP systems; Improved support for Google Apps and Zarafa in LDAP Directory; A base system updated to CentOS 5.5. As usual, please consult the Release Notes for specific upgrade information regarding your ClearOS version. ClearOS 5.x supports upgrades from ClarkConnect 4.x and later. Upgrades from earlier versions (or systems originally installed with an earlier version) are not supported." The release announcement can be found
here.
Deepin 10.06
Linux Deepin is a Chinese community distribution based on Ubuntu and designed for desktop users. After three release candidates, Linux Deepin 10.06 was announced today. It is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and a fresh installation (instead of upgrade from version 9.12) is recommended for users. It supports installation from USB devices and thus one does not need to burn the released ISO image onto a CD. Major components include ibus-sunpinyin the whole-sentence-oriented Chinese input method, Linux kernel 2.6.32-23, Flash player 10.1.53.64, Xfce 4.6.2, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, Firefox 3.6.6 and its plugins all of the latest versions. User-friendly improvements include automatic installation (one only needs to perform disk partition and user creation), faster boot-up, and graphical configurations for various network settings. You can read the full
announcement here (in Chinese).
FreeBSD 8.1
FreeBSD 8.1 was formally announced after a few days of its appearance on world-wide mirrors: "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: zfsloader added; zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14; NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities; UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support; SMP support in PowerPC G5; BIND 9.6.2-P2; sendmail updated to 8.14.4; OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1; GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list." You can read the
full announcement here.
eBox 1.5
eBox Platform 1.5, an Ubuntu-based, easy-to-use platform to manage various network services, has been released: "eBox Platform development team is glad to announce that the first installer CD for eBox Platform 1.5 is now available for download. Please note that eBox Platform 1.5 is a development version based on Ubuntu 10.04 and it will become eBox Platform 2.0 (next stable release of the Linux small business server) after a stabilization period. The development of eBox Platform 2.0 is now finished and from now on all the attention will be focused on testing, bugfixing and optimizing the software. These are the most relevant changes since eBox Platform 1.4 release: Improved software management; Autoconfiguration wizards integrated in the administration interface; New mode for network interfaces; Improved logs performance; Webserver with HTTPS support; New FTP module." See the
release announcement for
details.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- Buluo OS
A distro based on Linux From Scratch with a GNOME desktop.
- ASRI éducation A French distribution with a focus on education.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 2 August 2010.
Jesse Smith
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Lightspark (by Burt on 2010-07-26 12:48:49 GMT from Netherlands)
I'd be very interested to hear of peoples experiences of Lightspark and how it compares to the awful adobe flash which is one big nightmare in all distros.
2 • @1: Re: Lightspark (by Stuart on 2010-07-26 13:06:34 GMT from United Kingdom)
Lightspark works for some Youtube videos for me, and the speed is acceptable (though slower than the Adobe plugin). The project seems to be developing quickly which is promising, although it could be some time before it's a reliable replacement to the Adobe plugin (it still periodically crashes and doesn't work on quite a few flash files).
If you're interested the best thing is to try it out and help the developer with bug reports/feedback.
3 • Lunar Linux 1.6.5-rc1 (by DG on 2010-07-26 13:21:56 GMT from Netherlands)
Users might be interested to know that following the recent release of Lunar Linux 1.6.5-rc1 (Mare Ingenii), there is now an updated installation guide on the wiki, and a new overview of the process of installing a desktop environment:
http://wiki.lunar-linux.org/index.php/Lunar_Linux:Installation-1.6.5
http://wiki.lunar-linux.org/index.php/Lunar_Linux:DesktopEnvironments
Hope this makes the first experience with Lunar a bit easier.
4 • Video element in html5 (by LivCov on 2010-07-26 13:23:09 GMT from France)
The best thing to replace flash, especially with ressource-heavy videos is definetely html5.
Currently you can watch most of youTube's videos with Chrome (h.264 plugin) simply by registering to the beta program at youtube.com/html5
The page also points to the development versions of Firefox with webM enabled.
Since html5 seems to be so hot I don't see the need for yet another flash decoy plugin.
5 • Package tracking (by Max on 2010-07-26 13:24:39 GMT from Brazil)
@Ladislav
With the recent move to KMS, maybe you should start tracking the distro's free video driver versions...
i.e xf86-video-intel, radeon, via and noveau
For example, I went here: http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
And wanted to know which distros might be using the latest driver, but such info is not available in your package lists...
Cheers
Max
6 • Yast openssh configuration component (by cba on 2010-07-26 13:58:06 GMT from Germany)
In my opinion, a very good OpenSuse review.
By the way, the Yast component for openssh configuration is called "yast2-sshd".
7 • About tracking driver versions (by LuisG on 2010-07-26 14:07:23 GMT from Colombia)
@#5, I totally agree, video drivers at this point are the reason to go with one distro or another. I have a mobile ATI HD4330 card, which, while supported by the opensource driver, still has problems with power management.
For instance, Opensuse 11.3 is not viable at this time for me, as the restricted ATI Catalyst driver does not support the xorg version shipped on opensuse, and the free driver makes it overheat a lot.
8 • OpenSuse (by jared on 2010-07-26 14:27:13 GMT from United States)
I believe the Opensuse mascot is a chameleon not a lizard. Then again I just checked wikipedia and it claims chameleons are lizards. Never mind.
9 • YaST sshd tool (by Jesse on 2010-07-26 14:27:19 GMT from Canada)
As a follow-up to post 6, on the live CD version of openSUSE 11.3, yast2-sshd isn't installed by default. It can be downloaded from the repositories and, once installed, appears in the YaST menu. Thanks cba for pointing this out.
10 • Open SUSE 11.3 Very buggy (by Tony on 2010-07-26 14:31:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
I thought I would try the new 11.3 (I have always been a SUSE fan), sadly on my Atom with Nvidia 9300 (Approx 1 year old) but it crashed so badly and regularly that after 2 days I had to wipe it and pop on Mint which works fine.
Media MD5 was okay and I did updates. Very strange.
11 • Distro comparison (by fernbap on 2010-07-26 14:31:18 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks for another nice review.
What i would like to see at Distrowatch was a series of distro comparisons, aimed at the Linux newbie.
Example: Opensuse vs Ubuntu, or Debian vs CentOS, etc: comparative strong and weak points, the distros basic philosophy, to which uses they would be more appropriate, pros and cons of the several package managers, etc.
For a Linux newbie, Distrowatch main asset is also its main problem: too many distros, which are the really relevant ones, which would be more appropriate for certain tasks, etc.
So, i think this is the perfect place for presenting the visitor with a clear map of distros sorted by there relevancy, usage focus, hardware requirements, etc.
And, of course, more in depth reviews of their comparative strengths and weaknesses.
Just my 2 cents...
12 • OpenSuSe and stuff (by davemc on 2010-07-26 14:42:55 GMT from United States)
Great review. The last time I tried SuSe out it was a total disaster on my laptop. Wireless was undetected and getting it setup and able to connect to anything was a nightmare while virtually all the other major Distro's had no trouble with the same hardware at that time (about 1 year ago). What I have found is that SuSe and Mandriva are both so heavily customized and seem to be built around these custom control center's to the point that if those tools cant handle the job, it takes a horrendous amount of effort to get things working the manual way. Even when there is guides/work arounds posted on their wiki's or forums, some of these post advice that can break a system and in my case, made things even worse. Trying to get things working using methods that do work in less scripted Distro's tend not to work in Mandriva/SuSe - at least by my own experience, cant speak for others. However, both distro's have matured to the point that now there is really very little they cant handle and issues like this tend to be the odd exception.
13 • @10+ :OpenSuSE 11.3 crashes (by polycarp on 2010-07-26 14:54:23 GMT from United States)
I am an OpenSuSE fan with an EEE (atom + intel945 graphics) and I had crashes as you describe. The problem seems to be a bug in graphics that is seen in our two cards (ala bugzilla), but I haven't seen anything about Atom processors.
If you have this problem, you have the option of adding the X11:XOrg repository and switching all installed packages to this repo. This has stopped MY crash problemsn
Just wanted to offer a final fix attempt you can try before hopping distros. If that doesn't fix your problem, I totally understand jumping ship. Massive system crashes aren't really a small bug you can live with patiently. ;-)
(Considering the number of atom+intel machines out there like mine, I was surprised to see the bug with only a MEDIUM severity flag on OS bugzilla.)
14 • Offtopic (by User on 2010-07-26 14:59:35 GMT from Greece)
WOW distrowatch is so much better now with adblock. Just text, no pictures and ads and all that crap. I wish every site was like that. Thank you.
15 • ... and there is Suse Studio (by meanpt on 2010-07-26 15:00:41 GMT from Portugal)
:) I managed to produce some kind of a "light" thing that dared to run within 480's of RAM ... but didn't run much ... nor longer, I might say it. Nonetheless, it has been a good experience ... this studio thing for linux alchemy ... despite recognizing I've not met yet the right type of bat wings to put in the badly smelling mix :)
16 • OenSuse (by Andy on 2010-07-26 15:03:00 GMT from United States)
I'm surprised no ever seems to mention the font-handling in OpenSuse. I have tried many iterations of this distro (including the latest) and find the default fond-rendering to be incredibly subpar, particularly in KDE. Why is this? Turning on subpixel rendering with every conceivable variation does little to improve things... OpenSuse and other distros (even Fedora), IMHO, could improve greatly in this area. Debian and the *buntus seem to be the leaders...
17 • oops (by OpenSuse on 2010-07-26 15:05:16 GMT from United States)
Too bad I can't spell - above should read 'OpenSuse' and 'font-rendering.'
18 • SUSE review (by corklad on 2010-07-26 15:36:38 GMT from Ireland)
Good review on Suse 11.3 but ... (and you new a but was coming) ... it's a pity that it wasn't tested on computer hardware that the world marjority still uses, not just high tech high rollers.
I'm talking about the test mashines:
one generic desktop box (2.5GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2GHz CPU, 3GB of RAM, Intel video card)
Are all linux users that well off? what about the rest of us who can't aford the 'muscle car' mashines - who dream of having a computer with a whole Gb of RAM and over 1.5 Ghz prossesor.
Would suse 11.3 work OK on 5 a year old computers?
At least we should know. A full review would include testing on at least one 'average' computer.
19 • openSUSE issues (by Sam Spade on 2010-07-26 15:38:15 GMT from United States)
"...Some of the previous issues regarding codecs have been corrected..."
When I tried to install simple codecs for mp3, it wanted to install over 500mb of files!
I left suse on the floor, then tried installing Mandriva. It was worse. Now I'm happy with Kubuntu. Not a fun by a long short, but Kubuntu just works and installing codecs was a snap.
Another sad tail regarding suse is they still haven't fixed the OpenOffice crash. Try opening a new template and soon it will crash. This was the same problem with previous release. I reported it and got them to admit it, but its still there. Ubuntu and others don't have this issue.
I had the same experience on everything the review mentioned. They need to make there codecs much easier and fix that darn OpenOffice crash!
20 • @14 (by Anonymous on 2010-07-26 15:44:26 GMT from Canada)
You should browse using elinks then.
21 • Kubuntu (by EP on 2010-07-26 15:53:17 GMT from United States)
I read lots of poor things about Kubuntu, but really liked it on my laptop. Would have stuck with that easily over ubunu had the configuration for dual monitors worked as I had expected it to. Unfortunately it didn't so I'm back to ubuntu, but I really loved kubuntu 10.04, almost surprisingly so!
22 • OpenSuSE (by Sly on 2010-07-26 15:55:28 GMT from United States)
Great review of Suse 11.3
I loved Suse 11.0, but it is now obsolete. Suse 11.1 was horrible, and I refused to install it. SuSe but 11.2 is/was great and I am running it now as my primary distro, with Mint as #2.
Suse 11.3 is very appealling except that they restricted an option or two with KMix. It's a very simple thing, but for me it's a deal killer.
23 • Re #18 (by bill on 2010-07-26 15:59:32 GMT from Canada)
Please do a install on your old machines and tell us how it goes.
You can't expect a reviewer to have 10 different machines to test a distro.I sure Jesse has a job and family to spend time on too.
All my computers are about the same or more than Jesse's. So for me they are average.
So please do the install on a spare partition and help the people in your situation.
24 • openSuse (by EP on 2010-07-26 16:00:02 GMT from United States)
And...I wanted to use OpenSuse. I really did, but the whole ATI driver not working really was a sticking point for me as well. Not to mention, for some reason the sound on OpenSuse was much much lower than on either of the buntu's that I have installed. I And as for Kubuntu, I may have given up too easily, but man was it pretty. I'm definitely tempted to give it another go. I tried PCLinuxOS, but was having some difficulties getting it to work. A lot of difficulties really. I will have to go back to those forums to see if anyone had any suggestions for a fix.
25 • Tech level (by Jesse on 2010-07-26 16:02:11 GMT from Canada)
@18,
>> Good review on Suse 11.3 but ... (and you new a but was coming) ... it's a pity that it wasn't tested on computer hardware that the world marjority still uses, not just high tech high rollers.
Well, the desktop machine was a low-end purchase around three years ago or so. and the laptop was the lowest end machine I could find in this area a year ago. Most people I know run more powerful machines than this. But for people with lower-end hardware, I also run distros in a virtual machine. If you read the whole review you'll notice openSUSE could be run with 256MB of memory. That was on a single CPU.
So to answer your question,yes, the distro should run fine on a five year old machine.
26 • @16: Re: Opensuse & Font rendering (by Stuart on 2010-07-26 16:04:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
The reason Ubuntu has better font-rendering than Fedora/OpenSuse etc. has nothing to do with technical ability, they choose to ignore possible patent violations.
Read:
http://david.freetype.org/cleartype-patents.html
(it's possible the Apple sub-pixel patents have expired recently, so we may see it return? Who knows)
27 • Re:#16 (by Sam on 2010-07-26 16:05:40 GMT from United States)
Fonts in Linux in general are subpar. Remember, this is an operating system for programmers, not graphic designers.
28 • @18 (by cba on 2010-07-26 16:06:08 GMT from Germany)
"Would suse 11.3 work OK on 5 a year old computers?"
Yes.
Sometimes there might be problems with old Bioses and ACPI, but in most cases this can be handled.
The Distrowatch review pointed out that OpenSuse runs with KDE and Yast with only 256MB RAM in a virtual machine. You should be safe with this amount of RAM, if you own a 500MHz PIII CPU at least, so a 10 year-old computer can be used with OpenSuse 11.3.
http://en.opensuse.org/Sysreqs
The DVD or the network installation CD should work as well as the text-mode-LIve-CD installation:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/unreviewed-how-faq/436916-text-mode-install-livecd.html
OpenSuse comes also with lightweight GUIs such as LXDE, Fvwm, IceWM, Enlightenment and Windowmaker, all with full Yast and SuSE menu integration. So there is always a simple GUI-way to configure e.g. your printer with Yast, independent of the GUI you have chosen.
29 • 28 • @18 (by cba (by meanpt on 2010-07-26 16:29:20 GMT from Portugal)
"OpenSuse comes also with lightweight GUIs such as LXDE, Fvwm, IceWM, Enlightenment and Windowmaker, "
... cause I didn't dare to donwload a four giga iso, I need to ask you this: does the installer offers to install a default DE at our choice, or does it install KDE by default, and it's over KDE's bones and fat we may then run other DE's? ... By the way, can one install Suse in a VBox machine with 256 MB of RAM, or does it need more "chest" to do it?
30 • Stable Linux Mint KDE is out (by nobodyin on 2010-07-26 16:33:28 GMT from United States)
I've tried OpenSuse and Kubuntu in the past but don't like them for some reason. But I do like Mint's implementation of KDE. The good news is that the latest Mint 9 KDE is now out at the Irish mirror:
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/9/
Enjoy!
31 • Conezilla Live? (by Ronald Gibson on 2010-07-26 16:51:42 GMT from United States)
Never heard of it. Clonezilla I have heard of.
32 • Re: #19 Sam Spade (by Mandriveiro on 2010-07-26 17:04:48 GMT from Spain)
You wrote about mp3 stuff:
(In OpenSuse) "When I tried to install simple codecs for mp3, it wanted to install over 500mb of files! I left suse on the floor, then tried installing Mandriva. It was worse. Now I'm happy with Kubuntu. "
Since my first encounter with Mandriva, 5 years ago, I could listen to all my mp3 songs on _every_ single version of Mandriva absolutely out of the box! I've never needed to install anything special.
If you are happy with Kubuntu, that's fine. But don't tell FUDs about other distros.
Like usual, these sort of opinions coming from a *-ubuntu user...
33 • Before openSUSE (by Bill Gates on 2010-07-26 17:09:31 GMT from United States)
Seems you can't get a review without the U being mentioned , the U sucks in my opinion , a long time Linux user (15+ years) , SuSE has been around for years before the U and will continue when the U is gone .
If the U is so easy and great why is there such a large mass of forum reports of errors and problems ? Makes you wonder doesn't it .
Love the 11.3 openSUSE , SuSE has been my main stay for years when other distros wouldn't even boot SuSE would , and long before the U , SuSE would just work on just about everything I tried it on , THANKS openSUSE and keep up the good work .
U just go away !
34 • openSUSE (by EP on 2010-07-26 17:16:31 GMT from United States)
As someone who does a lot of work via ssh, I would love for openSUSE to work for me. Yast over ssh is pretty sweet. I am waiting patiently for ATI drivers to be updated to work on the system. As for ubuntu, it's a solid system. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but solid. With that said, I can't wait for my openSUSE install.
35 • @4 HTML5 Video (by Cuda on 2010-07-26 18:46:40 GMT from Canada)
Thanks for the link, I was interested in trying that out. It works quite nicely but html5 video used about 5% more CPU than flash on my machine for identical videos on the chromium browser. Not a big difference and I hope they can continue to improve the rendering performance.
36 • Yast (by Cuda on 2010-07-26 18:51:54 GMT from Canada)
Many people don't know there is a curses based (not the swearing kind) version of yast. It has all the same options as the gui version too.
37 • RE:32, That's not quite correct. RE:33, ? (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-26 19:01:29 GMT from United States)
"Since my first encounter with Mandriva, 5 years ago, I could listen to all my mp3 songs on _every_ single version of Mandriva absolutely out of the box! I've never needed to install anything special."
Wrong, You did not use every version. Mandriva Free does not play back MP3 music and several other formats out of the box. It is easy to set up but cannot play out of the box. Before you accuse someone of spreading FUD be sure your facts are straight.
@33, What was that post all about. "U just go away !" is really just a stupid comment. I believe that your name does say it all. Microsoft and Novell do have an accord. Furthermore the only thing I wonder about is what you are going to do when Microsoft finally buys out Novell. "Makes you wonder doesn't it ."
38 • RE: 36 (by EP on 2010-07-26 19:07:14 GMT from United States)
Exactly! It's pretty great, which is what I was referring to when I said "Yast over ssh is pretty sweet." :)
39 • fonts (by Andy on 2010-07-26 19:14:58 GMT from United States)
@26 - thanks for the link; I figured that had something to do with it. Still, Debian's default install provides nearly as good rendering as Ubuntu, and presumably Debian is stricter with their use of patented code, right? In this case (and wireless cards, printers, flash, etc), I think *most* people care less about patent restrictions and want it to "just work." Maybe OpenSuse is just being stubborn?
@27 - I prefer Ubuntu's fonts to any I've seen in Windows or OS X. At least on my particular display, there is no contest.
40 • @29 (by cba on 2010-07-26 19:22:33 GMT from Germany)
"does the installer offers to install a default DE at our choice, (...)"
This is possible if you use the network installation CD, you can even choose to not install any GUI at all.
You get the very same options as if you were using the DVD installation procedure.
You have the following options in the desktop selection window:
1. Gnome
2. KDE
3. Other options:
3.1 Xfce Desktop
3.2 LXDE Desktop
3.3 Minimal X-Window (i.e. xdm and twm)
3.4 Minimal Server Selection (Text Mode)
There is also a possibility for a detailed software selection before the installation begins, if needed.
For a test I installed OpenSuse 11.3 via "method" 3.3 with the addition of fvwm, fvwm-themes, windowmaker, icewm, openbox and LXDM. Around 415MB software were downloaded and installed. According to Yast not a single KDE4 package is installed now.
By the way, KDE3 can be installed afterwards from an apparently still supported KDE3 repository:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/openSUSE_11.3/
It is a pity that there are only official Gnome and KDE4 Live-CDs at the moment. A combined LXDE/Xfce installation or Live-CD would help users of old computers a lot. There exist unofficial community Live-CDs, but most of them are not updated to OpenSuse 11.3 up to now.
http://en.opensuse.org/Derivatives
41 • OpenSuSE No-X/Minimal/Server (by polycarp on 2010-07-26 19:59:36 GMT from United States)
One of the areas I often wish reviews would address is the ease of setting up a headless machine, installing and customizing a minimal install, server, etc.
This is probably the area where yast shines brightest, since yast is not only easy to use but also works from CLI as well as it does under a GUI. I never see any comments about that.
42 • openSUSE 11.3 (by GeckoGeek on 2010-07-26 20:10:13 GMT from United States)
I started using openSUSE with the 10.2 release and it remained my KDE desktop of choice up until 11.1. I experienced far too many problems with 11.1 to be able to justify keeping it on my machines. I am happy to say that with 11.3 the oopenSUSE experience that I enjoyed so much in the past is back - almost. I do a very large majority of my computing work on my laptop and I too have the problem of th OS not recognizing taps on the touchpad as mouse clicks. This seemingly small inconvenience was the main factor in a friend's decision that "Linux is just too much hassle and a lot of things don't just work like they do in Window$." I hope that they will fix this little annoyance so that I can show off Linux to others without having to make excuses for this and that little thing that does not work - yet.
And as for me, If Micro$oft ever does buy Novell I will no longer use any Novell product. Just my opinions.
Whichever disto someone choose to install, let's stop bashing each other if it is not the one that we choose and enjoy the amazing world that Linux has opened up to those of us who are willing to take a little time to learn and get things the way we like them. That's the freedom that Linux offers that no other OS out there can boast about.
43 • openSUSE 11.3 (by Valerio on 2010-07-26 21:13:55 GMT from Switzerland)
@42
Actualy, GeekoGeek, the touchpad can be configured using (for example) synaptik from KDE. It is not a bug, the tap-to-click was disabled intentionally by default. It is easy to put it back using synaptik. I don't remember the reason it was turned off right now, I only remember it was a usability issue (they wanted to have consistent behavior across all the DEs, and some of them disabled tap-to-click, so it is gone everywhere). You can find more details in the OpenSUSE forums.
I recently came back to SUSE after some years and I find this release very nice. But I wish they had gone with plymouth for booting, because it is so smooth on Kubuntu
44 • Fonts and things (by davemc on 2010-07-26 21:20:10 GMT from United States)
For the commenters above about fonts and licence issues, look here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
Free and fully open source and ever bit as good as the best proprietary fonts out there. Slapping this font set in is always the first post install task for me. I hear tell that Canonical has some beta Fonts out there in testing right now that will also be Open Source and fully free. Have some faith people!
45 • openSUSE 10.3 on older machines, etc. (by eco2geek on 2010-07-26 21:24:12 GMT from United States)
@26:
>> The reason Ubuntu has better font-rendering than Fedora/OpenSuse etc. has nothing to do with technical ability, they choose to ignore possible patent violations.
Where's your proof of this? Your comment sounds like the typical, tiresome "let's bash Ubuntu because it's fashionable to" kind.
Personally, I use Ubuntu and openSUSE with proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed and see little difference in font rendering between the two.
Speaking of openSUSE and old machines, I installed openSUSE 10.3 on an old machine with an AMD Athlon K6 1.9GHz CPU and an NVIDIA FX 5200 AGP 8x graphics card. As you might expect, it has some problems keeping up with high-res video, but other than that, it runs fine.
One thing to watch out for. If you have to use the legacy NVIDIA drivers, the ones you can currently download through the NVIDIA repository are not compatible with X.org server v1.8 (package "xorg-x11-server" in openSUSE). NVIDIA's updated the 173.x line to work with X.org but apparently won't update the 96.x line, according to an article on Phoronix.com:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQyMQ
46 • openSUSE (by Landor on 2010-07-26 21:39:12 GMT from Canada)
"Trying to run a program (from the command line) which isn't installed would invite the user to run a command..."
I think this is a great feature, but it is a bit behind in the times. I hate to say that too, as I've always had a special place for SuSE. Fedora actually finds a package associated with the command and offers to download it or not (I'll get back to Fedora in a moment, I have a gripe). Ubuntu will tell you what packages are available and tells you the command to install it.
I took a look at openSUSE during the beta and RC releases. I enjoyed them to a point. Even the RCs I didn't find as light, or responsive as you had, Jesse. That could just be perception though. Another issue that I just can't get by with openSUSE/SUSE is the whole Mono thing. I'm no fan of Mono at all. I avoid it as much as possible in other distributions, and yes I can in openSUSE as well, but they're the driving force behind it.
Back to Fedora. I'm literally shocked at some of the common place applications that are missing under the hood with Fedora that are almost always installed by default in most distributions. The Fedora Team can say it's due to space, or this or that, but it seems other distributions are able to have these packages installed default while still providing other packages to meet the full user experience. I wish I could remember the applications too. There's two for sure but I just can't remember them right now.
Good review, Jesse.
Oh, I read an error (typo) in the news section: The Debian Live project provides such CDs for people who are "interesting" in playing with Debian. Not complaining, I make tons of them weekly here and even miss words...lol :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor.
47 • Legacy NVidia Drivers in OpenSuse 11.3 (by cba on 2010-07-26 22:05:38 GMT from Germany)
"NVIDIA's updated the 173.x line to work with X.org but apparently won't update the 96.x line, according to an article on Phoronix.com:"
That is true.
But: The OpenSuse 11.3 NVidia drivers from this repo, which can be activated via Yast, work, including the first and second legacy NVidia driver:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.3/i586/
All you have to do is activate the NVidia repo, start the Yast Package management, clicking o.k. and that's it.
No need for nomodeset or disabling KMS by hand. Yast deals with this automatically.
I checked this with my old Geforce4MX 420 NVidia card.
Believe me, it works.
48 • missing reference in 47 (by cba on 2010-07-26 22:11:39 GMT from Germany)
My posting 47 is a reply to the cited sentence of eco2geek's posting 45.
("@45" is missing in 47)
49 • @46 Speaking of Mono and moonlight (by Cuda on 2010-07-26 22:19:12 GMT from Canada)
Going back a couple of months.... I tried watching the winter olympics on CBC's Silverlight enabled pages after first downloading moonlight/mono (hesitantly I might add). It literally brought my dual core Atom cpu to a screeching halt. Needless to say I won't be trying that again anytime soon. Typically I'm not a big fan of Mono either and find most apps too sluggish on my lean hardware. During a package install, I'm quick to abort when I see the two dozen or so Mono dependencies pop up. :-)
50 • RE: 49 (by Landor on 2010-07-26 22:38:58 GMT from Canada)
I never tried silverlight, thankfully it seems based on your experience. I think I read that you were interested in using html5 for flash, trying it out. There's another alternative.Google/Youtube has a mobile page which doesn't require flash, you can download/view them in your media player, like totem. http://m.youtube.com
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
51 • Stuart (by @45: Re: Ubuntu fonts on 2010-07-26 22:44:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
I wasn't bashing Ubuntu when I said they're ignoring possible patent violations; I meant it in a matter of fact way. I use Ubuntu myself (I like that they don't pander to scaremongering patent laws, but understand that Redhat and Novell perhaps have more reason to be cautious).
As for proof, I thought it was just common knowledge? One could look at the code, the Arch Wiki mentions the patent issue and specifically that Ubuntu applies patches:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_Font_Configuration#LCD_filter_patched_packages
52 • Slipstreaming Updates - Fedora respin or remix (by Scott Dowdle on 2010-07-26 22:44:52 GMT from United States)
I have created my own Fedora Remix that I don't really share publicly because I don't have the bandwidth to have people downloading the 1.9GB .iso. Anyhoo... my point is that Fedora has a respin / remix tool that allows you to easily remake the Live install media, add packages, remove packages, update packages etc. The difference between a respin and a remix is that a respin only uses official Fedora packages... whereas a remix adds third-party stuff that Fedora doesn't allow to be distributed with Fedora proper.
I rebuild my remix whenever a big batch of updates come out and so far for Fedora 13, I've rebuilt 37 times each for the i686 and the x86_64 builds. That's how I "slipstream" my preferred install media. Here's a screencast on the process although it is dated around the Fedora 10 timeframe but the info is still accurate:
http://www.montanalinux.org/fedora-remix-howto-screencast.html
53 • @47: NVIDIA legacy drivers with old GPUs (by Anonymous on 2010-07-26 22:48:32 GMT from United States)
I didn't test a GeForce 4-based card (which uses the 96.x driver).
However, with this FX 5200 card, the NVIDIA v173.14.25 driver YaST automatically installed once NVIDIA's openSUSE repository was enabled did not work with X.org server v1.8. The relevant error messages from X.org's log file:
[ 257.499] (EE) NVIDIA(0): This video driver ABI is not supported.
[ 257.499] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.
The newer driver from NVIDIA that did work has version number 173.14.27.
Anyone else's experience with this?
54 • @51: Thank you for the clarification (by eco2geek on 2010-07-26 23:11:57 GMT from United States)
From what I've read, Novell and Redhat both have strict policies regarding software patents in their free Linux distributions. (Which makes Novell's Mono project rather bizarre, when you think about it, but that's another story.) So if Ubuntu's ignoring software patents, that's not necessarily a good thing.
Anyway, from the FreeType web site:
"Since May 2010, all patents related to bytecode hinting have expired worldwide. It it thus no longer necessary to disable the bytecode interpreter, and starting with FreeType version 2.4, it is enabled by default. [...] The colour filtering algorithm of Microsoft's ClearType technology for subpixel rendering is covered by patents. Note that subpixel rendering per se is prior art; using a different colour filter thus circumvents Microsoft's patent claims."
(Comment #53 was also mine.)
55 • re 18 - that 'average' computer (by gnomic on 2010-07-27 00:31:00 GMT from New Zealand)
Get with the programme, it's the 21st century now! If you haven't got 4 cores and a 512MB graphics card, probably time to get a new hobby. (Erm, just joshing, sark off). But seriously, you must have encountered the message board sigs detailing the proud owner's impossibly high spec supercomputer fairly often? Or even the fairly average from a Linux user such as 'Core2 Duo 2.80 GHz, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 9400GT, HD audio, 10/100/1000 NIC onBoard, 1 TB HDD, 2x DVD-Burner and P4 3.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 7600GS, 16 bit sound, 10/100 NIC onBoard, 2x 80 GB HDD, DVD-Burner, DVD-ROM'? The review machines mentioned are well behind the bleeding edge.
Are there no skips to plunder in Ireland, or no 'puters left on the roadside? No auctions where there might be a bargain? Anyway, what is that 'average' computer; I think we should be told. I write as someone whose newest machine is from 2006 or thereabouts, 32 bits only here.
PS North American readers may call a skip a dumpster I believe.
56 • openSUSE-11.3 install (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-27 03:06:41 GMT from United States)
I find it VERY difficult to believe openSUSE KDE4 is usable with only 256 MB ram.
I have a couple of installs using 512 MB ram, and use swap when more than one app is opened!
That is after stopping all services and background programs possible.
Because of those experiences, I chose to install the openSUSE-11.3-Gnome Live on a 512 MB desktop.
There was a warning I might have problems because ram was under 1 GB.
Took me three tries, but finally succeeded.
Had to stop the panel icon program that was building a search database of the live CD (WHY?!).
Had to manually enable the swap partition. After that, install went smooth.
Thankfully, openSUSE still uses grub-0.97. I didn't have to worry about loosing my partition table
by installing grub to the root partition.
57 • cloning an installed distribution (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-27 04:13:42 GMT from United States)
I recently used "remastersys" to copy an installed debian-LXDE desktop to another computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remastersys
It works on debian and ubuntu systems.
With a few clicks, I created an iso file for an installable Live DVD of MY system.
That included all package updates, removals, newly installed apps. A snapshot of my installation.
I then booted the other computer, and installed, just like you would with any other live DVD.
I believe pclinuxos and mandriva have a similar application, but have never tried it.
58 • Lightspark (by Oko on 2010-07-27 04:21:43 GMT from United States)
Could anybody provide any arguments why would Lightspark fair better as an alternative to Adobe Flash plug-in than the swfdec or Gnush?
Swfdec was at its peak the closest that any open source project came to be functional replacement to Flash plug-in. It was for most part OS agnostic although the support for OSS was removed and many non-Linux projects had to maintain their own patches. It has never been web-browser agnostic to my knowledge (would not work on surf, xxxterm, uzbl or God forbid something like NetSurf) It is now unfortunately dead but still usable for most YouTube like cites. It has never been usable for something more serious like MapleNet editing.
Gnush failed due to usual GNU ideological reasons and was far more concern with the support for Windows than to be usable on Unix (BSDs and Solaris).
59 • RE: 51/54 - 52 - 56 (by Landor on 2010-07-27 06:29:50 GMT from Canada)
#51/54
It's not actually correct that Canonical/Ubuntu doesn't pander to scaremongering patent laws. A case in point is where they actually pay the licensing fee for the H.264 codec. It's quite possible they've paid out licensing fees for use of other patent encumbered pieces of software as well, or come to some kind of agreement. Not saying this is the case in regard to the fonts issue, just pointing out a fact.
#52
I've played around with both myself and I've always been curious about one issue in regard to removing the logos/branding. Will any updates after the install of the remix pull in any branding at all in the future, and if so, is it possible that it could become a legal issue?
#56
I tried a VirtualBox install of openSUSE at 256 mb and it wouldn't load the desktop fully with the KDE Live CD. As far as it would go was the background and showing the desktop folder. After 5 minutes of going back to check if it loaded finally, I shut it down. I haven't yet checked to see if it would duplicate the problem on a second run. I did get it to fully load under 512, but didn't try to install it.
Oh, you also mentioned Remastersys. There was a great tutorial that used to make me smile (thinking about all the spin-offs of Ubuntu and such) when I thought of all the guys trying to do it the old fashioned way. It was pretty well all command line and the site's gone now I do believe, though I may have the actual text laying around somewhere in a file. The site was called cyber-something, maybe cyberpunkcafe?? But from what I remember of the old days, the tutorial was bang-on.
One issue I have with KDE 4 (and this isn't specific to openSUSE by any means) is that watching the system tray load up well after it's hit the desktop reminds me way too much of Windows. Something I don't like to see for any Linux distribution at all, of course.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
60 • 40 • @29 (by cba (by meanpt on 2010-07-27 09:13:34 GMT from Portugal)
Thanks for your help.
I had already downloaded the lxde "unofficial" derivative of suse 11.3 but could n't install it within a 480 MB of RAM vm. I followed your link for the text'ed installation yast and managed to do it during the night..
I'm currently running it without the guest additions installed, hosted by a real old machine with an i686 pentium 1.4 ghz and 1 gb of ram. To be realistic, an old machine is something that has a pre dual core, core duo or one of those lively uni core atoms or equivalent processors. Despite still allowing 480 mb for the virtual machine in this "real old machine", the system hangs everywhere. It takes ages to boot and to shutdown, Surfing the net isn't a good experience at all. With the same resources settings I feel the same hanging with Fedora. And yet with these settings I'm able to run Lubuntu quite happily and even the "main" buntu can work and surf without this hanging.
Bear in mind I'm not saying this isn't a good distro, i'm sure it is, as it also feels solid but, putted simply, I would no recommend it for real old machines, as it is. Maybe another stripped down respin may achieve it, as even with the LXDE derivative things take too long to accomplish.
61 • @58 • Lightspark (by Oko (by meanpt on 2010-07-27 09:24:08 GMT from Portugal)
Sorry for asking but what is "gnush"? All I've seen is "gnash".
62 • RE:56, Any Special Setup? (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-27 11:57:50 GMT from United States)
"Thankfully, openSUSE still uses grub-0.97. I didn't have to worry about loosing my partition table by installing grub to the root partition."
Is there any special setup you or anyone who has had that problem have that may cause the problems with Grub? I just was asking because I've never had that problem and I test quite a few distros. If I do run into that problem then I may have a clue as to what is going on.
Thanks
63 • openSuse (by Kam on 2010-07-27 14:14:06 GMT from Germany)
I've tried the current openSuse 11.3 already when the RC was around, and it wasn't a very good experience at all - and that's on a machine that's pretty much state of the art!
There were some nasty issues with it, most noteably poor performance of the open video driver, but also several other issues with Dolphin, Yast, networking etc.
Checking back with the final version, appalingly none of them were fixed. As such, I can't really recommend the current openSuse to anyone.
Current Mandriva 2010.1 is performing a lot better already and doesn't have any nasty issues, it would've been a much better choice for a review.
Current Kubuntu 10.04 is running just fine as well.
64 • @63 • openSuse (by Kam (by meanpt on 2010-07-27 15:05:20 GMT from Portugal)
"but also several other issues with Dolphin, Yast, networking etc."
Now that you're mentioning it, I did have two issues with yast: one related and still realtes to the fact it can't load whatever it needs due to a process (packageitd or something like that) that needs to be killed but the system do not allow you to do it - solved by setting the process's priority to 0; the other relates to a forced installation of new packages totaling 300 MB after installation - I had to double click each item of the pop-up-ed list to stop this ... this ... "feature" ...;
65 • @62 Any Special Setup? (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-27 15:34:27 GMT from United States)
I am a bit of a freak with distro installations.
My recent loss of partition tables was caused by Crunchbang-alpha2.
Attempting to install grub2 to the root partition wiped the embr and partition tables on two 120 GB HDs. There were 28 operationg systems lost.
Normally just the MBR of one drive gets wiped, and I can quickly recover from that.
Tried to analyze the installer, but it was an executable, not a script.
I managed to recover 9 of the 28 distros.
Grub2 works ok on 3 out of 8 computers I use for my hobbie.
Anytime I complain in a forum, even to request that an option to NOT install a boot loader be offered are snubbed. I always get:
"Grub2 works great for me, you are a freak, go away"
Just use OUR distribution, you don't need any other, and install to the MBR, no problem.
66 • Snakr - News Ticker (by No*Tor*Rik on 2010-07-27 15:44:07 GMT from United States)
There is a news ticker called Snakr. I just installed it on Debian and it is pretty nice. It uses some resources but not too bad. It's nice to see another application for Linux. http://snackr.net/
Hopefully some of you will get to see this before Ladislav deletes my post. It could be useful for some, others will despise and ridicule it as useless bloatware but whatever.
67 • RE:65, Thanks (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-27 15:50:19 GMT from United States)
I hope that I never have that problem. Sorry you did, but Grub2 works great for me!!! Just kidding and people in forums should not try to diss you for trying to help solve a problem that you have.
Thanks
68 • RE:66, Snakr - News Ticker (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-27 15:54:27 GMT from United States)
Why would Ladislav do that? Anyway why the name No*Tor*Ric? Also thanks for the heads up on the new application.
69 • #68 (by No*Tor*ik on 2010-07-27 16:29:59 GMT from Sweden)
You are welcome. I don't know why he would do that.
70 • @53 (by cba on 2010-07-27 16:31:00 GMT from Germany)
I don't own a Fx5200 graphics card, but I found this thread:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/hardware/442471-fx-5200-a.html
Since the second NVidia legacy OpenSuse repo driver works and the first one apparently not, this is obviously a bug.
If possible, you should write a bug report so that the corresponding Yast package will be updated to NVidia version 173.14.27.
71 • @60 (by cba on 2010-07-27 16:59:04 GMT from Germany)
I installed OpenSuse 11.3 on my old computer with a 1,13GHz PIII cpu, a Geforce4MX card and 1GB RAM (with a VIA Apollo Pro 133T mainboard from 2001).
LXDE, XFce and Gnome work without problems (I had to add the "nosmp" option in the menu.lst to achieve this), but XFce as well as LXDE are not considerably faster than Gnome. Surfing through Gnome's menu structure is also faster than in LXDE.
As I am still using OpenSuse 11.1 and Debian Lenny (both with KDE3 as main desktop) on this machine, I am able to compare these "veterans" to OpenSuse 11.3. The result: OpenSuse 11.3 is slower (although it is not slow). The newer version of Xorg might play a major role in this.
But your computer is capable of running the official OpenSuse 11.3 Live-CDs. If OpenSuse 11.3 still doesn't work with these CDs, that's it.
72 • Prettier Fonts Coming Your Way (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-27 18:58:20 GMT from United States)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/prettier-fonts-way
Timely article for previous discussion about fonts.
"As of May 2010, those patents have expired and as of July 12 with version 2.4.0, Freetype ships with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled"
73 • My experience with gnash, others (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-07-27 20:23:28 GMT from United States)
Ever since Adobe dropped 64-bit Linux support for Flash I've been running gnash on my desktop system. I found that it does work correctly with YouTube provided you clear out cookies after running a video or prevent YouTube from setting cookies in the first place. With everything else it's 50/50 whether it will work or not.
swfdec was very good in the day but it is way too dated now to be useful.
I had problems getting lightspark to compile with versions 0.4.1 and prior. I plan to try again with 0.4.2. It also has a very long dependency list which I am not at all happy about.
74 • @65 28 distros! (by Cuda on 2010-07-27 20:53:45 GMT from Canada)
Maybe you would be better off running your hobby distros in a virtual machine, one distro per virtual disk. Then it wouldn't matter what bootloader was used.
75 • Lightspark (by ozemale on 2010-07-27 21:28:36 GMT from Australia)
tried the current lightspark deb packages on my Linux Mint V9 causes Swiftfox to crash. I would not recommend the switch to Lightspark at this stage!!
76 • @74 virtual machine (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-27 21:46:34 GMT from United States)
I use VirtualBox on a couple of computers. It just isn't the same.
Kind of like non-alcoholic beer/wine, decaf coffee, or driving simulators.
You just don't have the same experience.
Speaking of which:
Is Oracle trying to kill VirtualBox?
http://www.muktware.com/news/26/2010/249
Doesn't sound good.
77 • multibooting (by shady on 2010-07-27 22:34:29 GMT from United States)
i guess im the only one who dodges grub config problems by setting up separate boot partitions per distro then using gag bootloader in the mbr to control them all? No problems so far with grub/grub2 solaris/bsd etc. i wouldnt even want to begin messing with those config files
78 • @76 • @74 virtual machine (by RollMeAway (by meanpt on 2010-07-27 23:17:17 GMT from Portugal)
Well, I don't run VB in a 64 bit host Windows and so I can't give any opinion on it. Regarding the 32 bit version, I do experience problems when installing (Windows keep alerting me that the software didn't pass the logo test) but I force the installation to the end and after that things run normally, meaning what was slow kept being slow and what was fast is still fast, without the reported running and stability problems, either on the guests or in the host systems.
79 • @77 (by Ron on 2010-07-27 23:17:57 GMT from United States)
You are not the only one who uses GAG bootloader. If I am booting more then two distros, for example. Couple of Linux distros, *BSD, Windows I find it is much more easier to just use GAG rather then trying to get Grub, Windows and in some cases Lilo to play nicely.
80 • @78 • @76 • @74 virtual machines (by Cuda on 2010-07-28 00:12:43 GMT from Canada)
I've always had a good experience with VB prior to Oracle acquisition on my quad-thread (sounds way cooler than dual-core) Atom cpu, running various Linux guests. I even managed to get XP running so I could use Ikea's kitchen designer - it worked but taxed the cpu a little much to be workable...fortunately Wine was the ticket.
I would have liked to try KVM, but alas the Atom doesn't have the VT-x extensions. That's what you get for being cheap like me.
81 • Fonts in Linux Distributions (by trotter1985 on 2010-07-28 02:31:54 GMT from United States)
I've been following the discussion about Linux display fonts with
considerable interest. Over the last couple of months, I've installed Fedora 13,
Ubuntu 10.04 and OpenSUSE 11.3 on several machines and found each
to have plusses and minuses relative to each other. The differences are
minor and on the whole, the developers of each of these distributions
deserve thanks big time. But on the quality of display issue, Ubuntu is
the clear winner. Even after installing mstt fonts and optimizing displays for subpixel hinting for LCD's, Ubuntu still wins hands down.
So now you tell me it's because Ubuntu includes some dubious software?
Could this be really true? And if this is the only difference, I would
like to know how Fedora 13 and OpenSUSE 11.3 can be tweaked to match
the display quality of Ubuntu 10.04.
Thanks for any pointers.
Tom T.
82 • OpenSUSE 11.3 Review (by cg0191 on 2010-07-28 02:39:24 GMT from Australia)
I agree with Jessie that this is the most polished & stable release I have tried from OpenSUSE in a long time but it suffers from the same old design flaw of 99% of ALL Linux distro's i.e in order to placate the insane US legal system, it is released in a crippled form.
I tried Installs of the very latest up to date Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE & Sabayon Linux. Here's my results :
Ubuntu - Flawless install. ALL hardware recognised & working including WiFI & Sound although installing the latest ALSA packages post install helped sound work better. Information on installing multimedia support easy to find & use. Accessing 'windows' shares of file, printer & scanner on a Mac - Flawless & easy within the GUI file browser.
Fedora - Good installer. WiFi & Sound not working. Info on installing multimedia support harder to find & use. Accessing 'windows' shares of file, printer & scanner on a Mac - Broken. Gave up trying after wasting hours googling.
OpenSUSE - Good installer, much slower installer than Ubuntu (why?). WiFi & Sound not working. Info on installing multimedia support very hard to find & use. The package manager requires far too many mouse clicks to do the most basic tasks.
Accessing 'windows' shares of file, printer & scanner on a Mac - Broken. Gave up trying after wasting hours googling.
Sabayon - Installer is Alpha quality, falls over & dies mid install, who knows why... gave up after repeated attempts on two different machines & googling, googling, googling.
If you are a computer science student or avid hobbyist any Linux will do but if you need a working stable system on your desktop/laptop/netbook ASAP then I would recommend Ubuntu strongly.
83 • RE: 82 (by Landor on 2010-07-28 03:07:59 GMT from Canada)
Not discounting your issues but I found one common theme with a lot of your problems that most likely would have changed your experience, wasting "hours" googling.
I don't understand why you never went to an irc or the forums, even the mailing lists, for help. Yes, the first step is to try to fix things yourself, but that doesn't mean you spend fruitless hours googling something.
I'm quite sure if you used the above instead of just trying to use google your end-experience would have been far different.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
84 • At 83, RE:82 (by sirkit77 on 2010-07-28 03:14:28 GMT from United States)
The point he`s making is that he should not have had to.
85 • Opensuse 11.3 (by Joseph on 2010-07-28 03:15:04 GMT from United States)
I'm proud to say that OpenSuse 11.3 is the first Linux distribution (and I've been playing with them for about 10 years) that has convinced me to give up Windows! I'd been trying to make the switch with Sabayon 5.3, but there were so many little problems (and lock-ups) that I was about to make the switch to Windows 7 instead of Linux. Then a last ditch trip to Distrowatch and picking the first distro in the rank list that I hadn't heard negative things about and I discovered OpenSuse 11.3 and fell in love with it. It truly does have a ton of polish and numerous little things that make it shine. I'm proud to report it's been 5 days since I've logged in to Windows. :-) I'm also proud to report only very minor issues, and I haven't needed to edit one dang configuation file by hand yet! (unlike certain other distros). It's also the only distro I've seen that enables all VBox modules (mouse integration, clipboard, shared folders) automatically when installed in Virtualbox.
For those talking about mainstream specs, I'm probably more broke than anyone here and will say that AMD offers a 3-core CPU at 2.9GHz for about $75USD. I was able to unlock the 4th core on mine and overclock it to 3.4GHz with no voltage change. 2GB of average DDR3 also ran me only $40USD.
That said, I did try installing OpenSuse on a 5-year-old laptop with a 1.8GHz AMD Sempron and 512MB of ram and the world's slowest 4800RPM 75GB IDE hard disk (without touching XP). It left XP alone and still bootable, and KDE was passable but occasionally X's CPU usage would climb and slow everything down. Installing OpenSuse's LXDE configuration seems to have turned an almost unusable laptop of my friend into something they can finally use. Linux is great because it tries not to use the swap space (unlike Windows XP) and any disk access slows this laptop to a halt. Web browsing and e-mail are now possible without 20-second pauses caused by XP swapping to disk. It can even play 720p video (at 80% CPU utilization, but still... :-) )
OpenSuse 11.3 saved me a small fortune I didn't have on Windows 7 so I am a very happy Linux convert. I love OpenSuse so much I might use my savings to buy a chameleon. :-)
86 • OpenSuSe 11.3 (by mechanic on 2010-07-28 08:56:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
Did they fix the problem and allow the user to choose a machine name on installation yet?
87 • @83 • RE: 82 (by Landor (by meanpt on 2010-07-28 09:38:37 GMT from Portugal)
Hi, Landor. You do have a point but ... you know, some times problems you report on a forum are taken as irresponsible accusations on the public eyes quart room, others are not answered at all cause you should have "searched" and found a solution applied to the problem somewhere on the 20th page of a thread, if not more dispersed among many more threads and pages. In some occasions you are supposed to dig through an old FAQ or a manual made for geeks and still referring old versions. Many times forums seems reserved to a club of enlightened people. Well, whatever the reason behind it, I think the Mark Twain's statement used as ... well ... a "guideline" in this forum is misleading and ... who knows, should be changed for something more objective, pedagogic and less deterring.
88 • @85 • Opensuse 11.3 (by Joseph (by Anonymous on 2010-07-28 09:55:29 GMT from Portugal)
1 - Curiosity about the pricing your "main stream" specs:
"For those talking about mainstream specs, I'm probably more broke than anyone here and will say that AMD offers a 3-core CPU at 2.9GHz for about $75USD. I was able to unlock the 4th core on mine and overclock it to 3.4GHz with no voltage change. 2GB of average DDR3 also ran me only $40USD. "
... hum ... how much did you pay for the freezer you keep this boiling stuff cooled in? ... or are you using the heating for some scheme of power generation?
2 - On a more serious note, about your LXDE'd OSuse's installation:, did you use the four giga DVD or the LXDE derivative?
89 • @88 • @85 • Opensuse 11.3 (by Joseph (by Anonymous (by meanpt on 2010-07-28 09:57:26 GMT from Portugal)
I'm the poster of the 88 comment. My apologies.
90 • FGLRX on openSUSE (by EP on 2010-07-28 10:20:32 GMT from United States)
Sweet. 10.7 released and compatible.
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/07/15/ati-hd57xxx-flgrx-drivers-under-11-3/
91 • @33 • Before openSUSE (by Bill Gates (by meanpt on 2010-07-28 10:41:42 GMT from Portugal)
"Seems you can't get a review without the U being mentioned , the U sucks in my opinion , a long time Linux user (15+ years) , SuSE has been around for years before the U and will continue when the U is gone ."
Against your hopes for U, I hope Suse will be around for many more years even if Novell will be gone. By the way, what was the name of the software that made Novell a leader provider of proprietary local networking solutions? ... was it Netware or something like that? ... you know, it happens I can't remember it anymore ... and hope the same will not happen tho Suse ...
92 • On the OPENBOXed PCLOS (by meanpt on 2010-07-28 11:36:14 GMT from Portugal)
It has nothing to do with this weekly but I tried all the editions of the 2010 PCLOS and stayed with the OPENBOXed one since then, cause it provided for a good 256er (meaning it runs with 256 MB of ram) under a VirtualBox vm and I found, despite still not being able to have the seamless mode working, that the 2010.7 is a bit faster than the 2010.1. Well done, gents, well done.
93 • @92 (by Leroy on 2010-07-28 12:19:27 GMT from Serbia)
Yeah I like what they've done with Openbox too. It's still a tad glamorous and lavish :)) for my taste, but good nonetheless. But since people have discussed font rendering in Linux in general, what do you do for font rendering in PCLOS OB? It's really bad chez moi, unacceptably blurry, and I don't really know how to fix it (i.e., make it sharp) on that particular system.
94 • RE:76, I haven't seen any problems, yet. (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-28 14:45:16 GMT from United States)
Speaking of which:
Is Oracle trying to kill VirtualBox?
http://www.muktware.com/news/26/2010/249
Doesn't sound good.
Well I read the article and didn't find anything that proved Oracle is trying to kill VB. I run the latest version and have no problems at all. I use an Ubuntu 10.04 host with Windows XP and Windows 2000 as guest. (Other Linux distros I put on separate partitions.) No crashes and everything seems to work well. Granted I don't use VB much and that's because I haven't needed to but when I do it's stable. Also I believe it's a little early to tell what Oracle has in mind with those applications. Let's give them a little time to work things out.
95 • @93 • @92 (by Leroy (by meanpt on 2010-07-28 15:02:00 GMT from Portugal)
:) I've done nothing more than running it in a vbox virtual machine :)
96 • REF#-82 • OpenSUSE 11.3 Review (by John Hopkins on 2010-07-28 15:33:59 GMT from United States)
I had the exact same issue(s) did you described. U=flawless install, and the fastest, Suse=multimedia install SUCKS!, Mandriva=Install ok, can get multimedia from DVD.
97 • BSD (by Saucy on 2010-07-28 17:51:40 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's been a while so decided to look at the new PC-BSD8.1. It always was a bit of a pig to get BSD started, but hey-ho. Four hour d/l on a fast-ish connection for the 3.3G DVD; not a promising start. Knowing this one of old, decided to go straight to installation, and, to avoid any confusion, to permit auto-partitioning. Opening gambit promises fast and simple procedure. Oh yes? Five hours later on a well-endowed 'spare' 754 machine - success at the first attempt - it was installed. Or was it? Yes, everything seemed to check out OK. But start into the requested auto-X, no hope. Nothing works. Best so far is to offer a bin/sh, but nothing works from there on. Just where have these guys been hiding? What have they been smoking? We have turbo-boots, even from FDDs, in seconds and a plethora of excellent compact liveCDs running in anything from 10M up to ~130M, with kitchen-sink derivatives in a lot less than 700M .iso.
Get a grip BSD-chaps, keep up or give up.
98 • Failsafe Lightspark? (by NFKillz on 2010-07-28 19:50:31 GMT from United States)
Havent used Lightspark, although, I would be interested to use it if I can still use regular flash if Lightspark fails on like a certain site?
99 • #82 Re: paragraph #5- SUSE Codecs (by Sly on 2010-07-28 20:13:59 GMT from United States)
SUSE multimedia codecs are not that hard to find or install. I think you mischaracterized the difficulty level by a bunch. 1-click install is about as easy as you can get.
100 • #98 - Flash replacements (by Caitlyn Martin on 2010-07-28 20:20:34 GMT from United States)
All the browsers I've tried can only handle one Flash plugin at a time, so no, you can't have Lightspark (or gnash for that matter) and Flash at the same time. The reason these replacements became more important is that Adobe has dropped Flash support for 64-bit Linux: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/06/running-64-bit-linux-no-flash.html and http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20008290-264.html
101 • should we try to fix things ourselves? (by forlin on 2010-07-28 20:53:34 GMT from Portugal)
I strongly disagree with this principle.
It's really the nerd geek old school.
It implies that anyone trying to experiment a new o/s needs to first learn coding.
Good for hobbyist and for computer science students. Useless for common computer users.
No polemics or flame intended. It's my own opinion, I'v and I'll not add a word about it.
102 • Fonts etc (by Adam Williamson on 2010-07-28 21:32:08 GMT from Canada)
Yes, Ubuntu has different font rendering from other distros because they enable the bytecode interpreter in freetype by default. Yes, they have been doing this for a long time, and until recently it was a potential patent violation. It's very unlikely they could have licensed the patents, because the only way you can license a patent in a F/OSS compatible way is to essentially grant a license to anyone at all to use it in any way compatible with F/OSS licenses - which is extremely liberal. Only a very few patents have ever been made available in this way.
Yes, Canonical got an h264 license for a specific OEM purpose. No, that license does not cover regular Ubuntu that normal people use.
The patents covering the Freetype bytecode interpreter have indeed recently expired, so distros with careful patent policies are now able to use it, if they choose to. It's enabled for Fedora 14. Not sure about other distros.
Mandriva has long had a bytecode interpreter-enabled Freetype in PLF, if you wanted to have it, btw - if you run Mandriva, you can just enable PLF repos and install libfreetype6 from PLF to replace the one from the MDV repo.
Bytecode interpreting doesn't make all fonts better in all situations, note. It only makes fonts better if they actually have (good) bytecode. So it's not necessarily best to just use it for all fonts. This is why we haven't retroactively enabled it for Fedora 12/13 with an update; we'd rather get things set up so it's used for the fonts where it's appropriate and not for fonts where it isn't before we consider doing that. Other distros may be making the same consideration.
Landor, I've explained the trade-offs in building live images before. Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu exemplify it. Fedora puts lots of translations on its live images, and has only one live image per arch (and per desktop). So it's simple to know what to download, and your language will probably be available, but there's less space for apps. Mandriva makes lots of languages available by providing multiple images for each desktop with a few languages on each, so you can get the language you want and there's still lots of space for apps, but you have to figure out which image to download for the language you want. Ubuntu doesn't provide many translations, so there's only one image to download and there's lots of apps, but your language might not be available.
It's not a circle that can really be squared except by generating bigger images. Whichever path you choose, there's a trade-off: simplicity, available languages, or available apps.
103 • @101 (by Antonio on 2010-07-28 21:52:04 GMT from United States)
I agree to disagree with you :)
Take for instance, FreeBSD is on a league of its own, PCBSD is simpler to use. You would use PCBSD right? because it is easier and you are more comfortable with it.
I would use FreeBSD :) Why? Because I want to "Put the fun back into computing" :)
I am not a Computer Science Student, no computer science major or minor either :)
but I do like to learn more about something than take the easy road :) That includes sacrificing time and energy on other things that people consider important.
104 • Fonts in Fedora 13/14 and Other Distributions @102 (by trotter1985 on 2010-07-29 00:05:21 GMT from United States)
Hello Adam, Always a pleasure to read your posts in the comment section. It's great
that you are now part of the Fedora team. If you can access os statistics, this
is now being sent from a Fedora 13 install ... while an earlier post came from an
Ubuntu 10.04 install. I was determined to do everything I could to get fonts working
as well as possible in Fedora 13.
Here's the steps I took and while it isn't perfect, it seems better than before.
1. Do basic install and all updates.
2. Add RPM Fusion repository and then install nvidia drivers following instructions
on RPM Howto. Reboot and run nvidia-settings as root. Configure twinview with both monitors at 1280x1024.
3. Although not at all essential to this topic, I must confess that I paused here to
(a) add all the codecs, mp3 players, dvd navigation, flash, acroread, etc., and (b) set up printing through a Windows 7 box, I also added some 100 gb of
data which had been backed up on an external drive as well as a number
of other software tools that are important to my work.
4. I also added the mstt fonts. Lots of ways to do this.
5. Under appearance, I chose the arial family for all the variable width fonts
and set all the font sizes to 12 pt rather than the 10 pt size which is the
default. Now at least my old eyes can see the email messages in Evolution.
6. I also toggled to subpixel smoothing for LCD's.
I like this much better. If you and your Fedora colleagues can make it
even better in Fedora 14, that will be just great.
Tom T.
105 • REF# 99 openSUSE multimedia (by Sam Spade on 2010-07-29 03:52:58 GMT from United States)
1-click multimedia install:
http://www.opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php
I find the second paragraph interesting:
"By default only free, open, non-patent encumbered formats such as Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis and Flac are supported for legal reasons (US software patents and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA))."
Flac can copy CD audios lossless, and then can be converted to almost anything else.
Surprising that DMCA doesn't lift its ugly head.
I think I will re-install openSUSE and try that 1-click method above.
106 • @103 • @101 (by Antonio (by meanpt on 2010-07-29 08:07:16 GMT from Portugal)
:( ... that's the kind of fun we have at some time in our life but after that we may start not liking it anymore ... meaning that I'm the kind of altruistic guy who wants to sacrifice all the potential fun I can get "understanding" PCBSD and give that fun away completely free of charge back to the PCBSD dev's to make sure at least they will have all the fun available to design and release a good or top graded OS with an acceptable and working graphical front end ... I'm just not sure if they are up to the fun of the challenge ... so much waisted fun ...
107 • confused: (new releases) 07/29 Salix • 13.0.1 (by meanpt on 2010-07-29 08:15:04 GMT from Portugal)
... the last release was 13.1, wasn't it? ... hope this isn't a countdown ...
108 • @107 Salix 13.0.1 (by gapan on 2010-07-29 08:44:50 GMT from Greece)
This is actually a maintenance release for Salix *Live* 13.0, which is still supported. The latest Salix version is indeed 13.1 and a first alpha Live CD for the 13.1 series should be out shortly.
109 • OpenSuse (by shrek on 2010-07-29 10:10:19 GMT from United States)
OpenSuse 11.3 is a nice distribution....except. Try as I might, my wireless hooks up...workes for about 5 minutes, then seemingly falls asleep. I am not sure what about their driver or network manager puts my connection at bay but it takes rebooting the system to make it work again. For me, since internet access/network access is a must, it makes this distro annoying.
110 • @108 • @107 Salix 13.0.1 (by gapan (by meanpt on 2010-07-29 10:22:57 GMT from Portugal)
Hi gapan, many thanks for the info. My live CD 13.0 is still working like a rolls-royce and ... :) ... no maintenance is needed at this moment.
111 • Re: #109 (by Sly on 2010-07-29 14:02:02 GMT from United States)
Sounds like a problem with the KDE Wallet. If you turn off the KDE Wallet feature, your problem will most likely be solved. Go to the SUSE forums and you should be able to find the method to turn it off.
112 • suse futility (by Mark Spits on 2010-07-29 14:44:35 GMT from United States)
To those SUSE fanboys, this is why UBUNTU is king, and will remain so:
From SUSE, open Dolphin, click on left side places, on one of the partitions/disks.
You get the error message at the bottom of Dolphin:
"An error occured while accssing 'whatever',
the system responded: org.freedestop.Hal.Device.PermissionDeniedByPolicy:
org.etc,etc,etc"
KUBUNTU. Open Dolphin, click on any places on the left and you open that partition/disk!
So simple.
Security you say?! What security? And from whom? Myself? This is pure nonsense!
BTW- Google is NOT my friend. Its a corporation that makes huge amounts of money
when you use the search engine!
So I did search, and found multitude of pages and redirects:
Several bug reports, one of which:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533246
On my Google Tour, some knuckleheads suggested altering fstab. Why? What if I add another partition/disk: Again alter fstab.
Then it was suggested using Yast > Security & Users > Users and Groups. Then alter from there.
Yet Another Suggestion was to alter this obscure file:
/usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.storage.policy > "allow_active>yes"
Are you SuseHeads beginning to see the futility of all this unneeded nonsense!
You may NOT like seeing the U word pop up, but maybe now you can begin to see why U is the choice of new users.
Bashing the U is not an answer. Intelligent answers is. There has been several problems relating to suse and I have seen few intelligent replies.
Is this how you want to represent you distro?
Am I frustrated. Yes. Not so much for suse, but its fan base.
BTW, I never got a clear answer on my error. Sad indeed.
113 • @104 (by Adam Williamson on 2010-07-29 17:15:33 GMT from Canada)
Hi Tom, thanks for the reply. So, that's the thing about fonts; they're very subjective. I don't actually like the Microsoft fonts very much, I prefer the DejaVu / Bitstream Vera and Android free fonts. People also differ on whether they like anti-aliasing or not, and whether they prefer the bytecode-interpreted or autohinted interpretations of various fonts. All distros can really do is try and figure out what the most people will like, within whatever legal restrictions they're working with :)
I think most people will probably prefer F14's rendering compared to F13. F14 Alpha will be out in the next few weeks, and you can have a look see at it then.
114 • good experience with openSUSE-11.3 (by oldcpu on 2010-07-29 18:12:36 GMT from Germany)
I've been tracking openSUSE-11.3 thru the milestone and RC1 builds, and installed openSUSE-11.3 on 3 of our 6 PCs and home (and plan to install it on 2 more during August) and I'm pleased with it. I anticipated more complaints on 11.3 from nVidia users, as 11.3 comes with the nouveau driver by default, and it does not yet work well on all nVidia hardware. Also 11.3 no longer includes the sax2 graphic card wizard. But it appears users are finding the exiting (and very functional and easy to apply) work arounds for these hiccups (which are documented in many places), which is good news. For me the inclusion of the LXDE desktop in openSUSE-11.3 has to be the biggest new feature. Its entirely openSUSE community driven which is significant. A liveCD for the LXDE desktop for openSUSE-11.3 was available in the Release Candidate (RC) stage a week ago, and should be available soon (if not available now) for users to download and use to install openSUSE-11.3 on their old PCs. A milestone release for me. ;)
115 • GhostBSD (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-29 19:16:11 GMT from United States)
I'm in the process of downloading GhostBSD. Has anyone tried it yet and also what is your impression?
116 • @102 and @113 re: fonts (by eco2geek on 2010-07-29 20:57:46 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the information, Adam!
If you want to enable subpixel hinting in openSUSE, you can find freetype2 packages available at the openSUSE community Wiki:
http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting
(You can also find instructions on how to easily install restricted codecs, e.g. for playing MP3s and DVDs, there as well.)
117 • OSuse (by A reader on 2010-07-29 22:13:11 GMT from Germany)
I've tried OpenSuse several times and I always have the same problems. Last time I tried it was earlier today and I had the same issues as before:
1. After installation the first update to the system is for the MS fonts. I have nothing against MS and I install the fonts myself, but I think it should be my decision whether I want to install those fonts or not, and it also seems a bit hypocritical, i.e. "we don't include any non-free software in our CD but we'll install it on your system at the first update whether you want it or not". I don't get it.
2. I then wanted to test the famous one click install and decided to install Chromium. The package manger did it thing and then informed me I have to download about 600mb worth of packages. Well, forget about that then.
3. Wanted to install the latest KDE 4.5 RC3. This is where the one click install really shines. After the first initial click I had to go through 20 more clicks to resolve conflicts. Then It wanted again to download about 800GB including Open Office stuff.
Since I've never seen those things mentioned I'm not sure anymore if it's me or if it's OpenSuse, but I'm back to my Debian-derived-ugly-step-son distro that dare not speak its name.
118 • antiX-M8.5-upgrade edition available and a new antiX-core version. (by anticapitalista on 2010-07-29 22:28:23 GMT from Greece)
Pimp your distro alert!
antiX-M8.5, released on 12 April 2010, has been upgraded to fix various bugs and bring the installed apps up to date (c 400MB of Debian Testing updates) as well as now including a cli-installer option for those with very low RAM. Tests have shown that antiX will install with as little as 40 MB RAM
A new addition to the antiX 'family' is antiX-core at c95MB a live cd iso with no X, but the basics to build from (similar to Debian net-install).
Give it a try, and let us know what you think t antiX forums.
downloads here: http://www.mepisimo.com/antix/Testing/
Forum here: http://antix.freeforums.org/
119 • @117 (by Brandon S. on 2010-07-29 23:02:51 GMT from United States)
First off, the OpenSuse KDE install has the pullin-msttfonts (or so) package installed by default. If you delete that you won't have to worry about the msttfonts package. On your other problem, zypper is set up to install "recommended" packages. You'll have to go into either zypp.conf or zypper.conf (don't know which one off-hand) to change that setting.
120 • @115: GhostBSD (by eco2geek on 2010-07-30 10:33:51 GMT from United States)
I know next to nothing about the inner workings of BSD, but I did download and try GhostBSD (I did not attempt to install it; the installer's a work in progress and would require prior BSD experience). The live DVD takes forever and a day to boot into GNOME. Also, there's not much free space in the user's home directory when running from the DVD, at least when your PC only has 1GB of RAM, and it's cumulatively used up (it doesn't get released) until you can no longer function. Running Firefox radically speeds up the process of disk usage. The OS configured my ethernet connection using DHCP with no problem. It also properly configured my monitor to run in its native resolution.
There are some unique GTK themes and wallpaper, which I naturally copied (to a FAT32 partition; I couldn't figure out how to mount an ext3 partition) for later use in Linux.
(By comparison, PC-BSD is also very slow to boot into KDE and doesn't give you much free space when running live. IIRC FreeSBIE also took a long time. I'm sure you'd have a much better experience running it from a hard drive.)
My thought, FWIW (being a complete BSD newbie), is that if you're looking to use a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE, I don't see a compelling reason to switch to *BSD from Linux. You'd have to have some other reason.
121 • @112 Why I won't use U* (by Anonymous on 2010-07-30 11:00:34 GMT from United States)
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ - Canonical has contributed 1% of Gnome commits.
Here is a commercial endeavor that has become the most "popular" version of desktop Linux and yet doesn't give back much to the community and Gnome isn't the only major project it doesn't contribute much to either (Kernel, OpenOffice also don't get squat).
So before you go on trashing a competing distro consider who's the good guys here.
Oh, and I guess it's easy to trash Google because their big and wealthy but consider GSOC and what it means to the multitude of projects that participate - seems to me they more than any other company are pushing OpenSource forward.
122 • RE:121, Who's The Good Guys? (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-30 12:14:23 GMT from United States)
"So before you go on trashing a competing distro consider who's the good guys here."
Who got trashed? Sounds like someone just gave their experience with a distro. Sounds like frustration from receiving no reasonable help from a major distro users. I wasn't involved so I don't really know, but I will tell you something....I don't believe in trashing any open source project unless it has been PROVEN to be detrimental to the open source community. And I don't mean someone's opinion because everybody has one.
On the subject of contributions, that has been rehashed so many times and there are so many projects that most distros give back to, no one really knows the figures. Numbers can't be trusted. Good or bad.
And I take it that you mean Google are the GOOD GUYS. Well the Code Of Summer may have helped a lot of projects but I think that it's a bit of a stretch to say they more than any other company are pushing open source forward. Data mining is their business. They are GOOD GUYS as long as they know what you had for breakfast and when and where you last went to the restroom, what was the last 150 web sites you visited, and where you live and so on and so on. Get the picture. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
123 • RE:118, Sounds like a good weekend project. (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-07-30 12:25:53 GMT from United States)
"Tests have shown that antiX will install with as little as 40 MB RAM"
I have a working Toshiba 490CDT laptop with a pentium II and 40 megs of ram. I use it for some plc work and cnc work on industrial machines on factory floors. It runs Win98SE now. It will be fun to see if I can get antiX to run on this machine. I shall give the results when I have them.
Thanks
124 • Austrumi: "your cpu does no support pae" (by meanpt on 2010-07-30 14:11:41 GMT from Portugal)
:( ... rats!
125 • RE #118 (by Anonymous on 2010-07-30 15:59:18 GMT from United States)
Thanks Anticapitista for fixing Anti-X. I had to go back to 7 on some of my installs. Does it still need about 15gb of disk space for the HD install? Also will the Flash drive/unetbootin install work again with a 8gb flash drive? I had booting troubles after the install and may suspect it was running out of space in both cases.
126 • @122: He's a concern troll (by eco2geek on 2010-07-30 20:09:00 GMT from United States)
He found a bug and was given at least two valid workarounds. He then describes the people who gave him those workarounds as "knuckleheads" and the workarounds as "unneeded nonsense". He proceeds to profess some sort of concern for openSUSE's "fan base" and concludes with, "BTW, I never got a clear answer on my error. Sad indeed."
All of which speaks for itself.
127 • antiX (by anticapitalista on 2010-07-30 21:13:13 GMT from Greece)
# 123
You'll have to use the cli-installer if you have 40MB RAM and the various cheatcodes. probably best to have swap already set up as well. The core and base versions should work ok once installed, not too sure how well the full version will work.
Thanks for testing.
#125
antiX-full takes up around 2GB installed. You should be able to install to usb. Use the antiX2usb installer rather than unetbootin. You might need to add a rootdelay=10 (ie 10 seconds or more).
128 • antiX (by anticapitalista on 2010-07-30 23:27:56 GMT from Greece)
I forgot to mention.
You can boot live antiX and add/remove apps in live mode and these will carry over to install.
129 • re 124 and austrumi 2.1.6 complete with PAE requirement (by gnomic on 2010-07-31 01:22:01 GMT from New Zealand)
Also struck the problem with the pae requirement in Austrumi when trying to run on a Pentium M machine which for some reason known only to Intel omitted pae. Only affects a small number of 'puters I guess as most 686 do have pae, but can't really see what the devs are up to here - how many people are in fact running 4 gigs+ of RAM on 32 bit boxes? Seems to be a new brainwave with Austrumi, wasn't in past versions. This was also a hassle with archiso-live since early in the year. Have seen at least one other distro with this 'feature', name escapes me at present - it needs to not become a trend imho.
Did run it on a P4 desktop and haven't struck any major problems so far. The last version seemed a bit below the standard of earlier cuts, but this seems to be back on track. And how often do you get to use fvwm these days? It did take me a while to find the switch to make the menus appear in English this time; I was surprised how much Latvian I knew :-)
130 • Ref#126 - 122, SuSe Work arounds.. (by John Moore on 2010-07-31 01:31:12 GMT from United States)
It sounds like in the end his "work arounds" didn't work :)
131 • @130: At least one of them did (by eco2geek on 2010-07-31 04:58:59 GMT from United States)
Adding disks/partitions to /etc/fstab definitely solves the problem.
132 • @29 • re 124 and austrumi 2.1.6 complete with PAE requirement (by gnomic on 2010 (by meanpt on 2010-07-31 11:01:40 GMT from Portugal)
:) Liked your comments. The first pentium M (old uglier logo) generation has the pae disabled. Guess what: I'm the "proud" owner of one.
"how many people are in fact running 4 gigs+ of RAM on 32 bit boxes?"
Well, I do know lots of them. :):):):) ... some people with xp's and vista's started buying ram to increase their machine's performance :):):):)):) ... not to mention computer sellers that still have no problems in making available 4 giga machines with 32 bits windows machines ... :):):):) .. anyway, if I had an upgradable machine I would install more ram and a pae'ded linux ... but would like to test austrumi without the pae ... after all, it's a slack :)
133 • Open SUSE 11.3 & WIFi (by Radrick on 2010-07-31 15:54:36 GMT from Canada)
I agree with the points made about OpenSUSE, but would like to recommend Pardus distro especially if youare using WiFi. Over the past couple of daysI tried installing
MInt 9 LXDE
OpenSUSE 11.3
Super OS 9
Mandriva 2010.1 and Pardus 2009.1/2
on a Desktop wit a 2.8GHz Celeron with 1GB RAM, Radeon X1050 video card and an ASUS WL-138g-v2 (Broadcom-BCM4318 chipset) wireless adapter.
All installations failed to setup WiFi adapter. Some offered to install the Windows driver, but then said it need other files, ie. needed a wired Internet connection in order to proceed, EXCEPT Pardus.
I must confess I am a big fan of Mint so I was really disappointed that it failed this test. I have also like SUSE a lot and recently I admired the completeness of Super OS which is really a dressed up UBUNTU. Pardus I have used in the past and was always impressed, but did not like the KDE desktop.
I now have greater respect for PARDUS!
134 • networking: is it that hard? (by Josh on 2010-07-31 18:26:57 GMT from United States)
Opensuse 11.3 is a dead deal for me. Just like in 11.1, it still can't configure internet access by itself. Is it really that hard to make that happen? Ubuntu, fedora, pclinuxos, mandriva, all these come with that feature right out of the install. No, I didn't go looking that hard into forums or irc's, but in this day and age, I really shouldn't have to for something as simple as auto-configured Internet access.
135 • RE: 84-87-101-102 (by Landor on 2010-07-31 20:27:24 GMT from Canada)
#84
That was the point? You're sure about that? Tell me please, why shouldn't someone have to fix something that doesn't work? Someone does in the end right? Why is it always some end user that "should not have to"?
#87
That "may" hold true for some forums, but not all. I've seen some really hateful forums, some utterly useless forums, and then some really great forums that people knew what they were talking about and could help out. Also, there was the IRC I mentioned and I've been to quite a number of IRCs over the years and I've yet to see anyone be bashed for asking for help with Linux in one. I think more of the elite forcing someone to jump through hoops is more of the person's perception that isn't an elite than it has to do with being a constant occurance.
#101
I strongly disagree with the principle that makes you disagree..lol
Fix is a relative term. If your toaster isn't plugged in do you call someone else to plug it in because it's too technical or geeky or do you reach down and do it yourself? What you're implying goes against the very nature of Open Source. If people didn't make attempts to fix things and just left it up to others no bugs would get reported. Then no bugs would get fixed. The whole system would grind to a halt. On that note as well, I think every user of a computer is "obligated" in our community to make some attempt to fix the problem themselves. If not, they're just leeches riding on the work of others complaining and being rude while they do 0. If someone comes to my house to help me clean out my basement I don't sit down and watch them work because I never have done it before, then complain that they're taking too much time to do it. :)
#102
I already know the reasons Fedora claims, but that in my eyes doesn't fully wash. There's some things you just don't remove. I finally remembered one of the packages that Fedora has removed that I think is "completely absurd". Gnome is a GUI based DE as we all know. Gnome does not have a lot of configuration in a user's face like KDE does as it's more simplified. They do however provie "1" tool that lets you get into the very core of Gnome and tweak it. But first, remember, Gnome is about the GUI and ease of use, not anything to do with a cli. So what does Fedora do? Since at least Fedora Core 3 (I believe) they removed gconf-editor. I do not know of any other distribution that has removed it. Don't give me any crap that it was to save space because of language packs too. We're talking since Core 3 here and they've been continually stripping stuff since. So how absurd is it for a technical distribution that Fedora is to remove the "1" tool from their Flagship DE (which Gnome is) that lets you actually really configure Gnome. So what, to configure something that's meant to be GUI only from the command line? Absurd, completely absurd. I'm not hot about it, or going off at you, I'm just stating a very clear fact that Fedora did something extremely stupid (given the context of Gnome's philosophy for ease of use) and in no way could have done it for space.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
136 • A brief history of distributions (by RollMeAway on 2010-07-31 20:55:48 GMT from United States)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10724
Old news to many.
Interesting to new converts.
Note the links to Distrowatch, of course!
and the Linux Timeline,
at bottom of the page.
137 • RE:135 (by sirkit77 on 2010-07-31 23:32:56 GMT from United States)
Hey Landor, how about putting "although that`s just my opinion", somewhere in your utterances? Thanks from all of us. (Btw, not all of us are geeks, some of us just want to use our computers without jumping through hoops.)
138 • opinion (by Anonymous on 2010-07-31 23:50:41 GMT from Netherlands)
I must now go crank my Model T
139 • RE: 137 (by Landor on 2010-08-01 00:10:08 GMT from Canada)
Then answer me this, why do you go and ask tons of questions about Linux and Linux related topics. Why should these people offer you any kind of assistance when by the very nature of your own comment you don't feel you should "do anything" because you just want to use your computer. But I guess it's ok for people to jump through hoops for your benefit.
That's the sad nature of what's becoming quite common in our community and why you find that so many "so called" elites get disgusted when people like yourself make such comments.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
140 • RE: 139 (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-01 00:36:36 GMT from United States)
Touchy, are we? Asking why Ubuntu is so reviled is the only question I`ve ever asked here. Might want to recheck the Mark Twain quote at the bottom of the page.
141 • re #132 pae, austrumi and its quirks (by gnomic on 2010-08-01 02:14:52 GMT from New Zealand)
Happy to bring a moment of mirth ;-)
Looks like I'm not getting out enough, will have to do some random sampling on the 4gigs and over population - maybe I don't know enough hardcore Windows users . . . .
As to austrumi, I found it doesn't seem to know about audio cds - the mplayer version included has no cdda support as far as I could tell. So, moving on to a usb stick with some mp3s, hmmm, can't mount the volume because /dev/sdb1 doesn't exist. And sure enough there was no /dev/sdb1. After rebooting with the stick inserted, hooray, we had sdb1. So it's a 'some assembly required' situation. However some points for actually running X Window, something that pclinuxos openbox couldn't do, on a desktop with a Matrox Millennium G550 video card. austrumi was even able to put up 1280x1024 (SXGA) on the 17" CRT attached. Of late I find lots of distros insist on the somewhat obscure 1152x864 (XGA+), some Xorg weirdness I think.
142 • The whole "Why should I have to do anything" (by Barnabyh on 2010-08-01 11:15:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
builds on unrealistically high expectations from, mostly, newer users who may have heard but certainly expect to have found the holy grail. When was the last time you did not have to do 'anything' in Windows or Mac? Life doesn't work like that. If it came pre-installed you were ok for a while until something messed up (quite often the fault of the user btw) or you just wanted to extend and customize the abilities of your OS. I can still remember the last time I was hunting down one particularly elusive Xvid codec pack that did NOT come pre-installed with Windows. Eventually your OS gets behind and you have more need to refresh. Not to speak of hardware conflicts between TV card and grfx card and the like that may take some of your valuable time to find out exactly what's going on.
So why do people increasingly expect Linux to 'just work'? This is not even to do with "old school vs new school" that I think sirkit77 brought up another time. In the oft used car analogy:
Sure, you can buy a new car and drive it away but pretty soon problems will start creeping up. The oil will need to be checked, do the tires still hold enough air etc. You can do it yourself or you have to pay someone at the garage. You can ignore problems but eventually you'll lay by the side of the road and you'll have two options- fix things yourself or call the AA if you're a member or hope someone else will help you. Do you want to be that person that always needs help or would you rather know how to fix it yourself? The sooner you start learning the better, even when it's all still new and working and shiny, so you know what to do when the inevitable happens.
And I think it would help to be less confrontational here. And sometimes accept that others might know more than we do.
143 • re: networking: is it that hard? (by oldcpu on 2010-08-01 11:28:29 GMT from Germany)
@ 134 (Josh) - Hey Josh, sorry to read you clearly had a negative experience with Networking on openSUSE. Networking should 'just' work, I can understand your frustration. I note it does 'just work' for me on all the PCs I have installed Linux (and indeed on all the PCs I have installed openSUSE-11.3). I suspect there may be something different wrt your hardware. How about posting on http://forums.opensuse.org/ asking for assistance, and I'm confident you will have volunteers/users try help you. If we fail (in helping) then write a bug report on openSUSE (guidance here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Submitting_bug_reports ) and lets get this fixed! SuSE-GmbH has a good reputation for passing any fixes upstream so that all distributions will benefit from any fixes.
144 • Do it yourself computers (by Jesse on 2010-08-01 11:39:11 GMT from Canada)
I don't mind posting a bug report or, in extreme cases, submitting a patch. But, for the most part, I expect developers to create and maintain their own code. Frankly, I don't have time to fix all the bugs I find in the software I use. Most of us have jobs and families and other important things to do with our time.
I am of the opinion people should learn some basics about keeping their computers healthy, much the same way I think motorists should be able to change a tire. However, to expect most people to learn all the ins and outs of computer software is unrealistic. Most people will hire professionals to fly their air planes, fix their cars and repair their computers.
145 • Landor, Barnabyh, et ali ... (by jake on 2010-08-01 11:43:47 GMT from United States)
I think it is self evident that we are all tool users. Why some people expect that tools should be self-maintaining is beyond me.
I'm not equating a tool & die maker with a home handyman, although both use tools.
However, please note that said tool & die maker *AND* the cognizant home handyman both know how to keep their tools of choice sharp and clean. I would throw in a cooking/kitchen reference, but it's too early in the morning ...
In summery: PDNFTT. Ta.
146 • GNOME Census: Who writes GNOME? (by Observer on 2010-08-01 11:49:07 GMT from Australia)
GNOME Census: Who writes GNOME?
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GNOME-Census-Who-writes-GNOME-1048613.html
GNOME Census report available
http://www.neary-consulting.com/index.php/2010/07/28/gnome-census-report-available/
147 • Kde4 'usable' but has some very rough edges (by Observer on 2010-08-01 12:18:13 GMT from Australia)
There have been quite a few positive reviews of openSUSE 11.3 Kde4 but, IMO, reviewers don't do a thorough test run to highlight real user issues. Open Office and Kde4 integration is a serious issue that should have been looked at.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=open+office+kde4
Bug 568082 – kde4 file dialogue hangs if one inserts an image
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=568082
NB: If one opens a OOo writer and creates a new document and then carries out the followining steps they will see an ugly and, IME, a critical bug:
a., Write some text in new document, highlights some part of it, e.g. the topic heading, and copy it.
b. Then click on 'save' or 'save as' menu options
c. After 'Save As" interactive program interface opens (possibly with long delay), try and paste the copied text in the 'Location' (file name) space and observe a lockup.
This bug was in openSUSE 11.2 and can also be seen in Mint9 Kde4, i.e. it IS a KDE4 BUG.
148 • Re: 144 (by jake on 2010-08-01 12:22:47 GMT from United States)
"Most people will hire professionals to fly their air planes, fix their cars and repair their computers."
Why do you equate learning to pilot[1] aircraft with *fixing* cars and *repairing* computers? (Emphasis mine.)
I think, if you look carefully at the world around you, the proverbial "most people" don't know how to fly, drive, or use computers ... much less fix the required tools when they break.
[1] Actually, I find flying easier than driving ... Fewer idiots to watch out for in the air.
149 • HTML5 Theora (by Cuda on 2010-08-01 12:23:59 GMT from Canada)
I came across this youtube-like site that also has an html5/theora beta in progress. Looks pretty good. I just become an early un-adopter of flash technology. So what if some pages look empty, usually there just annoying flash ads that get blocked by the ad-thwart plugin.
http://openvideo.dailymotion.com
150 • 144*Hi Jesse (by Barnabyh on 2010-08-01 12:42:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's all up to a point of course :) I guess it depends what you consider the basics, for example I certainly could not write a patch 'cos I'm utterly useless at programming.
151 • Jesse said it all. (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-01 14:49:00 GMT from United States)
I take my car to the shop, that`s why I keep money around. I used to build houses for a living, now I hire someone to repair something that needs repairing. Simpler and easier. Cheaper? No, but you get what you pay for and I can afford it. `Nuff said. If users want to joln hands and sing "Kumbaya" while writing code, knock yourselves out. I`m not.
152 • Skills (by Jesse on 2010-08-01 16:00:48 GMT from Canada)
>> Why do you equate learning to pilot[1] aircraft with *fixing* cars and *repairing* computers? (Emphasis mine.)
Because they are all learnable skills. I could have also pointed out most people don't sew their own clothes, build their own boats, repair their microwaves, make their own paper, etc...
153 • post 145 (by Pieter on 2010-08-01 18:00:56 GMT from United States)
But Jake ----- if we don't toss some crumbs your way, you'll starve to death !!
154 • RE: 144 (by Landor on 2010-08-01 18:36:09 GMT from Canada)
If you're of that opinion, why do you have the question/answer section here in DistroWatch Weekly? I don't know if that was explicitly your idea, though I did wonder when I read the section the first time.
Our community has shown that it's not unrealistic to expect people to contribute. You can argue that is because most of the people coming here are technically oriented. I'll disagree with that. Now we have a new crop of people rolling in, and sometimes "demanding" perfection an instant microwave-esque attention/service while doing nothing themselves. I don't believe that's completely their fault either. I believe it's the community's fault, or a fraction of the community, a group I would include you in. The group from our community almost wants to beg people to convert and they view these converts from a Windows View. They are as locked in to the the Windows methodology as if they were still using it daily. Microsoft never sold an OS because anyone who considers 95 an OS is pretty well insane. No, Microsoft sold a concept, how "YOU WANT" to use your computer. They weren't correct about it, because people didn't want to use their computers that way. But, Microsoft rammed the concept down people's throats until long their concept had a world wide following. But back to Linux, the community bought the whole concept hook line and sinker too and have been trying to compete ever since. So what's the goal? To allow Linux to be as stupid as Windows so we can pander to new converts who absolutely refuse to do something that every other species continually does on this planet, evolve, and why, because companies like Microsoft that this community competes with, taught they don't have to.
What vicious circle this community has created.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
155 • networking (by Josh on 2010-08-01 19:01:00 GMT from United States)
@ 143: Oldcpu, thanks for the advice. I will try that and see how it turns out. I'd like to see how to fix it as well. I am quite impressed with the look and feel of opensuse so far.
156 • RE:151, Now That's Just Mean. (by Eddie Wilson on 2010-08-01 21:35:39 GMT from United States)
"If users want to joln hands and sing "Kumbaya" while writing code, knock yourselves out. I`m not."
Now that's just plain mean to make fun of coders. Why are you so bitter toward anyone who writes code? Just to sit things straight, coders are users too. Anyone who uses a computer is called a user and really what does that have to do with anything? I'm not really sure what money has to do with anything either. Just because you can pay to have something fixed doesn't mean it will be done properly. Furthermore just because you can pay to have something fixed does that mean you should? Sorry but this is just a stupid discussion. Remember that it's not wise to be helpless.
157 • Further experiments with openSUSE & RE: 148 (by Landor on 2010-08-01 21:40:07 GMT from Canada)
Before I forget, I tried a second time to install the KDE Live build of openSUSE 11.3 (in VirtualBox) and after a 10 minute wait it would not fully load the desktop with 256 mb of ram and a single cpu. I was however able to easily install it using 512 mb of ram without any special configuration prior to the install, and it seemed fairly responsive. I wasn't able to duplicate it having any problems installing with that amount of ram as previously noted here by RollMeAway in comment #56. I'd wager though the differences are in the hardware installed upon, where mine was simply under VirtualBox as I've said since I don't own a system (at this time) with less than 1 gig of ram (and only one of those).
Take the above for what it's worth, but I can agree that 256 mb or ram is a no-go for openSUSE's KDE Live build.
#148
[1] Actually, I find flying easier than driving ... Fewer idiots to watch out for in the air.
I'm sure my son will agree with you on that one given his comments about people on the road driving, though he's only flown a glider.
I've currently been pestering him on the phone about wiping his current install and putting Slitaz or Tiny Core in its place while he's away for a summer training course in aircraft maintenance.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
158 • RE:156 & 157 (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-01 22:28:13 GMT from United States)
156: I`m not bitter, just tired of Linux users burying their heads in the sand by saying Linux is the end-all, be-all of systems. It isn`t, there isn`t one. See the Linux Haters blog to see what I mean, (written by a longtime Linux user and coder). 157: Point proven. Thanks.
159 • RE: 158 (by Landor on 2010-08-01 23:03:17 GMT from Canada)
I have no idea what point I've proven for you, but that's ok.
I find your reply to Eddie odd given the context of your prior comment and his reply. I don't see how the two fit.
But what makes it truly odd is (unless I'm mistaken) the fact that you don't consider Linux "the end-all, be-all of systems", since I do believe it was you a month or so ago that was pumped up about Linux and how you've converted extreme amounts of your friends. As I said, quite odd. It's almost like two different views or people.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
160 • The "No Thinking, Waste Money Society." (by Ron on 2010-08-01 23:22:40 GMT from United States)
I hear people saying they hate Linux, they Hate Mac's, They hate Windows.
What I hate is the fact that some people are willing to pay for everything. We even buy water in a bottle, what next. Will we buy healthier air in tanks in the near future? Don't laugh it off. Not too long ago people laughed at the idea of buying water in a bottle when you had it coming out of your tap.
In a commercialized society we have been brain washed well. We must buy to get good quality. This is so ignorant and closed minded that it pains me to even try and understand that concept. Granted I do believe we should pay for things, like a car. What if I bought a car and I wanted to paint my car, take out the engine and replace it, use different tires, etc. But the manufacturer told me no, we really own the car and you are only borrowing it. That is beyond wrong when you buy something with your own money but someone else has control over it.
Now on the flip side of that there are people who want to buy a car and if they want something done with it they would rather take it to a repair shop and have them do it.
The point is the freedom for something you paid for to do what you wish. Tweak it yourself or just have something that works and you take into the shop to have someone repair it or tweak it for you. That is the freedom of Open Source. Not that it is free of cost but that you have the freedom to change or modify it like the freedom you have to change or modify your operating system. Closed source takes that freedom away and tells you that you have to pay for every little thing, no matter.
I tolerate MS Windows (Sorry Microsoft trolls,) I love Linux, I love BSD, I love Haiku, I love all operating systems (Yes even Mac OS.) Paying for them is not an issue. Getting ripped off and having my hands tied because I don't really own the operating system I buy, that is what annoys me.
But in all honesty we live in a very wasteful society. We are willing to spend money on anything and everything because that is how we have been conditioned. In the USA we throw away so much good stuff, rather then fixing it, and buying new just because. Even if it is something as small as a scratch or the cord needs to be replaced. Corporations love this and encourage it. Money, money, money.
I am curious though. This forum is about Linux and does talk about other Unix based OS's as well. If one hates those then why come here in the first place?
Big companies are just worried. They hate change and the more people they loose the less profits they make, and that is what it's all about. Not what's better, no what the people want. But squeezing every last penny out of a person.
For some MS Windows is what they need. For others it is Linux, or it is *BSD, etc.
Now buying software and games my opinions vary a bit more. Operating systems in today's world are turning into a necessity. As is some of the software (Flash, Java, etc.) But most games and software can be closed source, that is their right and I have and will buy those things as I need or even want them.
161 • RE: 159 (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-01 23:25:46 GMT from United States)
It`s called now having used Linux for awhile. See "Evolution Of An Ubuntu User" at Linux Haters blog. It`s also called having the ability to change your mind, try it sometime.
162 • SUSE memory usage (by Jesse on 2010-08-01 23:43:06 GMT from Canada)
I thought it was interesting that some people here said they were unable to get openSUSE to boot with 256MB of memory. I've got a screenshot here of openSUSE 11.3 booting (and logging in) in about two minutes with 256MB of memory and no swap space.
http://resonatingmedia.com/jesse/suse_memory.png
This is in a VirtualBox VM. Sadly I don't have physical hardware with similar specs to test it.
163 • RE: 162 (by Landor on 2010-08-02 00:14:42 GMT from Canada)
You're discussing a completely different beast Jesse. I looked at the screenshot and you're running "installed" at 256 mb of ram. I can't believe (nor will) that you went through the openSUSE graphical installer from the desktop and installed that system with only 256 mb of ram in VirtualBox. They tell you 1 gig is needed and less could be a problem. But aside from the installation, and as I've pointed out, I can't even get the "Live KDE build" to boot to the desktop in that kind of time, let alone fully, with 256 mb of ram.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
164 • Live-CD text-mode install GUIDE (with pics) (by Suse User on 2010-08-02 00:19:27 GMT from Australia)
Thread: Text mode install from liveCD
11-Apr-2010 03:01 #1
Default Text mode install from liveCD
I put together the following screen shots of installing openSUSE from a liveCD in Text Mode. This is mostly useful for users whose PCs do not have enough memory to use the Graphic Install.
One boots from the LiveCD and at the 1st/initial grub boot/splash screen press F3 to get this:
Then press enter and install:
[...]
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/unreviewed-how-faq/436916-text-mode-install-livecd.html
Aslo worth reading the info at below link:
http://wiki.opensuse.org/SDB:Installation_with_little_memory
165 • post 163 (by Pieter on 2010-08-02 00:48:00 GMT from United States)
Maybe, just maybe, and regardless of your seemingly never ending boasting and pontificating, you really don't know what you're doing ------- even though you claim (and believe) you do.
166 • Opensuse Networking (by Josh on 2010-08-02 01:18:16 GMT from United States)
I went do some searching before I went to the opensuse forums. I found a solution to my problem here: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/install-boot-login/408220-multiple-problems-11-1-a-2.html (post #18). I just had to go and add the dns servers I use. Somehow, most other Linux distros get this right. I would like to know why opensuse was not able to pick them up from my dsl modem, but it seems others have this problem.
167 • RE: 165 Exactly (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-02 01:20:40 GMT from United States)
Seems that way, doesn`t it? When did this become "Landorwatch"?
168 • KDE opensuse with 256MB ram (post install vbox) (by Josh on 2010-08-02 03:08:49 GMT from United States)
Boot time didn't seem so much affected, felt about the same time as with 1GB ram. But, it took firefox about ~20 seconds to open and then a few more to load a page. It may work ok in terms of booting and the menu feel, but for application use, its almost unacceptable.
169 • Re: 150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 165 (by jake on 2010-08-02 03:17:09 GMT from United States)
Barnabyh, you might not be able to code ... but you can wright, in my opinion. Have you considered contributing to the HOWTOs and/or man pages?
Jesse sez: "Because they are all learnable skills."
Jesse, you honestly don't see the difference between using a tool and fixing a tool?
Landor ... Actually, it was Apple that started the "ease of use" myth. Microsoft "borrowed" it, as they have nearly everything else that they sell.
Eddie: Re: "not wise to be helpless" ... Exactly.
Ron scrive: "I hear people saying they hate Linux, they Hate Mac's, They hate Windows."
Absofreakinglutely. All OSes suck. All software sucks. All hardware sucks. All fanbois suck. The trick is to pick the combination that sucks least for a given situation.
Pieter, learn the difference between ad hominem & discussion. It'll do you a world of good.
170 • @160 (by Antonio on 2010-08-02 03:40:50 GMT from United States)
``I tolerate MS Windows (Sorry Microsoft trolls,) I love Linux, I love BSD, I love Haiku, I love all operating systems (Yes even Mac OS.) Paying for them is not an issue. Getting ripped off and having my hands tied because I don't really own the operating system I buy, that is what annoys me.''
You love all operating systems ?
I would say this is NOT TRUE. Why? Have you installed all 350+ versions of Linux?
No, Right not even in Virtual Box/Vmware/Xen??? whatever virtual machines are out there :(
I would like to say that I love all women, but that is sadly not true. There are some that I can't tolerate,. We know that they are very important for our existence, but not all are loved :(
On Linux/BSD, I come here because I like to find out about new releases and other things that interest me. I see new version of Clonezilla and I am happy :), I see SystemRescueCD, I see new FreeBSD 8.1 releases, news about Fedora and Slackware. I am happy that we have OpenSource apps, and OS that don't get in the way of my computing :)
171 • RE: 169 (by LeBlanc on 2010-08-02 04:00:57 GMT from France)
Jake,
Learn the difference between wright, [sic] write and right.
On second thought, it wouldn't do a pompous twit like you any good.
172 • Reminder: (by RollMeAway on 2010-08-02 04:07:32 GMT from United States)
It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. (Mark Twain)
173 • Never fails. (by jake on 2010-08-02 04:15:08 GMT from United States)
Thanks, LeBlanc. You won me the bet, and a free pint next time I'm at Lagunitas Brewing ... Yours was nearly word for word to my guess, no less. During the meanwhile, do you have any comment on the actual content of my post?
No? That's what I thought. Again, ad hominem doesn't score points. Catching clues yet?
174 • 173 (by LeBlanc on 2010-08-02 04:18:22 GMT from France)
There was content to your post?
Wonders never cease.
Soufflez-le votre oreille.
Ad hominem that.
175 • after "having used Linux for awhile" (ref.161) (by forlin on 2010-08-02 04:30:51 GMT from Portugal)
Well sirkit77, I started Linux a little beat more than a year ago. By that time, Suse released a new version that I tried and it was extremely buggy. Later I learned it was because they were using a new KDE version that was too far to be ready for prime time. It caused me a very negative first impression then. After this period of time, I'm a happy Linux user and I noticed that one of the its strongest point is the speed how things keep improving.
Maybe its too early yet for definitive conclusions. So, even that someone advert you, because you're a noob, that pressing your pc power button is not too technical, don't take the airplane. If you're not sure about what you're doing, is better to ask for help.
176 • Re: 174 (by jake on 2010-08-02 04:34:20 GMT from United States)
Yes, there was content to my post. Was there to yours? Kinda my point, no?
Les blessures de vérité, n'est-ce pas?
(My French is kinda rusty ... I apologize if I mangled that too badly.)
177 • RE: 169 (by Landor on 2010-08-02 04:36:07 GMT from Canada)
Jake,
I'll trade you boasting for being pompous, then my flavourful descriptives will both start with the letter P. :)
Pompous Pontificating has a nice ring to it. :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
178 • Done deal. (by jake on 2010-08-02 04:53:25 GMT from United States)
And I'll throw in "pernicious", just for grins, if I can have "bombastic". ;-)
179 • RE: 175 Lolwut? (by sirkit77 on 2010-08-02 04:53:49 GMT from United States)
In English, please.
180 • Cheap parts, good performance and cool running (by Joseph on 2010-08-02 06:17:24 GMT from United States)
"... hum ... how much did you pay for the freezer you keep this boiling stuff cooled in? ... or are you using the heating for some scheme of power generation?"
Are you kidding? :-) The 3-core Athlon II X3 2.9GHz has a TDW of 95W, which is the same as the chip it replaced, a dual-core 2GHz! In fact, it has added power-saving features and each core can clock itself independently based on usage, so unlike my previous chip, one core can be running at full speed and if for instance the other 3 aren't being used they'll automatically underclock all the way down to 800MHz. The reality is that this CPU, overclocked and with an unlocked forth core, runs COOLER than my previous Athlon 2GHz X2! There's nothing but air cooling it, the motherboard has only passive heat pipes/heat sinks, and there's only one system fan in the case. Nonetheless, during normal use, the CPU is usually only 12 degrees F or so above ambient, and almost always 90F or below during normal use, with the CPU fan running at its lowest possible setting, which makes the system basically inaudible. Even during stress-testing all 4 cores the CPU fan is able to keep the CPU at or below 120F at all times without going over 50% fan speed and thus still pretty quiet.
The AMD Athlon X3 435 (2.9GHz) will let you build a very snappy desktop for a bargain price and maintain cool temps and low noise, even if you overclock it, without using water or even an expensive heatsink/fan. Intel might have the high end right now, but AMD is producing some absolutely wonderful chips at the bargain end.
"2 - On a more serious note, about your LXDE'd OSuse's installation:, did you use the four giga DVD or the LXDE derivative?"
I used the standard OpenSuse DVD.
181 • Re: KDE opensuse with 256MB ram (by Suse User on 2010-08-02 06:47:05 GMT from Australia)
168 • KDE opensuse with 256MB ram (post install vbox) (by Josh on 2010-08-02 03:08:49 GMT from United States)
Boot time didn't seem so much affected, felt about the same time as with 1GB ram. But, it took firefox about ~20 seconds to open and then a few more to load a page. It may work ok in terms of booting and the menu feel, but for application use, its almost unacceptable.
I have a openSUSE 11.0 Kde3 installed to HDD on a P3-450 with 256MB RAM and whilst booting up and navigating are done at decent speed, using apps like FFox and OO.org is an unpleasant experience due to speed lags. I would think that 11.3 kde4 (slimmed-down) would work here too (and maybe a bit faster?) but I am not going to try it due to lack of time and interest (though I might backup the install and play around with some LXDE versions at some stage).
182 • Not all distros work the same way - remember that! (by Suse User on 2010-08-02 07:04:15 GMT from Australia)
112 • suse futility (by Mark Spits on 2010-07-29 14:44:35 GMT from United States)
To those SUSE fanboys, this is why UBUNTU is king, and will remain so:
From SUSE, open Dolphin, click on left side places, on one of the partitions/disks.
You get the error message at the bottom of Dolphin:
"An error occured while accssing 'whatever',
the system responded: org.freedestop.Hal.Device.PermissionDeniedByPolicy:
org.etc,etc,etc"
KUBUNTU. Open Dolphin, click on any places on the left and you open that partition/disk!
So simple.
Security you say?! What security? And from whom? Myself? This is pure nonsense!
openSUSE is NOT **buntu and following is the way to access internal hdd partitions:
Right-click on Desktop---->Run command---->enter 'kdesu dolphin'
You now have a root (admin) power in Dolphin file manager and can mount/unmount disks as required.
In an installed openSUSE system (KDE4), you can manage hdd partitions in following way:
System Settings--->System policies---->Configure policies for trusted actions in the system
org.freedesktop----->The udisks Project----->[modify policies to your requirement]
And for the silly whingers complaining about the Kickoff style start menu, just right-click on the Start Menu and change to "Claissic Menu Style"!
183 • CrunchBang (by Elder V. LaCoste on 2010-08-02 07:42:58 GMT from United States)
#! Get's my distro of the year award. Folks, CrunchBang may just be the show stopper that brings an end to my "distro-hopping". The alpha2 version based on Debian may not be perfect yet, but it is knocking on the door. I wasn't a fan of the Ubuntu version but this new Statler version is stunning. I have been using it for a little over a month now and feel that I have given it a fair test and I am still very pleased. I usually don't even make it to the two week mark before things start annoying me. If you haven't tried it yet and are looking for something new to try out, you could do a lot worse that #!.
#! CrunchBang 10 "Statler" Alpha2 - E.V.L. Distro of the Year Award Recipient
184 • Re. 169, by jake (by Barnabyh on 2010-08-02 09:09:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes I have thought about that, just need to move and settle down again. Once that's done there'll hopefully be time. I've got a few projects in sight that I like and would like to contribute to.
Cheers-
Number of Comments: 184
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| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Porteus
Porteus is a fast, portable and modular live CD/USB medium based on Slackware Linux. The distribution started as a community remix of Slax, another Slackware-based live CD, with KDE 3 as the default desktop for the i486 edition and a stripped-down KDE 4 as the desktop environment for the x86_64 flavour. There are now several desktop flavours of the distribution, which include editions running Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce.
Status: Active
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| Tips, Tricks, Q&As | | Tips and tricks: Digital cameras, mobile phones and music players under Linux |
| Tips and tricks: Changing init software after a distribution has been installed |
| Tips and tricks: Command line weather, ionice, rename files, video preview snapshot, calednar, ls colour settings |
| Tips and tricks: Bash command line short-cuts and tips |
| Questions and answers: Working together |
| Questions and answers: Detecting supported architectures |
| Tips and tricks: Keep terminal programs running, using the at command, reverse OpenSSH connections |
| Tips and tricks: Filtering ads with a Pi-hole |
| Tips and tricks: Gathering system information |
| Questions and answers: Easy access to VeraCrypt packages |
| More Tips & Tricks and Questions & Answers |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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