Kennon’s Space

This video is pretty awesome. If you were to replace Halo with Counter-Strike or Team Fortress Classic this could have been a hidden camera in my office when I worked at Fresno State back in the late 90’s. Enjoy…

Well I know compared to most people I am writing down my opinion of the latest OpenSUSE release a little late but…I wanted to try it out a bit, kick the tires before I put anything on here about it. And I am certainly glad I did.

OpenSUSE 11 is slick. And I don’t just mean slick looking, I mean it is fast too. Normally we expect to sacrifice speed for pretty, or vice versus. Honestly I did not find this to be the case in the least with OpenSUSE 11. I have been running it now for about 2 weeks solid on my home workstation. It is a now fairly aged AMD 3500+ Venice Chipset with 2 gigs of Ram and a GeForce 7800GS video card all sitting snuggly on an Asus A8V Deluxe mobo. Three years ago when I built it, it was a very decent rig. Today they sell $900 HP Pavillions at Costco that could blow it out of the water.

I don’t really want to dwell on the points you’ve probably read 100 times about the new installer and how much faster the package manager zypper is etc…I’ve read about 10 reviews so far and they all pretty much say the same things. I’d like to point out a couple of my favorite features. Some of these are not unique to OpenSUSE 11 as we saw a few of them in 10.3 but these are all reasons I use it both at work and at home.

I have some seriously mixed feelings about single-click install. I think it is a great idea for power users but a very bad idea for Linux noobs. Which is kind of counter-intuitive considering I’m pretty sure it was meant for the latter group. But for me, I love it. I read the URL provided and decide if I trust that repo and click OK and away it goes. I have used single-click now to install a lot of apps in OpenSUSE 11. I tried to stay way from it in 10.3 but decided to give it a go in 11. I keep close tabs on CyberOrg’s blog because I am a desktop effects/Compiz whore. Just before release on 11 he posted a single-click link for not only the latest versions of Compiz but also for the NVIDIA drivers, ATI drivers and arguably even more importantly the Gnome and KDE multimedia codecs. This is a huge time saver for me and I really appreciate his efforts.

OpenSUSE’s implementation of KDE 4 is the first one I have actually felt was usable. I ran 4.0 on OpenSUSE 10.3 and I ran Fedora 9’s version and they both pretty much sucked. KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 11 is really actually pretty beautiful. I still don’t like it as a day-to-day work environment but for someone who likes to just stares at his desktop sometimes and appreciate the art KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 11 is the shit.

Along that same vein it isn’t just KDE that is beautiful. The Gnome 2.22 desktop environment on 11 is elegant. On Ubuntu and Fedora I generally end up opening the theme control first thing and monkeying around with stuff. OpenSUSE 11’s default Gnome theme, to me, is gorgeous. Smooth fonts, simple yet very sharp icons all with a somewhat luminescent quality. I found myself changing one setting only. And that is the active window title bar color from blue to the new shade of grey they are using.

The new Yast interface in Gnome is pretty amazing. In alpha and beta versions this was troublesome for me as it would randomly crash in the middle of package installation using the software manager. I had horrific flashbacks to the package management nightmares in OpenSUSE 10.1 and got scared. But in release it has yet to crash once on me. I start typing the name of a package and viola the list of available packages begins filtering on my input. I think this is very slick and time saving.

An oldy but goody, the Gnome Slab…The name sucks and I hear people gripe about it all the time, but once I started using it on my day to day desktop I couldn’t stop. It is seriously the best thing to happen to Gnome from a UI perspective in a really long time. When I boot into Gnome without the slab it feels primitive. The same way I feel now a days when I am forced to use a Windows XP machine without desktop effects.

OpenOffice runs really well on 11. And the best part is, it actually looks like a KDE app in KDE. Unlike every other KDE I have run it in OpenOffice looks and runs slow and clunky. In OpenSUSE 11 it seems like a completely new Office system.

So at this point I went ahead and installed it on my old work laptop. An IBM Thinkpad T43p with 2 gigs of ram. I ran into a fairly significant problem on the laptop. The install went very well and everything seemed to work flawlessly out of the box. But as soon as I installed the latest ATI driver for the FireGL 3200 onboard the Thinkpad things went south quickly. At first everything seemed to be running ok after the FGLRX driver was in place. But as soon as I installed and enabled the latest Compiz from CyberOrg’s One-Click that laptop started sucking wind. I couldn’t resize any windows, mouse cursor moves became choppy and the system would idle at 8-12% CPU utilization. I tried installing and reinstalling the driver about half a dozen times to no avail. I played with settings I switched from AiGLX to the older XGL nothing seemed to help very much. At one point I even got the dreaded white cube of Compiz death which I hadn’t seen in a long time.

So I’m not really sure if this whole ATI driver problem is an OpenSUSE issue. But I felt like I needed to mention it since I know a lot of Linux people run Thinkpads.

Otherwise, on the laptop a lot of features worked great. My favorite thing is that suspend and hibernate totally work like they should. Sometimes when I resume from a hibernate though the wireless nic won’t always reconnect for some reason. And just like in OpenSUSE 10.3 all the Fn buttons on the Thinkpad work with zero tweaking. Oh and lets not forget libthinkfinger comes installed on 11 and works great.

So overall I’d like to say that the folks from Nuremburg have really outdone themselves this time. OpenSUSE 11 is a solid new version with lots of really key enhancements and a great sneak peak into some of the cool stuff we can expect in Novell’s code 11 enterprise offerings coming soon!