I was just about to install 10.2 on my notebook this weekend, when I see 10.3 is out.

But wow, does it download slow!

How stable is 10.3? Anyone running it? My notebook is a AMD 65 Turion, so I'm downloading openSUSE-10.3-RC1-DVD-x86_64-iso.

Also, I'm wanting to dual boot the preinstalled Vista. What are the tricks here? Is the SuSE grub going to wipe out my Vista boot? I'm also looking at neosmart, but the docs on it's server aren't coming up.

What have you all heard about 10.3?

Someone kicked the server. The download is flying now!

stop the download - the final version (GM) of 10.3 is released today. The RC version is a not 100% finished version.

I wouldn't spend time downloading the RC because the gold master for 10.3 was officially released today. A lot of mirrors seem to be a slow at the moment, so probably downloading via bittorrent would be a better option.

Thanks guys! I must have got in right before the GM release. I'm now downloading:

openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-x86_64-iso

I'm using KTorrent. It always seems kind of slow to me. I'm on a DSL, but my downloads speed now is < 10 KB/s. Not that it's a problem.

What's the buzz on 10.3? I'm posing here from 10.2

I found that if I go into YaST-Security-Firewall and in allowed services (something like that)hit advanced, and put 4444 6881:6889 in the box, KTorrent speeded up a great deal. Don't choose any services in the drop-down or you'll have unnecessary open ports. It's still a risk but you can always just go back in there and return that advanced box to its original blank state when you're not torrenting.

Oh yes, 10.3 is great! Lot's of easier one-click types of installations of various extra things are available and even a Community Repos section in YaST Software to add a bunch of repos and one-click install some of the most used things for you. RC1, updated to the GM packages that I'm going to erase and start fresh with the new DVD anyway, has been stable and running all the stuff I normally run.

Add the sources before the installation, like it asks if you want to, and you'll get the few fixes without needing to upgrade later and also get the latest Kernel without needing to go through the sometimes troublesome Kernel upgrade process. It'll just install the latest one from the oss repo instead of the one on the DVD. The NVidia driver builds perfectly with it (but make sure you install the source, gcc stuff, etc before doing the NVidia install).

I know I'm liking it!

It won't take you 63 days, no. Absolutely not.

Take it from me, I'm on 28.8K dialup, and using Kget I can download an ISO in about a week, sometimes less, depending on ISP load, etc. NOTE - this is for ONE ISO, so if you're needing multiple CD's it will take longer.
I think I have the slowest www connection on the planet

no it wont. look over the partitioning options thoroughly.
as for what ive heard...
http://news.opensuse.org/?p=400

I used Vista to set up my partitions. Vista has some nice disk management stuff. It wouldn't shrink the Vista partition quite as much as I wanted, but I ended up with a 40 gb Vista partition, a 20 gb partition I want to put SuSE 10.3 on. A 10 gb partion I want to use to experiment with other Linux distors, and then a 70gb partition I plan to share between all the OS's as a ext3 partition.

I booted on a 10.2 SuSE install DVD, and it saw all the partitions, except it called the Vista partition "Windows".

So you think I could just finish up the install and Vista will boot from the SuSE boot menu?

Those 10.3 features look really nice. I"m particularly interested in the 3d desktop.

Thank you!The tips on installation will come in very handy.

I have a cisco pix box I use as a firewall. I opened up those ports on it with these commands:

access-list acl_out permit tcp any host (outside ip) eq 6881
access-list acl_out permit udp any host (outside ip) eq 4444
access-list acl_out permit udp any host (outside ip) eq 6881

It does seem to have speeded it up, from 10K/bs to maybe 50K/bs, but of course that's nowhere near my max of 600.

Still, I wonder how ktorrent worked before?

It could be the ISP bottlenecking known torrent ports. It could be just that for these particular torrents they're coming from slower servers or have less seeders.

I've run the gamut from slow torrents to fast on the same configurations. It's hard to tell which are the reasons sometimes.

I really went nuts with OpenSUSE 10.3 GM. I added just about all the Build Service repositories for getting constant newer versions of things. Not the really experimental ones, but I did the xorg 7.3 upgrade, KDE, Gnome Stable, and the community and backports of both, and even installed CyberOrg's git repo for Compiz Fusion. It's got a lot more features in the plugins as well as others that work better since they've been working on all that eye candy stuff. I had been used to GIT Compiz Fusion on Debian. I only have to still do without Fusion Icon since his repo for that had dependency issues installing over his other GIT repo (he's got 2, plus the normal X11/XGL one). I had to tell YaST to keep the XGL patterns but that it was okay to trash the normal compiz stuff. Touch and go. But it ended up working great!

It was really touch and go figuring out how to put all the usual Packman versions of things like gstreamer. That turned out okay too. I needed to jump through some hoops but I figured it out. Telling it that it's okay to use different architectures helps. People who want to use the new recommended Fluendo mp3 setup will have it easier, but I wanted all the Packman versions of the programs, the xine stuff, and the Gstreamer stuff like I always had. I needed to get rid of Totem Plugin, replacing it later with Totem Browser Plugin, and once that's installed deleting all the libtotem complex plugins from all the systems browser plugin, Firefox plugins and my home's mozilla folder to keep RealPlayer handling that stuff. And Packman gives us totem-xine, along with Kaffeine, Amarok, etc. Mplayer, the w32 codecs, and some more crap later and I'm all set.

Oh! The NVidia driver on the actual NVidia YaST repo actually works, even after upgrading to xorg 7.3. It survived a full xorg upgrade after it had been already running with all the standard oss stuff. The driver downloaded from NVidia wouldn't have been able to do that without a reinstall, if then. If anything it works better after upgrading xorg.

Even after my surgery this thing is fully stable and so far all the stuff I use works great. The printer took some figuring out. I had to go to YaST's user management and add myself to the lp group.

Anyway, I'm having a great time with it. Now that mostly all I normally install along with all my files is on here I can relax a bit.

I'm downloading 10.3 and am stuck in a time warp.
10 hours ago, ktorrent said 5 hours to go. Now it says 2 hours. Running about 1 minute "torrent time" for every 10 real time minutes. My inbound and outbound were abot 40kbytes/s each. Now its about 4Kbytes down, 30Kbytes up.

Almost every peer shows as chocked/snub. Demand is high. Ktorrent is showing 3 leechers for every seeder (not much different than 10 hours ago). The speed issues are probably just the reality of the situation. On the plus side, I can surf and listen to music without affecting the pokey 10.3 download rate.

Thanks for the advice in paragraph 3! I was wondering what to do there.

I started Thursday and it was still running last night. And I have a 600 down DSL. Right now ktorrent says I have 110 peers uploading 10.3.

For anyone interested, Packman upgraded some of his gstreamer packages today so that they have newer version numbers than the official OpenSUSE ones. Now the upgrades and multimedia setups should go more easily. I had needed to downgrade to the Packman ones to make the whole gstreamer in synch with each other. I figured those things should all come from the same place.

Still can't believe that NVidia driver from the repo automatically adjusted to a later upgrade of the whole Xorg to 7.3. It's behaving itself in all my games and even a 3D screensaver program in Wine. And Compiz from git (CyberOrg's repo) works nicely with it.

Heh heh. OpenOffice.org has the same problem as I had with Shame's git repo on Debian. The closing of a document has that question if you want to save any modifications you know. On the normal X11/XGL repo's Compiz Fusion it's the normal small question box size. On git Compiz Fusion it's a huge full screen with the little question in just one part of it. It's a weird thing to see but clicking not to save or save works normally. Just looks weird being all big and all.

And don't forget that if you want K3b to have mp3 ability you need Packman's K3b plugin pack. If you upgrade K3b that uninstalls the extra pack so you need to install that again. And don't forget transcode and normalize. I even install eMovix from compiling just so I have everything it wants, then I add its codecs manually as well. I want my system to do everything! (Not that I ever made an eMovix disk.)