Shawn's Scraps

They are a long way away in the subways of your mind

OpenSUSE 11.2: It's OK, but it's still not bugfree.

I decided to bite the bullet and get up to date with OpenSUSE 11.2, which, after the issues with 11.0, should show that I still have an occasional ‘redline’ tendency.

I followed the 11.1-11.2 update procedure outlined here, and here’s what I ran into:

  • Kernel was updated, but GRUB menu was not. Yay for tab autocomplete.
  • Still a few strange module and startup/runtime issues, and incomplete packages by this method.
  • It took almost 5 hours, with 10mbit. The network overhead from others installing 11.2 made it annoying, but COME ON.

So far, my impressions:

  • The default installation of Firefox 3.5.5 does not work; the default file open dialog returns a nil after the file is chosen, but the 3.6b2 beta on the Build Service works just fine.
  • OpenOffice is finally unbroken again with tables created in Word.
  • I miss KDE 3.5, but have been able to make 4.3 do most of what I wanted, even if in a roundabout way. I hate the ‘display desktop icons in a folder’ view with 4.3, so I drag an icon from it to my desktop, then moved the rest to other subfolders. I keep my desktop clean, but I like having my files right where I put them. I have yet to integrate my ssh agent, but looks simple enough – just need to stuff in env, and slightly mod my shell scripts. I can probably live with this. (Edit: I can now view the desktop as a ‘folder view’ after repairing KDE’s installation.)
  • Intel video is not accelerated by default, and transparencies don’t work even forcing konsole to support them.
  • Pulse still sucks, and I don’t like Dolphin as much as Konqueror, but I’ll learn to deal with it.

Overall, 11.2 seems like a pretty solid release.

Update: It’s solid as heck on my Latitude 6500, but on my aging Inspiron 1525, it’s a no-go. The old 3945 works fine, as does the laggy video, but it will NOT work right. I’ve tried a plain 11.2 install – no keyboard with GUI despite various BIOS and X11 settings. Tried falling back to my old 11.1 and upgrading (after the first attempt left me with no zypper). Still, nada. It’s back at 11.1 and will probably sit there until I feel like wrestling with it to get it to work.