It has been just over a fortnight since OpenSUSE 11.0 was released. People still write about their experiences with this distribution, so here is just a sample of what people have found.

Reviews and Experiences

We'll present this as a list of stories with selective snippets.

eyereex.eryell.com: The first 24 hours with openSUSE 11

I’ve installed Mozilla Firefox 3, Google Earth, XMMS, K3b, Apache, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Wine, Tremulous, VLC player, Bluefish, and many other applications. Everything works great!! CompizConfig manager is installed by default so you can straight away show off the desktop effects to Vista’s fan around you after the installation.

simplyclear.wordpress.com: OpenSuse 11OpenSuse 11

It’s been two days since i did installed it and I must say that I’m really satisfied .Pratically I didn’t have to configure anything . The install phase went fast, my linux partition was perfectly recognised.

heresylabs.blogspot.com: SUSE 11.0 handmade

That is all! Now you have your SUSE good as new, without less integrated third-party packages and without crippled multimedia. It's time to install win32 codecs from packman and libdvdcss from videolan before first kaffeine launch, install amarok-xine and remove buggy amarok-yauap plugin.

TuxMachines.org blogs: On OpenSuse 11

All in all, I would have to say that OpenSuse 11 is an improvement over 10.3, which is as it should be.

There are a few cosmetics that I personally am not a fan of, but the beauty of Linux is that I can change these without much fuss.

Beyond that, I think it's definitely worth investigating for folks who want to implement a solid Linux distro.

lincgeek.org: OpenSuse 11

So it looks like Pat and I had the same idea this weekend. That is to play around with the new OpenSuse 11.

[....]

The bigger problem, and one that I still have is that my wifi will not work. The lappy I have uses an Atheros wireless chipset, which works OUT OF THE BOX with Ubuntu. If they can do it, why can’t OpenSuse?

labyrinth.org: OpenSUSE 11…a lot of new goodness, a lot of old goodness

Well I know compared to most people I am writing down my opinion of the latest OpenSUSE release a little late but…I wanted to try it out a bit, kick the tires before I put anything on here about it. And I am certainly glad I did.

[...]

So overall I’d like to say that the folks from Nuremburg have really outdone themselves this time. OpenSUSE 11 is a solid new version with lots of really key enhancements and a great sneak peak into some of the cool stuff we can expect in Novell’s code 11 enterprise offerings coming soon!

ZDNet community: Quad Boot - Friday Update - It's Good!

openSuSE: This probably wins the "cantankerous" award. In the end, it can probably do everything the other can do, but it just seems to make a big fuss over everything.

arsedout.net: Opensuse 11, new boss

Opensuse 11 was officially released a couple weeks ago. I’ve install it onto my work laptop. Overall I like the distro. Compiz works well right out of the box, at least with my hardware. I even got the wireless to work, sort of.

jaysonrowe.wordpress.com: openSUSE 11.0 after a couple of weeks

There is so much flexibility and power available to users in openSUSE it’s amazing.

[...]

Now that I’ve learned my way around the Suse way of doing things, I’m on the mailing-lists, Forums and IRC so I can do my little part in helping out other new users, so you’ll see me around (I’m jayson_r on Freenode).

KDE4

KDE4 is the beginning of something wonderful, but its inclusion in OpenSUSE 11.0 has been the subject of some debate. Here are a few remarks about it.

metaverse.wordpress.com: openSUSE 11.0 and KDE 4

The openSUSE development team was faced with a difficult dilemma with this release. The KDE 4.0 desktop environment was released in January, with an entirely new way of doing things. The Plasma desktop, Phonon multimedia framework, and Solid hardware framework represented some spectacular changes from the familiar KDE 3.x interface in place since 2002.

blogs.warwick.ac.uk: openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 inclusion

Summary

* openSUSE is not forcing people to switch to KDE4. Users can switch to KDE4 when they wish. Both are included on openSUSE 11.0. * If you find bugs in or are missing functionality in KDE4 please file bug reports so it can be fixed. * If you have an opinion regarding when the timescale for moving to KDE4 you are free to get involved and influence the decisions. You do not have to resort to insulting developers on the mailing lists to be heard, in fact insulting developers so is a good way to ensure that people disregard your opinion.

srikrishnadas.wordpress.com: Ride KDE4 with openSUSE 11.0

About Six and half hours of leeching from torrent and 117.4 MB of seeding contribution for self-satisfaction, adds another distro to my wallet - the all new openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 Live CD.

[...]

Current distro profiles of my machines - openSUSE 11.0 on PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on lappie.

Technical

More 'gory' (or simply advanced) details appear in the following posts:

opensuse.org: Showing package dependencies

This is a simple Qt Dialog widget which can be used in other programs too. ( Package libqdialogsolver1)

HowToForge: The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11 (GNOME)

This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

blogs.warwick.ac.uk: Upgrading openSUSE 10.3 –< 11.0 in a running system.

Upgrading openSUSE between releases while the system is running is not a currently supported method of upgrading. The supported method is to boot from an install medium and select the upgrade option. Nevertheless, it is possible to upgrade a running system. This is more difficult than normal with openSUSE 10.3 -> openSUSE 11.0 due to the change in RPM payload format from bz2 -> lzma which makes the RPM in 10.3 unable to install RPMs from 11.0.

jaysonrowe.wordpress.com: Configuring your fonts optimally in openSUSE 11.0

Great fonts and great font rendering are especially important to both the enjoyable and comfortable use of any operating system. Linux fonts, and font rendering have definately gotten better through the years, and the font set up in openSUSE 11.0 actually looks surprisingly nice out of the box.

Miscellany

There have been noteworthy developments other than those raves about OpenSUSE 11.0 and feedback on complaints.

In fact, 11.1 is already being discussed and implemented.

With openSUSE 11.0 out the door, it’s time to start thinking about openSUSE 11.1. The public release of openSUSE 11.1 is scheduled for December 18, 2008, six months after the release of openSUSE 11.0.

Here is the roadmap, which was followed by Andreas Jaeger indicating that it's already being worked on.

Alpha0 is not yet released, we’re still hunting some bugs but I hope the above gives some impression where openSUSE 11.1 will go.

Linux Outlaws, the audiocast, chose quite an attractive title when it included a mythical "KDE 5" alongside OpenSUSE 11. It's actually about KDE4.

This week we bring you a special show where we review the latest openSUSE release and also talk a fair bit about KDE 4.

Going further back rather than jumping ahead, Joe Brockmeier had this announcement to make a few days ago:

---

[opensuse-announce] Novell Client for Linux Public Beta for openSUSE 10.3

We're pleased to announce the public beta of the Novell Client for openSUSE 10.3. Novell released the packages [1] for the Novell Client for Linux 2.0 SP1 public beta today.

A number of openSUSE users have expressed interest in having the client packaged for openSUSE, so our developers have been working on building the client against openSUSE. Please download the package and give it a try on your systems.

Novell is also working on a package for openSUSE 11.0, though we don't have an official timeline for that package yet. We will also post an announcement when it's available, and will post announcements for any further betas or the final release of the Novell Client for Linux.

[1]: http://www.novell.com/beta/auth/beta.jsp?id=2585&type=1

---

For more information, see the weekly report from the OpenSUSE site.

In this week:

* openSUSE 11.1 Roadmap * Novell Client for Linux Public Beta for openSUSE 10.3 * People of openSUSE: Jan-Simon Möller * John Anderson: Find duplicate files by content not name * Lukas Ocilka: Package Search and One Click Install in YaST * Miguel de Icaza: Moonlight 0.7 is now Available

There's also that feature article, this time concentrating on Jan-Simon Möller.

Weekly News writer and openSUSE member Jan-Simon Möller accepted ‘People of openSUSE’ interview request and shared with us some information about himself. Jan is also the maintainer of the hamradio repository on the Build Service!

Next up: commercial SUSE. ⬆