... I dd a little bit of research, and narrowed it down to Fedora Core 6, openSUSE or indeed Ubuntu again. I looked at screenshots and lots of reviews, and decided openSUSE was the one for me. Before I start I must say that I am by no means a Linux expert, in fact I have hardly any experience ... Read review
Advantages: Easy to install, plays well with Windows networks Disadvantages: Comes with no codecs, hard to aquire
...down to Fedora Core 6, openSUSE or indeed Ubuntu again. I looked at screenshots and lots of reviews, and decided openSUSE was the one for me. Before I start I must say that I am by no means a Linux expert, in fact I have hardly any experience with Linux.
Getting openSUSE proved harder than I expected. Mainly because it took a very long time. I decided to download CDs 1, 2 and 3 through BitTorrent because I thought it would be quicker ... ...key and then it connected. openSUSE didn't do this but it wasn't too bad. The thing is, I'm not really sure what I did. I configured it through Yast->Network Card first and it didn't do anything. Then I realised I'd spelt the domain name wrong so I re-configured and it still didn't work. Then knetworkmanager randomly appeared and it gave me a much easier to understand GUI in which I entered my WEP key and my domain name, etc. So I don't really ... more
After 6 months of using Ubuntu on my laptop (Travelmate 220 - painful, I know), I decided a few days ago to change. One because I felt like it, and two the laptop really needed a cleanup. I dd a little bit of research, and narrowed it down to Fedora Core 6, openSUSE or indeed Ubuntu again. I looked at screenshots and lots of reviews, and decided openSUSE was the one for me. Before I start I must say that I am by no means a Linux expert, in fact I have hardly any experience with Linux.
Getting openSUSE proved harder than I expected. Mainly because it took a very long time. I decided to download CDs 1, 2 and 3 through BitTorrent because I thought it would be quicker than a HTTP or FTP download. How wrong I was. The download took from 6pm Saturday to 5pm Sunday (left the computer on). Almost 1 day. I'm not on a fast connection, but that is quite steep… Fortunately I managed to get it onto CD and get it installing pretty quickly.
Install was quite easy to do. It took a long time compared to other distributions I've tried, but that wasn't too bad. It asked me whether I wanted to install Gnome or KDE and I chose KDE. I would normally go with Gnome, but as it's my big change I thought I'd give KDE a try. I couldn't get the wireless card working, but that's to be expected. I'll configure it when I get the main system up. Other than that, install was good. Easy to understand and pretty quick.
This is where my I encountered my first real problem. I started the computer up, and got through the boot options, only to be greeted by a black screen. Great… Luckily I knew that this was something that was "fixable". A quick Google helped me along. I booted to failsafe mode and logged in as root. A quick look in /etc showed that xorg.conf hadn't been created. Then I just did a sax2 command let me get my display configured. Un-needed hassle, but it's not caused me too much trouble yet.
When I was using Ubuntu, my wireless card was instantly detected, it asked me for my WEP key and then it connected. openSUSE didn't do this but it wasn't too bad. The thing is, I'm not really sure what I did. I configured it through Yast->Network Card first and it didn't do anything. Then I realised I'd spelt the domain name wrong so I re-configured and it still didn't work. Then knetworkmanager randomly appeared and it gave me a much easier to understand GUI in which I entered my WEP key and my domain name, etc. So I don't really know whether it was Yast, knetworkmanager or both, but my internet is working and that's what I'm bothered about.
I think the software management is the biggest let-down of openSUSE. The only default repository is the CDs and it expects you to add your own. There's no clear list of good repositories to add. I did find one on the openSUSE site (an official repository) but it hasn't given me any good software to choose from and it took about 40 mins to index the software (or do whatever it does). So yeah, that's quite annoying but I'm sure I'll figure out what to do soon… Note: Actually, I overreacted. Only the official repository takes a long time to load. Packman doesn't take that long, and it seems to be working well now. I installed MPlayer with it :).
openSUSE came with the latest Java Runtime Environment installed which was good. I installed Adobe Flash pretty easily and that works without breaking Firefox like Ubuntu did. It doesn't come with any decent codecs and I'm working on that now. I only need mp3 really though so it shouldn't be too bad. Note: All the codecs I needed came with MPlayer.
As I said at the start, the laptop I'm running this on is by no means good, but the speed seems to be fine which is more than I expected with KDE. It's not instant; it takes ~4 seconds to open Firefox when no other programs are running, but I'm happy with it. I've been running it for three days and I haven't had any crashes yet. The mouse hangs sometimes and I have to wait a few seconds to get it moving again, I'm not sure about this one. I like the start menu thing, it's different. And it works well for me.
I'd have to say that I prefer openSUSE to Ubuntu. I'm not completely sure why, it just seems cleaner and more organised. I'm going to be sticking with it for a while anyway.
