[Wlug] Suse Linux Professional 10?

[Robert L Krawitz]

   From: douglas.r.aker at verizon.com
   Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:33:42 -0400

   OK, did so more research.  Looks like it's called OpenSuse 10.2.
   Read some reviews.  Some good, some not so good.

Short answer: after a rocky start, this release is really, really
good.

I found the *initial* upgrade from 10.0 to 10.2 to be very painful --
the upgrade process was actually the most painful I've had, and I've
been using SUSE distributions since ~6.0 (usually I take every second
or third release).  The problem was that the RPM consistency checker
was finding a problem, but gave an empty list of inconsistencies, so I
couldn't resolve it except by cut and try.  The YAST online update is
also ugly -- it only wants to upgrade from a site that it picks, and
doesn't let you easily upgrade from your own mirror.  The one major
other problem I had, when upgrading my server, is that I had to
rebuild my cyrus imapd databases, and this took a bunch of web
searching.  The other major annoyance is that 10.2 doesn't support
apt.

That's the bad.  When I eventually got past this, I've found it to be
really good.  Laptop support is particularly improved; suspend to disk
is considerably faster, suspend to RAM even sometimes works (it's
actually the resume that's the problem, and it's the usual graphics
thing), power management in general works well, and Network Manager
does a really good job of managing network interfaces on a laptop (you
don't have to use it -- you can use the traditional if-up tool if you
like, but once you try Network Manager on a laptop you won't want to
go back).

I think they've finally stabilized their software installation -- 10.1
was reputed to be a real horror story.

There are a lot of smart (Novell's apt-like tool -- why
they couldn't just use apt is beyond me, but smart can handle a lot of
different repository types) repositories around.  The packman and guru
repositories have a lot of good stuff; I also use this to do my
upgrades.  KDE 3.5.6 finally fixes a raft of problems, and if you sync
to a hand held make certain to upgrade to 3.5.6 before trying to sync,
or you'll basically lose all of your calendar appointments.

I'm finding I'm having to build a lot fewer things myself than I did
with 9.1 and 10.0.  I've largely depopulated my /usr/local.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton