My openSUSE 11 Journal - 1

At long last, openSUSE 11 arrived slightly over a week ago (20-21 June thereabouts) and I just had to try it out. Its no secret that the original SLE 10 had its roots somewhere between openSUSE 10 & 10.1. Therefore, trying out openSUSE 11 will give us a little insight/feel on SLE 11 when it eventually rolls out sometime in the middle of next year

... my hope its going to be based in 11.1... regardless of the fine quality I found in openSUSE 11, I still have my belief that one should wait for service pack 1 in any software... call me conservative... heh

First up, a little more details of my setup so that you know "your mileage may vary" since this is a journal of my experience:

Operating System: openSUSE 11 (64 bit)
The Box: Shuttle XPC SG31G2 (see link)
Box Specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (Desktop, non Intel-VT) @ 2.53Ghz
• Onboard RAM of 2Gb
• SATA HDD of 250Gb, triple-boot partition (3 OS at boot, common SWAP and DATA partition)
• Intel G31 chipset with X3100 Graphics Media Accelerator
  

I installed openSUSE 11 on 2 partitions, one with the exciting/experimental KDE 4 user interface and the other with GNOME, something I'm more accustomed.

The Good:
My hat off to the openSUSE community for their technical excellence, this is by far the faster openSUSE I've seen. From boot up and installation till its completion and ready for use, it only took me 15 minutes!!!

I've been reading how openSUSE has improved its software package management but I had no idea by THIS MUCH. I am so so grateful as this has been one of my bugbear with SUSE in general for sometime. Well DONE!

The Installation process has also been noticeably streamlined without sacrificing the power user's need to customize the install. Very pretty interface and I only had to click Next... the only part where I spent more time was the hard disk partitioning due to my triple-boot setup.

The not-so-Good:
Both the KDE and GNOME edition starts up well with no errors. Except when it tries to be helpful and offered to search for software updates online. I clicked Yes and entered my root password... after 10 minutes... nothing, the UI does not refresh.

Since I'm more familiar with GNOME, here's what I did to get online update going:

1. Computer -> Control Center -> System -> Sessions, disable PackageKit Update Applet. Normally, I would just do a log out/log in and this would remove the update applet. It didn't work for me as the update applet was removed but there is some background process running and I'm too lazy to figure out which one so I rebooted the system instead.
2. After a reboot and logging in, the update applet and its underlying processes are no long running. I clicked on Computer -> YaST (new in SLAB) -> enter root password -> Software -> Online Update
3. Viola! I am now given the option to download fixes and most importantly, Firefox 3.0 since it only became available after openSUSE 11 was launched.