I downloaded and installed OpenSuse 10 on my laptop along with Fedora Core 4. The installation screens were prettier than Fedora but that’s very easy to accomplish. Installation was also a bit easier than Fedora but not by much.
When you first log into OpenSuse you’ll notice that Novell/Suse has spent quite a bit of time on aesthetics. OpenSuse, whether you use Gnome 2.12 or KDE 3.4.2 is NICE looking. I haven’t spent much time on Gnome only because I’ve been using Gnome of a number of years and am forcing myself to use KDE.
OpenSuse also makes available a number of other window managers like xcfe, fvwm, Gnome, along with KDE. There are quite a few applications included in OpenSuse under KDE, such as KRPMBuilder for graphically building your own RPMs, Umberllo – a UML modeller, KTorrent – a BitTorrent Client, KWifiManager (which I don’t like too much), KMLDonkey – for P2P, a few RSS Readers like Akregator and Blam.
Package Management is handled through YaST along with most System level configurations. I think YaST is a great tool but I don’t like it for package management. Yum and Apt are so much easier to work with, script, find repositories for, etc….speaking of repositories, there aren’t that many good repositories for OpenSuse as there are for Fedora. It would be nice if RPM packagers would try to employ some logic in their RPM spec files so that the same spec file could build RPMs for OpenSuse, CentOS, Fedora, etc. I’ve done this for some custom applications I’ve written and it works very nicely on OpenSuse 10 and Fedora Core 4. Who knows how badly it will break when new versions come out but YaST for package management has to go!
Overall, OpenSuse is stable, offers some cutting edge applications like xen ( though it’s very difficult to get a virtual machine running ), all my standard applications work ( some with tweaking ). I like OpenSuse 10 on my IBM Thinkpad T40 and have no intentions of removing it. What I would like to do is get xen working so that I can run an instance of Fedora within OpenSuse
technorati tags: novell, opensuse, suse, linux, fedora, rpm, xen
Comments
2 responses to “OpenSuse 10 is solid!”
Distro is called SUSE Linux 10.
The project is called opensuse
more on moosy.blogspot.com
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out.