LET'S START with this joke about the choice of a new theme for OpenSUSE. Another post about choice involves distributions and OpenSUSE has very strong presence.

If you want an easy to use distro, you could try Ubuntu, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS and Mandriva One. Both have excellent community support as well. I’d started off with Ubuntu and have since moved onto openSUSE. If you have a good knowledge of Linux, you could try out Gentoo and Arch Linux. Fedora is also a good choice, but it is kind of bleeding edge rather than being leading edge. If you want distros to be run on older hardware, you could try Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux or Xubuntu; these are quite light-weight and fast. For paid support you can try, Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL 5 Desktop), SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop(SLED 10), Linspire, Xandros, Mandriva Powerpack.

Choosing OpenSUSE

Those who choose OpenSUSE (newest version) write about their experiences, which together amount to some sort of a statistical sample to judge by. We've already separated the negatives, so here are the positives for this week:

1. openSUSE Installation, DVD vs. LiveCD

By the way, openSUSE installed and runs extremely well on the laptop with AMD CPU, ATI graphic card, Broadcom wired network adapter and Atheros wireless network adapter. Everything else that I typically install (Sun Java, Adobe Flash, Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Citrix ICA Web Client, Opera, Gizmo5, mySQL, QT4 and more) was either already installed in the base system, or installed without a hitch.

2. OpenSuSE 11.1 First Impressions

I have been running OpenSuSE 11.1 for about a week now. My first impression is that it feels nicer, but that there are severe setbacks that slipped through QA.

* It seems to boot faster than 11.0. I was never really bothered by the boot time, so I do not have concrete measurements.

[...]

3. Searching for the Linux of Mass Appeal

So far, no distro is a shining star. SUSE is just barely enough better than Windows I have some hope of selling it. I’ll be running it as my primary work station only so I can keep track of little things which make a difference to clients. I still prefer CentOS for my own use, but I don’t have enough computers, nor enough space for more of them, to make like some commercial operation.

4. KDE 4.2 [Beta 2] on openSUSE 11.1

I couldn’t wait any longer to publish this blog post except my tight activities teaching students here and getting involved on openSUSE-Id first HackFest in Jakarta last Saturday, including preparing openSUSE 11.1 Release Party in Bandung. So KDE 4.2 Beta 2 (code name: Canaria) that had announced in last December 9th 2008 could not be reviewed (deeply) and published in this blog that days. If you follow the Roadmap, today KDE Team are preparing for next KDE 4.2 RC1, and on openSUSE we’ll still having in KDE 4.1.87 (KDE 4.2 Beta 2) tree until this day.

Package Management

Here is a nice new article about YaST in the latest release of OpenSUSE and here is a video that reached YouTube several days ago.

Direct link

The following is a post about packaging quality control in OpenSUSE.

One of the first things that I got involved in with regards to openSUSE was packaging, and using the openSUSE Build Service. Actually this was one of my first means of contribution to an Open Source project - packaging Hula on SUSE 9.2. Back then I used my old laptop (which I still have) - PIII 650MHz with 512MB RAM - and was limited to packaging only for the release that I had installed; which was fine as I was scratching my own itch, I wanted to use Hula and thought "heck if I'm using it maybe someone else will too".

Last but not least, here is an instructional post on how to to obtain DRM-free downloads ('installations') of music in OpenSUSE, using Amazon's fairly new downloader (about a year old).

Miscellany

OpenSUSE.org has some other news picks of interest, but we haven't glanced at these.

* Masim Sugianto: First Hackfest for Indonesian openSUSE Community * How to Make openSUSE 11.1 LiveUSB * Joe Brockmeier: openSUSE - One of the 10 coolest of 2008 * Marek Stopka: Fatrat - Nice download manager in OBS… * Howto-How to compile the new Kernel 2.6.28?

Next, we shall look at SUSE. ⬆