Comments on: openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 55

By: martinT

martinT — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:24:58 +0000

A little time ago I made the comment above about all the bugs I suffered in OpenSuse 11.1.
Today I reinstalled it, applied all the updates and everything seems to work now (with KDE 4.1).
Meanwhile there has been a major hal update, maybe this fixed a lot of the above-mentioned bugs.
Many thanks for your support, openSuse-Team.

By: eco2geek

eco2geek — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:36:01 +0000

Speaking of odd bugs, after doing the YaST equivalent of a multi-megabyte “zypper dist-upgrade” on my openSUSE 11.0-based laptop (that sounds awfully Debian-ish, doesn’t it?) I found I was all-of-a-sudden getting error messages like the following when attempting to run shell scripts:

bash: ./calendar.sh: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Permission denied

Some googling suggested that perhaps the scripts had MS-DOS-based line endings (i.e. CR+LF), rather than Unix-based line endings. That idea didn’t solve the problem, and certainly didn’t explain why I’d get the same error message running, say, the uninstall script from Google Earth.

Subsequent googling suggested a problem with /etc/fstab settings. Sure enough, as soon as I changed the line

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_[...]-part5 /home ext3 user,acl 1 2

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_[...]-part5 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

my scripts ran fine again. What the hell?

But that’s the kind of random glitch I’d expect of not just openSUSE, but Linux in general.

To temper that comment, I’d like to voice my appreciation for openSUSE’s treatment of KDE 4.2 RC 1. In brief: on both my ATI-based laptop and my NVIDIA-based workstation, the desktop effects work smoothly. Apps like OpenOffice.org that used to leave all kinds of screen artifacts behind with desktop effects enabled, now behave. The applications feel fairly mature – for example, Dolphin now has most all the features that Konqueror (in file management mode) had in KDE 3.5, plus some new ones. Plus there’s now a way to turn off that annoying “Nope, this game cannot be won anymore” solver message in KPatience. Thank God.

By: -=terry=-

-=terry=- — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:23:58 +0000

Comment #1. The default as KDE4 was not a good one. The version that came with the dvd (box) was unusable. The one from the factory is great. Do not use as default buggy version of anything.

Comment #2. Compiz/nomad/kd4 from the dvd did not work. Or install nomad or compiz without nomad.

Commnet #3. The bug reporting system works great. I have problems with DNS resolution in all the machines. I reported the problem and works around and in a little more than 2 weeks the bug was fixed , kudos.

Comment #4. Opensuse 11.1 with kde 4.2 is a major release and love everything. I know still has some rough edges mainly in some of the new applications like amorok 2 but overall is great and the devs has surpassed any expectational I have.

By: Fred

Fred — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:22:26 +0000

I started using linux about 3 month ago. Obviously started w/ LiveCD … used Koppix and I started to download tons of distros to play w/. Triple booting Windows box w/ Vista, XP and Kubuntu. Then got dedicated machine (old PIII) and loaded Kubuntu there. Didn’t really like it so I’ve tried many others then installed this distro w/ Gnome. Didn’t think that it would come up but then it did and then I installed it. So far like this distro the best but haven’t played w/ printing so much as one of the commenter’s said they had trouble I’ll have to check it out. Writing due to being new to the game and I didn’t have much trouble installing.

By: martinT

martinT — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:50:41 +0000

I have an old Intel 845BG Mainboard (PIV 1,6GHz, 1GB RAM, Ati Radeon7500 64MB, Soundblaster Audigy, Dawicontrol 2975U) and everything works fine with Suse 9.0.
I tried OpenSuse 11.1 on my second harddisk around Christmas and at first it made a good impression on me. But I could not print anything, because my parallel port was not detected. My old SCSI scanner does not work either. USB sticks did not appear after having been plugged in, DVD and CD burning was not possible.
I also tried Ubuntu 8.10: CD and DVD burning, Scanner and USB sticks worked, but printing was not possible also. Moreover, audio did not work in Ubuntu, unbelievable. This remembers me of very old Suse 5.x editions in 1997.
Maybe such new Kernel 2.6 editions are a big problem for my old hardware in general.
Since everything works in Suse 9.0 (which is Suses last kernel 2.4 distro) I’ll have to stay with it.

By: Praveen Kunjapur

Praveen Kunjapur — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:13:24 +0000

Novell

I wish:

Before “Currently predicted end of life” of any version of openSUSE as provided here [1] (thanks to Chris :) ), the status of all the bugs of that particular version of openSUSE should either be “ASSIGNED” or “NEEDINFO” or “RESOLVED” or “INVALID” and never be “NEW” or “REOPENED and not otherwise :( as can be seen here [2]

Note :

[1] here:

http://en.opensuse.org/SUSE_Linux_Lifetime

[2] here:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=openSUSE+10.2&content=gnome

By: Ulrich Windl

Ulrich Windl — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:23:07 +0000

If openSUSE is not being used by a huge user base, it wouldn’t help for SLE. Despite of that, some users need a newer software base than that of SLE. BTW: Is it still true that you may try out SLE for 30 days, but you will not be able to report bugs you found?

By: Praveen Kunjapur

Praveen Kunjapur — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:31:36 +0000

You are right :)

I should have said Before “Currently predicted end of life” of any version of openSUSE [...] the status of all the bugs of that particular version of openSUSE should either be “ASSIGNED” or “NEEDINFO” or “RESOLVED” or “INVALID” and never be “NEW” or “REOPENED.” :D

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:30:19 +0000

I wish:

Before “Currently predicted end of life” of any version of openSUSE [...] all the bugs of that particular version of openSUSE gets squashed.

That’s simply impossible and if you ever were involved into software development you would know that :D

By: Nigga

Nigga — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:36:31 +0000

You know what? Maybe it’s not even a debate. :)

I like openSUSE, but I know that it’s thousand miles far from being perfect, but I like it in spite of knowing it can hardly be called usable, however I’m faithfult to it, and so on… ;)