Ben Kevan’s Blog

I have been quite busy with a major project with work and that’s kept me from being able to write as much about openSUSE 11.1 as I have about previous versions. The lack of content from me in no way be taken as a dissapointment because my 5 day report on openSUSE 11.1 is pretty good.

So here’s a quick configuration:
Main Usage: Everyday enterprise use
Computer: Dell Latitude D820
Operating System: openSUSE 11.1
Desktop Environment: KDE 3.5.10
Display Driver: NVIDIA Beta 180.16

Here’s my screenshot:

First, I must point out that openSUSE 11.1 can be downloaded from the following locations:
DVD-32bit – openSUSE Linux 11.1 DVD – 32bit
DVD-64bit – openSUSE Linux 11.1 DVD – 64bit
openSUSE Gnome Live CD – 32 bit
openSUSE Gnome Live CD – 64 bit
openSUSE KDE 4 Live CD – 32 bit
openSUSE KDE 4 Live CD – 64 bit

Here are some major package version changes from openSUSE 11.0:
- Kernel 2.6.27.7
- KDE 4.1.3 & 3.5.10
- GNOME 2.24
- Mono 2.0

Now to my 5 days of openSUSE 11.1. First, after I installed I had to convert to the Compiz packages without the NOMAD patch (which was pretty much a known issue) and I was fully up and running without a hitch. First things I notice is the speed increase in boot (I’ll provide a bootchart diagram later to find out where that increase actually came from) and the speed improvements seen in zypper.

Again, I use this machine every day in an enterprise environment. Applications I run daily are:

Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta 2
VMware Workstation 6.5.x
Kontact
Opera
Yakuke
Amarok
Pidgin

All applications ran seemlessly. This was by far the simpliest upgrade I’ve had with any linux distribution and expect openSUSE 11.2 to be even easier.

On another note I played around with openSUSE 11.1 in a VM running KDE 4.1.3 and was astonished on how much further it was compared to the build of KDE that shipped with openSUSE 11.0. Now my only hope is that openSUSE 11.2 is on a 9 month release cycle and is released with KDE 4.3 which is due out at the end of June.

I’m hoping to have some time to write more about openSUSE 11.1, but only time will tell. Maybe just a nice screenshot walkthrough of the installation of KDE 4 Live CD, Gnome Live CD and DVD based installation with KDE 3.5.10.

On another note I would like to know if anyone would be willing to help me write some content on my site. Any inquiries can be sent to ben.kevan/at/gmail[dot]com.

I ask for help because Novell in the past has been known to have marketing issues, and I’d like to make sure that openSUSE doesn’t have this issue since to me, it is the best Linux distribution out there.