Following the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, quite a few people decided to explore the distribution. Novell has begun studying OpenSUSE 11.0 users. It's doing it at the moment using a survey that was launched last week. In addition, the OpenSUSE community pays its respect to Bryen Yunashko and Frank Sundermeyer, both of whom seem like veterans.

Listed below are articles and blog posts that shed some light on opinions and assessments of the latest distribution and its surrounding system.

Ubuntu/OpenSUSE Comparisons

This one has truly become a typical and popular comparison, possibly due to the message delivered by DistroWatch rankings. Here is a duel involving Kubuntu and OpenSUSE for a change (just KDE).

I removed Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 remix and installed openSUSE with KDE 4. My first impression was: Wow this looks great. OpenSUSE looks very polished compared with Kubuntu. Everything works as it should, I am impressed. I have been using it for a few days and I was thinking off going back to Kubuntu because I know it better and can get things done faster with it until today.

Here is another one about Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.

If you have followed my blog for any extended amount of time, you know that I have tried and used an extensive number of Linux distributions. I have finally found my home distro with openSUSE, and that is where I will stay for the foreseeable future. I do, and will still keep up with what’s going on in the entire Linux community, since it interests me immensely.

And here is one where Ubuntu beats OpenSUSE.

It was dead easy with Ubuntu. Go to screen resolution, choose the value you want, and Bob's your uncle. I can live with that. But openSuSE was a different story, it didn't seem to want to actually change the resolution, no matter what I did. I selected 1280x1024, rebooted, closed the lid, booted with the lid closed, and everything else I could think of, and it never changed. Sigh.

The HP 2133 Mini-Note ends up with Ubuntu rather than SLED on it. Blame Shawn Powers if this is seen as inappropriate or upsetting (given the permanency of SLED on this unit).

KDE4 on OpenSUSE

OpensusEEE gets some Plasma on it.

Now down to what's important. KDE 4.1 is clearly becoming a very polished desktop! Folderview rocks, and once the desktop alpha thing is fixed ( not sure what else to call it ). The idea of that is so kewl, its much better that a standard icon desktop, since you can do so much more. If you really want an icon wasteland, u can have one, but i like order on my desktop ( sadly my wife is using the laptop for work until we get a pc, so she dumps everything on the desktop ).

The above is about 4.1 Beta 1. A build of KDE 4.1 RC 1 is already available for OpenSUSE and other distributions like Mandriva 2008.1. I'm personally a bit of a Mandriva fan at the moment (migrated to 2008.1 Spring quite recently). I could possibly also report a bug that I had noticed. In the main KDE panel, if placed vertically, resizing it to less than 100% or moving it about leaves a void without a wallpaper and some odd effects. Either way, consider giving Mandriva 2008.1 a try. Everything ought to work 'out of the box' based not only on my personal experience.

OpenSUSE Impressions

There are some other experiences with OpenSUSE 11.0 that were shared in public. Not reviews; just experiences and short essays. Here are 3 of them:

1. Thoughts on OpenSUSE 11.0

Here are my experiences installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on my desktop PC (I had already successfully installed it on a VM).

2. Open Source OS's Part 3: OpenSuse

Well, OpenSuse is probably the best Open Source OS out there with a large corporate sponsor. I think it is the most intuitive, the most in line with what consumers want, has the best features, is the sleekest, easiest to customize desktop OS that is free. Be warned, there is a costly one that is even better but it costs something like $80. A lot of companies buy the liscense becasue it is a stable,

3. That didn't end well...

Feeling a bit experimental, I decided to try openSUSE. It was...different that's for sure. Slick, fast and the KDE implementation of much more stable. The installation however still left something to be desired.

David Meyer, the reporter from ZDNet UK, got his boxed copy and took some photos.

Yes! We got our hands on the hottest, most talked-about technological must-have... it is, of course, the boxed version of openSUSE 11.0!

Instructional

Troubleshooting is probably the boring part which isn't newsworthy. There were quite a few complicated solutions and some simpler bits of advice too. Here is one about repositories and the new OpenSUSE Build Service (recently hit the 1.0 milestone).

One of the things that has most impressed me about openSUSE is the ability to add additional YaST repositories from the openSUSE Build Service.

For those wishing to set up a powerful OpenSUSE server at no cost, here's some advice.

For the Linux distribution, I’ve decided to go with OpenSUSE. Based off of Novell’s SUSE, it’s a very solid operating system and has pretty much everything we need. It’s a community project that Novell supports, and Novell aims for it to be the best distro available. You can download the DVD image here: http://software.opensuse.org/ You can then burn the DVD image with your favorite DVD burning software.

Related Products

Novell's version of JeOS gets some special coverage in the OpenSUSE site where the role of LimeJeOS is explained.

SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS relates to LimeJeOS just like openSUSE relates to SLES. In fact, SLE JeOS is built from the latest version of SLES while LimeJeOS is built from the latest version of openSUSE. While LimeJeOS provides the latest state of the openSUSE distribution, SLE JeOS will offer all the services and support that is also available for SLES.

This was also copied and published in full here (was it permitted?).

Open-Xchange made an appearance again and it now exists on the OpenSUSE Build Service.

Today, Open-Xchange debuted its new community Open-Xchange Server application built using the new openSUSE Build Service. That means that by using one version of the application created on the build service tool, the latest Open-Xchange community version is immediately available for eight of the most popular Linux operating systems. They are Debian Etch, Red Hat Fedora 8, openSUSE 10.2, 10.3 and 11, and Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 and 8.04.

Other Bits

Earlier in the week, sensationalist reports described a network loophole (man-in-the-middle attacks) as a serious security flaw at the end-points. OpenSUSE responses to this.

Ludwig, one of our security experts, sent out a mail with a reaction to the report and I’d like to point out some of the things from the report and how it’s handled in the openSUSE 11.0 distribution.

[...]

Note that when I speak about YaST I mean everything that uses the openSUSE package management library libzypp which includes YaST, zypper and the updater applets.

As usual, for a different perspective on the news, there's always the weekly news from the OpenSUSE Web site.

In this week:

* Next Helping Hands Event * www.opensuse-tutorials.com * Hubert Mantel: openSUSE Gets the JeOS * People of openSUSE: Bryen Yunashko * Pascal Bleser: Reporting Packman package bugs * Jigish Gohil: New Compiz plugins

LinuxWorld is approaching, but summertime is, in general, fairly quiet. ⬆