An Update on OpenSUSE 11.1
7 January 2009 | Jason
I have been using the new distro for a week or two by now and an sadly less pleased with this version than the previous one. I keep having random kernel panics forcing me to hard reboot. NetworkManager also doesn’t work quite as well as I would have hoped. Pidgin was also not working until I deleted my ~/.purple and redid the configuration. Flash 10 randomly crashes or audio gets corrupted. The battery meter is not functioning correctly. The machine turns itself off automatically after about 20 minutes of being unplugged. The battery should last at least a few hours if not more. VLC skips frames while trying to play an HD picture although the same file plays perfectly in Kaffeine. There was a time I could not log into my account from the KDM. I had to create a new user account and copy over config files.
Overall, I am fairly displeased with the number of problems in this version. Many problems are probably because of incompatibilities in the config files from different versions. So, since I need to clean my machine anyway. I am going to nuke my entire machine and start fresh. Install Vista with a smaller partition. Install a clean OpenSUSE 11.1. Leave some space for Gentoo. Install VMware and install XP with hardware 3d acceleration so I can still play games like Age of Empires 2 which won’t run under Vista.
Nuke everything before trying new software. Being clean is good.
thanks.
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Lake-end says:
Hi.
Sorry to see you are having so many problems.
Are you sure your installation media is not corrupted?
I also used openSUSE11 home directory in my new openSUSE11.1 installation (except .kde4 directory I deleted). Pidgin worked just fine and I haven’t had a kernel panic once, to be precise only time I ever had kernel panic was few years back in Gentoo when I messed my kernel configuration.
I haven’t yet upgraded to 11.1 in my laptop, mainly because my gf is heavily depending on it currently. So I have not any meaningful opinion about NetworkManager with wifi or powersaving.
Flash10 is working quite nicely for me though, I think there was something about using multiple flash apps at the same time that causes crashes, but I think this was the same across all platform (win, mac, *nix).
I had audio corruption few times in 11.0 but none sofar in 11.1. Yours might be due to the new Pulse Audio. Also the default Amarok-engine causes some distortion while playing music, but that (and format problems) are easily solved by installing the non-cripled version from Packman.
As for video player, I would suggest you’d try smplayer, it is really great if your multimedia stuff is installed from Packmans. ( See http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/multimedia/400119-check-your-multimedia-problem-ten-steps.html )
Better luck with the clean install.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:20 am