THE MORE INTERESTING NEWS this week was the availability of a KDE 3.5-based Live CD which sits inside the 'shell' of OpenSUSE 11.1.

Want classic KDE on openSUSE, without the full DVD download? Carlos Goncalves has you covered. openSUSE 11.1 Live CDs and USB images featuring KDE 3.5 are now available for download.

Created by openSUSE community member Carlos Goncalves, the KDE 3.5 Live CD and USB images contain openSUSE 11.1 plus several key updates.

There were many experiences or reviews of the latest OpenSUSE, so we split them based on the impressions left. Starting with the good side of things, here is an experience with OpenSUSE 11.1 on a Lenovo T61 computer.

My new Lenovo T61 came with Windows Vista and a plethora of bloatware. First thing I did when I got the laptop was to backup everything using Clonezilla. I quickly removed all traces of Vista, etc. and installed Ubuntu 8.10. Almost everything worked out of the box, except that I couldn't scroll with the trackpoint and the I couldn't log-in using the fingerprint reader. There are fixes for that, but sometimes they stop working and I have to redo the fixes again.

So it ended up running OpenSUSE. Here is another OpenSUSE victory where it replaced Mandriva.

I have become quite accustomed to suse. I have been using it now for over a year and I plan to use it for some more time at least.

Excitement appears in this post as well.

My Dell laptop so far runs OpenSuse 11.1 perfectly at home, although I may have to find a better sound driver at some point. Nevertheless, though not as loud as Windows XP, I am satisfied once I place my earphones in the plugin.

Here are some general tips for this version of OpenSUSE.

I'm a big time Linux supporter and I love to use it for my day to day basis. I'm a Software Consultant so I have to use XP on many occasions and every time I leave Linux and go to Windows, I always think why the assignment is forcing me to switch back to linux. In my Linux journey I used almost all the popular linux distros such as Ubuntu, openSuse, Mandriva, PCLOS 2007, DreamLinux, Fedora,Debain .. etc. So far I found openSuse 11.1 is far better in terms on usability and look and feel compare to any other distro. It just need a little bit of effort to become the most perfect desktop ever.

Moving on to the bad (or worse) part, here are some wrinkles found throughout the upgrade process. It's not all bad though:

Upgrading to OpenSuSE 11.1 Some issues.

So as I previously mentioned, I've been upgrading my machines to OpenSuSE 11.1. First of I have to save it's very impressive. As previously mentioned, it's great that ALSA works now on my laptop.

Another rather similar experience:

Quite to my surprise when I went to add repositories, I found that my update repository’s autorefresh option was disabled, so check your repositories in YaST2 under Software–Software Repositories. I also disabled the Source and Debug repos.

The gstreamer backend for phonon has proven quite buggy on my system, so I removed it and instead installed phonon-backend-xine. I’d also recommend installing kdebase3 and kdebase3-SuSE to hedge up a few of the final quirks between KDE4 and KDE3 applications.

OpenSUSE left this new user disappointed.

Opensuse works for me and it looks really nice. What isn’t good, though, is that if you want to install something like Eclipse PHP Development Platform, it won’t exactly work. It just gets extremely complicated. For me, OpenSUSE’s Failsafe mode is good BUT it’s no good if the Failsafe fails as well. Yes, I said it people - the Failsafe mode failed on me. Of all the rotton things that could happen, this broke the camel’s back. It showed me how unreliable OpenSUSE really is. Now, I’ll also say that another factor which broke the camel’s back was the Eclipse installation. Trying to INSTALL something onto OpenSUSE was too difficult and led to frustration as I had to install various things without knowing what are the correct libraries to install. I’m not going to say that Ubuntu was worse; it might have been better if it actually worked. Ubuntu’s Firefox had a better interfact, at least.

Another OpenSUSE disappointment shows the way to Debian.

OpenSUSE I just didn’t like. I was mainly just seeing if it would load on my machine and I had no real intent to switch to it.

Technical

SUSEGeek/suseuser posted several HOWTOs that are not excessively SUSE-specific, such as this one. Here are some workarounds for OpenSUSE 11.1 and also a short tweaks guide.

Before you read this, please keep in mind that there were no tweak or tips which suitable for all condition and completely work for all users. Tweak and tips will only be suitable depending your purposes, requirement and environment. As an example, I may disable a service but the same service must be keep enable on your side because I do not use the service but you do.

OpenSUSE installation instructions were published for those without the physical media but just a network connection and YaST2 gets some more attention.

More items appear in Weekly News. The index:

* Bugzilla Update to 3.2 * Contributor Gifts * Miguel de Icaza: Mono goes Accessible! * lowobu: Since when do you use (open)SuSE? * Nikesh Jauhari: Read-Write Support for NTFS partition on OpenSUSE 11.x

Doing these weekly posts is a time-consuming process, so we might drop the "Saturday" part and publish them less consistently. "Novell News Summary" might be a good fit. ⬆