01.24.09

Novell News Summary – Part II: Active Week for OpenSUSE, New Short Reviews

Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE, Novell, OpenSUSE at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Reviews

STARTING with the good, here are some new reviews of interest:

1. And now openSUSE

And now openSUSE

[...]

I concluded that (K)Ubuntu does not match my taste. After tinkering with it a little, I noticed some strange behaviour (can’t remember them clearly) and plus, I didn’t like aptitude. I can’t really say much about (K)Ubuntu because I didn’t test it to death, but it wasn’t what I expected, or liked.

2. Review: OpenSUSE 11.1

OpenSUSE 11.1 is a fantastic release and show the quality that comes from a professional distribution with many years of experience. Yes, it’s probably not the first choice of distribution that many users (and Linux gamers) go to but I’ve found it to be quite well laid out and easily configurable. If you’re after a solid distribution that’s able work hard as well as play hard, you won’t go wrong with OpenSUSE.

3. Masim “Vavai” Sugianto: KDE 4.2 Beta on openSUSE 11.1

I’m quite satisfied with the quality of KDE 4.1.3 on openSUSE 11.1. Yes, I’ve read complain about KDE 4 here and there but I just an ordinary end user with a relatively general purpose using KDE 4 for daily usage. BTW, I also installed some KDE 3.5 basic utility for special purpose if I’m not really enjoy new replacement app.

Moving on to some bad reviews (in the sense that the impressions left were mostly negative):

1. SuSE 11.1 – too little, too soon

My opinion is that the community at large, and Novell/OpenSuSE in particular, would be better off adhering less rigidly to a six-month release cycle and more rigidly to making sure that very much everything works before making a release. Normal people do not reformat their disks and install a new operating system every six months. ‘Way too much work. This evolution has easily cost me two months, which thankfully I had available. I’m not going to do that every six months. And releasing buggy software just gives the community a bad name. So take at least a little more time and ensure that it WORKS before releasing it. Especially do not release stuff that the community has already identified as being dysfunctional, like bluetooth on KDE4.

So, despite being a SuSE fan from 10.2 onward, I shall catch my breath, and then try to figure out how to get Fedora or something else to give me KDE. And then, maybe, very maybe, come back to try SuSE 11.2 or 11.3 or … But again, shall do due diligence first.

2. Why I hate computers… (grumpy one)

Now my Linux of choice is SUSE and I’m running 10.1 right now. Seems that since Novell bought SUSE the home version of Linux has been spun off into openSUSE. No problem, just down load it, burn a CD and off we go, right?

3. The ping pong ends.. at Ubuntu

It’s not that SUSE hasn’t got any of the mentioned above, but.. it just keeps on having problems, witch I can’t find solutions for (and I’ve looked a lot). And for now I don’t have any more time to spare on trying to find guides to my issues.

Technical

Lots of stuff fits here. Here is a selected bunch:

Linux Tip: Remote access using NX and OpenSuse 11.1

NoMachine NX is a solution for secure remote access, desktop virtualization, and hosted desktop deployment using compression, session resilience and resource management. It integrations a powerful audio, printing and resource sharing capabilities and makes it possible to run any graphical application (e.g KDE, Gnome etc.) across the network connection. The NX Free Edition is easy to install and woks on almost all Linux distributions. The following workshop describes the installation an the first run on an OpenSuse 11.1 server.

SUSEGeek: Kdenlive – Free opensource video editor in openSUSE

Kdenlive free open-source non-linear video editor for KDE. Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies. It relies on a separate renderer, piave, to handle it’s rendering. Kdenlive is easy to use for all levels of users from novice to advanced video editors. Kdenlive is built upon MLT and ffmpeg frameworks, which provide unique features to mix virtually any kind of media.

There were several more HOWTOs from “SUSEGeek”, so this blogger is definitely active again.

Wafaa: Dropbox on 11.1

There have been many people that have complained that Dropbox no longer works on openSUSE 11.1

To name some more such items:

• The Value of (Good) Documentation
• ZYpp project now on git
• OpenSuse 11.1: Broadcom bcm43xx Wireless Card. Painless installation in 2 steps.
• Don’t Use Zypper to Upgrade OpenSuse

OpenSUSE gave exposure to openFATE and KDE’s Aaron Seigo wrote about it too:

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce that feature tracking and requests are now available to the larger openSUSE Community. The openSUSE feature tracking system, openFATE, is now live and accessible to anyone with an openSUSE account.

Hosted at features.opensuse.org, openFATE will help the openSUSE community monitor and participate in the development process. Features that are tracked in openFATE are any proposals that the project wants to see introduced in order to improve openSUSE.

Miscellany

Here is a Web host that starts sporting OpenSUSE.

Having established itself as a leading provider of VPS Hosting services, Cirrus Tech continues to offer their clients more options by announcing the availability of openSUSE 10.3 on their Linux VPS plans.

This begs the question, “why not 11.0 or 11.1?”

The OpenSUSE Web site has plenty more that are older.

In this week:

* openSUSE Project Opens Feature Tracking with openFATE
* openSUSE forums has reached 20K members
* Wanted-Build Service Contributors
* Joe Brockmeier: What happens with KDE with Qt license shift?
* Katarina Machalkova: A fairytale about brave wizard QSplitter and evil ancient screen resolution from the last century

Next — we’ll look at all the rest of the news. █

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