OpenSUSE 11.1
21 December 2008 | Jason
I remember as I wake up for the first time in four months in my own bed that OpenSUSE finally has its new release out. I quickly head over to OpenSUSE and download the KDE4 Live CD. I let this download as I visit friends for the day. I get home and burn the ISO and commence installation. I generally accept that everything will work just as it did in 11.0 so I am looking forward to the new features. The installation finishes quickly and it pulls in most of my previous settings. I excitedly reboot for the installation to finish and it finishes doing its automatic configuration. I log into my account and am at first slightly disappointed, it did not autodetect my monitor resolution and was at an ugly 1280×768 resolution. I quickly load up Yast (where all system configuration is) and start Sax2 (X config util) to reconfigure my xorg.conf to be full 1680×1050. Okay, that was a little disappointing, just a little hiccup. In Yast I add the usual repositories and update everything and install missing software. 2 GB to install. Okay, I’m just going to let this run overnight.
I wake up and reboot the machine. The first time I booted it hung for a while. I thought it was just fsck-ing but I went from the pretty framebuffered screen to the terminal and saw it hung on something. HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) crashed somewhere and was displaying a stack trace. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with this error (should have sent a bug error), and hit ctrl+c to get out of it and try to start the system. At least it wasn’t a fatal kernel crash. My /home wasn’t mounted so none of my settings could be loaded. Ahh crap. I already broke something. I rebooted everything hoping somehow it would all be better. It was. Weird… two hiccups, I never had this before.
I boot up and everything is running smoothly. KDE4 compositing is on and everything is pretty looking. I try to get online and realize I’m not connected. I try to connect to the wireless with knetworkmanager/kde3 but nothing happens. Why doesn’t this work?! Wireless was working fine on the live cd. I eventually go into Yast again and change it so the network is not managed by networkmanager. It works. This could be a slight problem trying to connect to obscure wireless networks that I’m not familiar with. For the moment it works. I try to search around on the wiki about how it normally uses networkmanager but find nothing. After a bit of searching, I find a widget for Networkmanager and try that. I eventually get it to work after a few restarts and a few setting changes. Maybe this is a remanant of having an old ~/.kde4. Three hiccups. This is a little disappointing, but at least I was able to get past them. It is a slight disappointment how there are these small problems, but I know it will be better.
The desktop itself is very pretty. Compositing is enabled by default and my machine takes advantage of this. Transparencies and rotating cubes and more eye candy everywhere. I still love OpenSUSE even with the few problems I ran into. My only disappointment is the networkmanager widget. It is less straightforward than the kde3 version, but that version doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell. I have yet to test the suspend to disk/ram, but they should work. Will report back when I do. I still recommend OpenSUSE to everyone who wants a good linux distro.
New releases of software will have slight problems. Work through them and everything will hopefully work.
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