Suse Linux 10.1 x86_64

[CityK]

Currently I'm highly dissapointed with my two days of "use". I've had numberous problems -- many of which appear to be shared by others, as witnessed on the different Suse user forums I browsed. Until I can rule out that my crappy install luck wasn't the result of either bad media or burn (doesn't appear that way) or from the "makeSUSEdvd" program/script, I can't endorse this....my experience pegs it along the lines of early beta software. And that's bad, especially because this release was trumped up as being a serious alternative to MS on the desktop....(and MS is INDEED the intended competition, as stated by Novell themselves on many recent occasions)

Major highlights of difficulty so far include:

- first installation attempt buggered the partitions and failed ... a subsequent install attempt also failed because it was now marred by phantom partition info ... this lead to a convoluted process to finally resolve the issue

- take 2 or something - initial boot after software installation failed ... subsequent boots required/requested a login and password .... kind of hard to login if you haven't configured user/password info ... I'm sure this would have gone over well with a brand new user...

- Next attempt, works ... until I shut the machine down last night and it hangs. Oh well better luck tommorow. Yeah right. Today I am discovering 4 out of 5 boots (cold or warm) hang ... restarts that do work often fail to start X (its not a biggy to "startx" , but that's definitely not the point of the matter now is it). Once I'm "in" it works and looks great...until:

- shutdowns and restarts hang every 4 out of 5 attempts (some "client kill" problem)

- trying to register leads to a "no product to register" ... That's just brilliant given Novell's new registration prerequisite in order to configure online updates ...i.e no register, no online updates ....(unless you manually configure ... and tell me a new user is going to know about that).

etc, etc, etc...

Additionally, I felt there were a number of areas of the install that could have been improved upon with very little effort. For example:

- When booting from the installation disk, after the welcome screen you are presented with a list of options (install, boot from hdd, etc etc). When you choose install, the screen changes to "Suse Linux 10.1" and the graphical circle -- for an abnormal amount of time without any indication that anything is happening.....Surely a "please wait, preparing to install" or something could have been inserted.

- The "Add on Product Install" part -- not intuitive at all, nor did it appear to work for me

- For v10.0, I had mentioned/complained about the lack of a simple "remove CD from drive" for the initial boot ... this oversight/issue still exists

- In a number of spots during the installation, it is not obvious whether you should click "next" or perform some other action.

- the registration thing in order to get the online updates thing is capital B A D ..... bad, bad, bad ... did Novell learn nothing about consumer sentiment about "required" registration from the misadventures of MS?

- documentation in the release notes that includes "inside" jokes or info .... To answer them - No, I don't know what they (Novell) were referring too because I'm not a dork who spends 24/7 of his time following the Suse mailing lists.

- if the configuration of online update was skipped or didn't work during installation, use yast or rug or zmr or xyz or jkl or .... Okay, it should be self evident that I made the last couple up. Or should it be self evident? Seriously, if the person installing is a new user, how the #*$@ are they going to know what the documentation is talking about??? rug, zen, zmr, yast. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?

And so on and so on.

I'll try again in a couple of days, once all the traffic on the new DVD ISO's settles down a bit. Hopefully I get my issues settled/reigned in.

 

[CityK]

Next attempt, works

Should read: Next installation attempt, works

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't tried 10.1 yet, but to be fair it is the first 100% free SuSe release. Apparently they've added yum-style updates to this release, which is really quite handy for users interested in trying out packages that aren't included with SuSe (e.g. MythTV).

I'm not aware of anything else that's significantly different from v10. I'm sure some of the software packages are somewhat newer, but that's all stuff I can take care of on my own.

 

[Mercutio]

Another interesting change in SuSe.

 

[CityK]

I think the (majority of the) problems I experienced were result of two reasons:

1. I believe the makeSUSEdvd program/script did not properly create the DVD iso from the (5 +1) CD iso's. In particular, something about the package handler was borked, and who only knows how many downstream problems this created during the install. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of Suse users who aired complaints, about this and that, had likewise used the makeSUSEdvd script. Now that official DVD release is out, I don't future users will experience the number of problems as observed.
The learning experience here is to use/stick to the official DVD release (although I composed my own DVD for the v10.0 release and it worked swimmingly well). There is just no point in going through that hassle again of having a borked install.

The flipside to this is that Novell should seriously consider killing off the (independent) makeSUSEdvd project by providing DVD releases from the get go. Else, they are only jeopardizing their image, in that end users will continue to unwittingly use makeSUSEdvd but end up with defective installs, and then Suse will take the blame/be criticized as being buggy.

2. After using the official DVD release to reinstall * , I was still being plagued by hanging starts and shutdowns. To make a long story short, it appears that the root cause of this was that the right CTRL key on my keyboard had, unknowingly **, become semi-stuck and was toggling off and on at various points. As this is a wireless (RF) usb k/b, it must have been playing havoc with the I/O.

* I did try a repair first, but that crashed, as it also had with the case of using the custom built DVD...albeit, it seemed to get further along then the custom built DVD could...anyways, not that it matters, as reinstalling is soooo easy with Suse....especially if you have an existing /Home

** I should have thought of this, as this affected me once before, albeit under a different set of circumstances and slightly different symptoms

*******************

And now the good news.

Its sweet. Its quick. Its snappy. In fact, I can't believe how much snappier it is compared to release 10.0 32 bit... I don't know how much of that difference is attributable to 64 vs 32, or how much is genuine improvements between 10.1 vs 10.0 ... regardless, its readily apparent to me. YMMV.

The default fonts look very nice. This is usually an area of big compliant against Linux. Personally, I think that this complaint is overstated and ill-based -- I think its all just a result of conditioning. For example, when I exclusively use Linux for an extended period of time and then have reason to boot into Windows, it always strikes me as how ugly the fonts look in Windows. So, if you ask me, its just a perception thing -- the mind gets comfortable and used to something (a given condition) very quickly, so whether your switching from Linux to Windows or Windows to Linux, your going to generate the same 'oh, the fonts look weird' response.

A couple of quick thoughts:

- I like the drop down menu on the restart button -- allowing you, if you so choose, to select which boot option to directly restart with, as opposed to rebooting and winding up at the bootloader menu (where you either manually making a selection or waiting for the timeout default). I don't remember this being available in v10.0

- suspend to disk works beautifully
- suspend to ram results in a not know for my machine type message ... so it looks like I'll have to manually configure that.

- in attempting to get the extra buttons on my mouse working again, I discovered that using Xmodmap is no longer necessary, as Xorg.conf now has an Option for "ButtonMapping"

- I also discovered that selecting English UK (instead of the defualt English US) during the install process ends up giving me a whacky keyboard.....just changed that during the last sentence, as I was tired of not having double quotations and missing pound sign .... I'm sure they're on a UK keyboard, but just not in the places I know (shift-single_quotation and shift-3 respectfully).

- boot time is greatly reduced from the 10.0 release. I saw an amusing comment on one of the Suse forums, where the poster remarked that they could take a small nap in between the time they turned on the computer (or rebooted) and the desktop was fully up on Suse. Quite frankly, I have to agree with that assesment -- it was one of my biggest grievances with 10.0. But, as mentioned, the boot time reduction (which is now very comparable to XP ... going to have to time these at some point, just to check) goes hand in hand with the improved speed/snap/feel that 10.1 has brought. Again, whether or not this is a self contained observation (i.e. perhaps my install of 10.0 was buggered too or bloated), or attributable to the 32 vs 64-bit environment change or what, I don't know....but I ain't complaining.

- as everyone will mention, it looks great -- nice uniform theme throughout (i.e even up to the black/grey background image in the framebuffer during startup/shut down...I thought that was a real nice touch). Very professional looking....and thank the heavens (praise be jebus!) they did away with the stupid green lizard everywhere or so prodominantly ... example: the green openoffice splash from release 10.0 was hideous....now the blue splash for 10.1 looks like very professional

- I haven't set up any of the Xgl/Compiz stuff yet ... I test drove it with the Kororaa liveCD a month or so ago, and although I thought it was great eye candy, I just didn't see much in the way of productivity enhancement...perhaps just the F12 trick for neat arrangement of apps on the desktop -- that might be handy in finding things quickly when you have a large number of apps open....I'm also interested in the video acceleration aspects avaiable with either of Xgl (or its AIGLX counterpart), but little (re: none) has been discussed about this in all the articles I've scanned. Although, clearly, if you've seen the Xgl presentation demo video (links to it are found in here), you see that some really neat accel is taking place ---> two translucent movies running over top of each other --- that's some seriously challenging effects.

Well, composing this post is taking forever (many interuptions...and I even timed out of the login to the fourm!) and I've pretty much lost my train of thought on this one at this point...plus I want to go investigate other things while there is still some time left in the morning. So, TTFN.

Bottom line: two thumbs up. Now highly recommend you give it a go. And although its far too early to make a definitive assessment, I suspect it will turn out to be an excellent release.

If they incorporate into the install procedure some of the simple recommendations I mentioned previously, Suse will REALLY have something good going....I've been playing with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), and I have to say its pretty nice too. I can't make up my mind on the Gnome vs KDE thing ... I like elements of both. I'm thinking, from what I've seen that KDE 4 looks to be adopting a number of gonome like elements to it, so it will be interesting to see how I feel about this next year.

**********

Another interesting change in SuSe.

Yeah, saw that a couple of days ago when I was scanning the various Suse forums/mail_lists in search of answers to my woes. Looks like a good step in the right direction.

Apparently they've added yum-style updates to this release, which is really quite handy for users interested in trying out packages that aren't included with SuSe

Yeah, I saw some questions about this (package management) on the Suse mailing list. It seems to me a rather confusing situation: yast2, apt, smart, yum..and some others.

In regards to this Merc, do you think there is any harm in mixed use of package managers? Do they all write to the same database? I'm not at all familar with this area yet. Previously (with v10.0), I used Yast (with the Suse and Packman repositiories) and Kpackage (which IIRC, is just a apt frontend). I found Kpackage to be quite handy with stuff not found in the Yast repostories.

 

[CityK]

I should add that "the Jem Report" has produced a Hacking Suse Linux 10.1

 

[LiamC]

Looks like the final of dapper drake is scheduled for Thursday

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32031

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwa...ux_due_this_week/0,2000061733,39257454,00.htm

 

[Mercutio]

I'm hoping to install Ubuntu 6.06 Server in a Virtual Machine in a little bit. Torrent will be done in an hour or so, and I have nothing better to do.
Maybe this will be the lucky first time I get a debian install to work right.

 

[Mercutio]

The "server" version of Ubuntu has a fairly fuss-free install, at least. I had to tell it a hostname, username and password and it did everything else.
Maybe 20 minutes to install it.
Apache and PHP were running by default, so I copied over some images and installed DAlbum (a php photo album generator).
Took about 10 minutes to get up and running, including the time it took to index 2000 high-res JPEGs.

The server version of Ubuntu also doesn't include any graphical tools at all as far as I can tell. Runlevel 3 and runlevel 5 are identical.

 

[CityK]

I was having some weird issues (i.e. gnome desktop fails to come up properly and hangs the system) with the last Ubuntu RC. Browsing through ubuntu forums suggests I was not alone in this experience .... I'm going to install the 6.06 release on the weekend. And speaking of hanging desktops (albeit, on another system):

---------

Continuing my trend of up and down experiences with Suse, my latest thoughts (and I'm sure I'm not saying anything anyone of the zillion reviews haven't said/touched upon already) are:

I'll flip flop to my earlier opinion that Suse was released too prematurely to be a stable desktop platform. The overwhelming reason for that argument is that the package management situation is buggy as hell (and frustrating at times). I don't think it is much of a stretch to say that Novell is treating Suse Linux as the beta testing ground for SLE...However, I can live with that...the corporate release pays the bills after all, and I think many others would overlook this to, as SL, while being buggy in the early stages, is still very nice. Things will get better (yesterdays host of updates seem to have helped already).

About that packagemgmt - the whole yast/zen thing is soooooo sloooooooooow, and the Zen thing can be (slash is prone to be) a resource hog (would peg your cpu at 100% every so often), and tends to throw errors in the middle of updates. An unnessecarily complicated situation at the moment. On top of that, I'm not too hot on the Zen interface (pretty dumbed down if you ask me...then again, the yast interface strikes me as needlessly cluttered -- too busy, and not intuitive). I think I'll look at smart in the near future.

Some elements could be a lot more streamlined too -- like why is there a seperate entry for install software, update software, remove software ? Wouldn't a single software manager suffice? Or how about the need for multiple Online update applets in Yast??

The multimedia licence issue -- I think Novell should just not package crippled apps -- leave them out! Getting rid of them and getting the full featured versions seems to have migrated in something close to a sacrificial ritual -- again, the packagemgmt is to blame here (errors/bugs related to installation sources, refreshing, etc, etc).

I also completely overlooked the issue of 64 bit codecs (or the lack there of in some cases). I should have known better on that one..

Booting became a really big issue during the past week --- only 1 in about 10 boots (cold or warm) would successfully make it to the desktop with everything functioning. My working theory is that
(a) during startup the network manager would hang the system while it searched for a connection or initialized
(b) during this time, the usb wireless receiver for the kb & mouse would fail to be detected and the acpi would kill power to the usb port that the receiver is connected too.
(c) when the network manger finally (4-5 minutes) came back from la- la-land, the booting of the OS would continue....only, once KDE finished loading, the mouse cursur would not move, nor was the keyboard responsive (i.e. the receiver wouldn't work)

Suffice to say that whenever the system hung (due to the network manager) during the kernel initialization phase, I would just hit the reset button...repeatedly... :evil: ... until it would properly boot.

Yesterdays update was eventful too. Something like 16 updates (a couple for the network manager too ... surprise surprise). So, I decided to try to use Zen for it. Perhaps somewhat predictablly, the Zen updater threw up an error during one of the installs and shut itself down, but kept the CPU pegged at 100%, sending the system's fans into ballistic mode shortly there afterwards...(.I hate when my system's fans shitt/throttle into high gear).... So, even after a restart of the computer, Zen would constantly peg the cpu and crap out. Uncertain what, and if any, updates had been intstalled, I tried updating via Yast. It appeared to proceed normally with the update operations. However, upon checking yast again, it appears nothing actually had been installed at all, as the same group of updates remained in the list of updates available. huh? Trying again, take two proceeded like the first attempt - with all indications that it had worked correctly . Upon rechecking with the Yast online updater again, the list still contained the same updates, but their checkboxes now contained a "keep" selection.....in addition, the checkbox to hide already installed components (that is supposed to eixist beneath the list) is nowhere to be found, despite the help section stating "This list normally contains only those patches that are not installed on your system yet. You can change that with the Include Installed Patches check box below the list."...and yes, I do remember it in 10.0, but she ain't there now. :roll:
On top of this, even after that whole mess, the Zen updater kept peggin' the cpu...it seems that several reboots were required (which flies in the face of the "hardly ever have to reboot argument/school of thought") before whatever ghost that was at work
in the system was finally was excised. Shhhesh.

The good news is that today everything seems to running as expected
- no hang on boots
- no crazy cpu peggin

Hopefully that good fortune continues, and perhaps the next round of updates will bring some much needed corrections to the Zen / Yast functionality.

 

[Mercutio]

CityK, you do know that you can install and use apt on SuSE, right? It's just a matter of finding a proper repository for SuSE stuff.
I'm generally OK with Yast or just downloading .tgzs, but I teach my students about apt, and I show them how to install it and the related packages that make it work.

I more or less work from the instructions I found here.

 

[CityK]

CityK, you do know that you can install and use apt on SuSE, right?

Yes, of course, I mentioned this above.

But for those who are interested in stories:

(It is my understanding that) apt barely made it into 10.1. In fact, the initial push appeared to be geared towards adopting smart. It was only after a number of complaints about its pending removal that Suse decided to keep apt this one last time. See this thread for details

However, Suse made a large right turn prior to 10.1 beta 4 -- completely changing their package mgmt system --- see here. This drew a lot of criticism (and rightfully so -- who makes major changes that close to release? ...oh, yeah, that's right, MS does too ) The consequence of that decision was the main reason for 10.1 final's delayed release. And quite frankly, the finished product was still slightly premature, as outlined by the million and one articles on the net (and by myself above).

So, one might wonder why they made such a radical change so late in the development cycle? Response.
So, one might wonder why the new system is still so buggy? Response. ... which is kinda funny considering how far into the development stage the change came.

And now, here's some background info:

- Once upon a time, Novell had a product called Novell Application Launcher. However, NAL developed to become a suite of of software products for computer systems management and, consequently, it was rebranded as ZENworks (for "Zero Effort Networks")
- One of the elements of Novell ZENworks to develop was “Linux Management”. What ZLM does is manage RPM packages installed on Linux workstations.
- ZLM is based on (slash leaverages) the Red Carpet software package management that was developed as a part of the former Ximian desktop. Novell, of course, acquired ownership of Red Carpet through its purchase of Ximian. The name Red Carpet was re-baptized into ZENworks Linux Management, to match Novell's existing software distribution platform.

Still with me? Good, here's some more: For platforms (such as Suse 9.3, RHEL .. ) that use ZENworks Linux Management (ZLM):
- the ZLM agent is zmd; ZENworks Management Daemon ... the successor to Ximian's rcd (Red Carpet Daemon)
- rug is simply the command-line interface to zmd (which, to reiterate, is the ZLM daemon)
- rug/zmd rely upon the libredcarpet package/patch/pattern/product management library

So, pulling it altogether, in Suse 10.1, and onwards:
- rug/zmd is still used
- however, what is different is that the libzypp package/patch/pattern/product management library is utilized instead

Yast also now utilizes libzypp.

Confused? Perhaps a picture and some more discussion will solidify the gaps.

Lastly, I do not want to leave out this wonderful post that provides some degree of clairity on the various package managers.

[note: the history lesson outlined above was derived from here and here ]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also outlines pretty well much of what I have related in this thread about the package management wows plaguing an otherwise very svelte OS.

I concur that the patches Suse released last Friday did wonders ...although, as SVN notes, there are still bugs. One that has affected me (thrice already), but not outlined by SVN, is the potential for some sort of corruption or loss of the repositorys in Yast or the services in Zen.. I first discovered that I had lost the repos after applying the Suse patches. Adding them back I happened upon the bug outlined here. However, making the preferences switch (outlined in that last link) in turn wiped out 4 of my services in Zen..yet they remained in the list of Yast Installation Sources this time. The third incidence occured after a prolonged period of testing several software packages (meaning I was doing a bunch of installing and uninstalling) -- eventually, upon once again opening up Yast's software management, I was greeted with an error about one of the repositories, and sure enough, checking in the installation sources list confirmed that it had been removed, and, likewise, Zen's services list was also corrupted (but with several other repo's also removed). It was at that point that I wished that I knew where this Yast data is stored, so that I could have just made a backup copy and restored that file instead of having to manually resynch. .... or maybe I should have just gone with smart (or even apt for that matter) to begin with, as everyone is touting how well its doing.

Oh well, at least I've learnt a thing or two. In any regards, I have faith that Suse will soon complete their right turn and steady the ship for SL....further, it stands to reason, that I think the enterprise edition is going to end up being a great OS for them.

 

[Howell]

Sounds like SUSE needs a few competent managers.