OpenSuse, An alternative to Ubuntu.

Rich43

Rich43

Rich43

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I think this is a really nice well polished distro, Nvidia drivers were a breeze to install.. All I did was download a simple xml file from their website and double click.. wham bam and its installed! Compiz runs real smooth, it uses XGL and doesnt have the slow window resizing problems of Ubuntu.

The installer is more complex/comprehensive than Ubuntu's (good thing imho), You can set up a software raid on your drives if your not happy with your motherboard's.

Theres a good variety of software/packages, I havn't had to touch the terminal (So many GUI tools that you never need it!).

It installs Macromedia Flash and Sun Java during the installation process, so that just works out the box.

I could go on...

And now for screen shot and link.
750px-103gnome-desktop.jpg


Get it at:
http://software.opensuse.org/

Live CD/DVD and Install CD/DVD is available, I have not tried the Live CD/DVD yet.
 
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I think its each to their own but i have a friend currently on ubuntu but did say he liked suse.

Does suse have repo's and a good package manager??

Matt
 
Package Management software was developed in house by novell and it is very good and user friendly!

Theres one big third party repo called PackMan and it recently merged with another 3rd party repo, so its even bigger! OpenSuse 10.3 should have all the Linux apps you need. You can enable it with a GUI tool (Titled: Community Repositorys) that comes with OpenSuse in its control center.

I've only been using it for a few hours but I am very impressed!, I have a 600GB linux software raid set up too! It nips along very quickly!
 
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Only real problem I found with Suse is that it felt slow on the last bit of hardware I used it with.

That was 9.0 to be fair but Novell seem to have steered the ship quite well in their time in charge and there are certainly lots of nice projects coming from them.

Might be worth another look.
 
Rich43 said:
I think this is a really nice well polished distro, Nvidia drivers were a breeze to install.. All I did was download a simple xml file from their website and double click.. wham bam and its installed! Compiz runs real smooth, it uses XGL and doesnt have the slow window resizing problems of Ubuntu.

The installer is more complex/comprehensive than Ubuntu's (good thing imho), You can set up a software raid on your drives if your not happy with your motherboard's.

Theres a good variety of software/packages, I havn't had to touch the terminal (So many GUI tools that you never need it!).

It installs Macromedia Flash and Sun Java during the installation process, so that just works out the box.

I could go on...
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Sorry but you'll be back to ubuntu soon. Suse is good but not as good as Ubuntu is.
 
I still haven't tried 10.3, though I did have 10.2 for a good few weeks. I gave up on it in the end due to Firefox constantly crashing when viewing YouTube vids, no matter which version of Flash I used (from the repos, or the latest rpm direct from Adobe). Apparently the bug has been known for a couple of years now, but still isn't fixed. It happened under Ubuntu as well so I'm not distro-bashing.

F7 hasn't had the problem however, so I'm staying with what works (for us). Once there's a live DVD out for 10.3 I'll give it a whirl however. Someone further up the thread mentioned the 10.3 live CD but it's still not shown on the download page? Only install DVD/CDs for now.
 
Rainmaker said:
I still haven't tried 10.3, though I did have 10.2 for a good few weeks. I gave up on it in the end due to Firefox constantly crashing when viewing YouTube vids, no matter which version of Flash I used (from the repos, or the latest rpm direct from Adobe). Apparently the bug has been known for a couple of years now, but still isn't fixed. It happened under Ubuntu as well so I'm not distro-bashing.
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I've been using and installing Ubuntu on computers for over 2 years and never once had this problem. Used Suse before that too, maybe something else was at fault?
 
I used to use Suse (before it was split into two versions, openSuse and Novell I think it is), going to give this one a try when I get my other PC back up and running.

I have heard that the hardware support has been quite good lately in the linux world, hopefully this is true :)
 
brummie said:
I've been using and installing Ubuntu on computers for over 2 years and never once had this problem. Used Suse before that too, maybe something else was at fault?
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The only thing I've found is that it happened after adding a GeForce 7300GT and installing binary drivers. There are countless results on Google for this fault, mostly for Ubuntu and Suse. Some folks cured it by gediting xorg.conf or the Firefox config, but neither of those worked in my case. My second machine also has a 7300 but it's a BFG GS, and it doesn't crash at all.

Dunno what causes it exactly, as different drivers and versions of Firefox/Flash still give the crash and the cli output references an ALSA file. Nobody on the OpenSuse forum could get to the bottom of it either.

As I said, Fedora 7 works just fine using apparently the same versions of Flash and Firefox etc, with Nvidia's drivers installed to boot. So who knows? One of those weird things. The bug has been reported for a couple of years now (some of the posts go back to 2004/5) but still no fix or even a definitive cause :(
 
Rainmaker said:
The only thing I've found is that it happened after adding a GeForce 7300GT and installing binary drivers. There are countless results on Google for this fault, mostly for Ubuntu and Suse. Some folks cured it by gediting xorg.conf or the Firefox config, but neither of those worked in my case. My second machine also has a 7300 but it's a BFG GS, and it doesn't crash at all.

Dunno what causes it exactly, as different drivers and versions of Firefox/Flash still give the crash and the cli output references an ALSA file. Nobody on the OpenSuse forum could get to the bottom of it either.

As I said, Fedora 7 works just fine using apparently the same versions of Flash and Firefox etc, with Nvidia's drivers installed to boot. So who knows? One of those weird things. The bug has been reported for a couple of years now (some of the posts go back to 2004/5) but still no fix or even a definitive cause :(
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You cant blame the OS for problems with drivers and 3rd party software.
how do you install flash player? tried letting FF do it? Have you tried Gnash? Have you used the restricted drivers instead of the nvidia ones?
 
Where in my posts did I blame the OS, or should we say distro as I'm still using F7? I used the restricted drivers manager under Ubuntu, and later the Nvidia driver direct. I allowed Firefox to install Flash to start with, then tried from repos. When that crashed as well I got it direct from Adobe and that still didn't cure it.

With OpenSuse 10.2 I tried two different drivers, flash from Packman and then from Adobe (RPM download) and the drivers were again from Packman and later direct from Nvidia.

As I said the output in terminal was referencing an ALSA lib file whenever the crash happened. Never did get to the bottom of it, but the fact is I'm using the exact same driver, Flash and Firefox version under F7 and it just works. Maybe it was a faulty Alsa implementation, or the way they built the package, who knows? I don't. Like I said, I just stuck with what worked for me. No bashing in sight :)
 
Rainmaker said:
Where in my posts did I blame the OS
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By telling us you gave up on an OS because 3rd party software didn't work.

I still haven't tried 10.3, though I did have 10.2 for a good few weeks. I gave up on it in the end due to Firefox constantly crashing when viewing YouTube vids, no matter which version of Flash I used (from the repos, or the latest rpm direct from Adobe). Apparently the bug has been known for a couple of years now, but still isn't fixed. It happened under Ubuntu as well so I'm not distro-bashing.
Click to expand...

Hopefully trying the newer versions may solve it for you.

Rainmaker said:
With OpenSuse 10.2 I tried two different drivers, flash from Packman and then from Adobe (RPM download) and the drivers were again from Packman and later direct from Nvidia.
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What about ubuntu, what did you try in that?
 
Rainmaker said:
I used the restricted drivers manager under Ubuntu, and later the Nvidia driver direct. I allowed Firefox to install Flash to start with, then tried from repos. When that crashed as well I got it direct from Adobe and that still didn't cure it.
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No offence brummie, but I'd hardly call switching distros "blaming the OS". The OS is Linux, and I still use it. However, too right I switched distro because a piece of software I use daily didn't work for me, 3rd party or not. I don't see a problem with that. Nor do I see it as bashing Linux, or even the distro. As I said it wasn't a problem on the other PC.
 
Rainmaker said:
No offence brummie, but I'd hardly call switching distros "blaming the OS". The OS is Linux, and I still use it. However, too right I switched distro because a piece of software I use daily didn't work for me, 3rd party or not. I don't see a problem with that. Nor do I see it as bashing Linux, or even the distro. As I said it wasn't a problem on the other PC.
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I didnt say you was bashing anything. i did say you gave up on Suse and ubuntu because you couldnt get software to work. Its not their fault and i was trying to make that point and that point only. i was trying help and see if we could have identified the problem rather than we give up on things. :rolleyes:
 
I like the look of both, and I am currently trying to get either on my laptop. Although its becoming a pain at the moment.

Both look ace!
 
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