I had briefly tried RHEL3, Mandrake, & Suse 9.1 Pro on my DT systems [AMD 939 nForce mainboards], but never really did much other than a few card games. So as a NEW SUSE user;
I am happy w/ 10.1 from recent dl of DVD iso so far. Am 3x boot, XP, Vista ULTIMATE, Suse 10.1, maybe try 10.2a3!! I will try 10.1, 32 & 64 bit on my DT systems, want to see how AMD FX60x2 on TYAN S2865 server board w/ LINUX settings in BIOS really works, if any stable OC CPU/RAM cabilities > XP.

It has fairly good HW support for Asus Z71V. Being new to actually using Linux, vs trying to load & wondering what good is this OS, I was able to get on-line fairly quickly once I figured out I had turned OFF Intel 2915 in XP. So I turned back on in XP, & verified signal worked. Return 10.1, few clicks later & I was connecting.

KnetworkMgr is as easy as USR or Intel Pro to use, except for it would be nice to have known how to turn WiFi back on in 10.1. May figure it out looking around sys tray area. BUT it appears Suse/Konq SLOWER than XP/FF!

Power mgt has me @ 500MHz Max Batt, do not know if UV. In xp `Notebook Hardware Control 2.0 pr3' allows me to UV my Pentium M 725 Vcore from .988 to .700 @ 6x, but still @ 798 MHz [had 313MHz once, not sure how]. Must experiment like to regain some battery life in Suse, lost ~15min when using 2nd / OD bay batt.

1.Where do I find AR5006XS WiFi, as Atheros site doesn't seem to list any drivers for it (XP or !*)?

2. No HD Realtek audio yet, 3D graphics, or card reader. Did not understand use of adding media when a new install starts, but thought all extra added CD stuff is on DVD, would load automatically!

3. Have not installed any upgrades, not sure how to, other posts indicate go SMART!

4. Any patches for Audigy 2 ZS NB pcmcia Sound card? Or is that why so many used R 4 sale!
I had some card games in 9.1 and a moon phase program that can't find yet in 10.1, may try loading from the old 9.1 Pro DVD.

SuSE 10.1 ended my devotion to SuSE for good. I went to Ubuntu 6.06 and am very happy. If you do the same, install the 32 bit version even on a 64 bit machine. There are some key 32 bit aps like Flash Player that are difficult to run with a 64 bit kernel. There's a package called EasyUbuntu that will take of installing all the proprietary drivers for video, DVD, MP3 and etc.

My first attempt to install 10.1 was thwarted by a bug in the installer that crashed hardware recognition for my mobo. Installing 10.0 and upgrading to 10.1 worked well. I held off installing until the updater problems (someone at Novell should walk the plank for that one!) had been resolved and I have no complaints there.
I don't use WiFi or non-free media files so I can't comment on that side of things, but Audacity, which I use frequently, is severely compromised - the record and playback volume controls don't do anything, preference changes only seem to work after a reboot, there are no input and output source selectors, and, worse, the cursor runs ahead of the recording by about double speed.
Otherwise 10.1 is a significant improvement on Fedora Core 4. Everything else works well, though KMail/Kontact wasted a ridiculous amount of screen space until reconfigured.
So long as OpenSUSE supports KDE properly I expect to stay with it through future upgrades.

I just did a clean install with 10.1. It only took me all weekend. The install went fine until I did an Online Update. When I rebooted, all of the sudden Grub was messed up. I finally got so frustrated, I reformatted and tried to re-install 10.0. Just wasn't my day, it messed up on the final hardware configuration and my graphics card monitor combination ended up going to a black screen everytime the KDE desktop loaded. The next time I reinstalled 10.1 it messed up Grub again, but by now I new how to manually fix it. Right now my system seems happy and stable. I ran the full online update and it didn't blow up in my face. I hear a lot of people complaining about installing new software. I find if I right click a RPM file and choose "open with software installer", it works fine.

Ah! I had forgotten that one. I first tried installing 10.1 on a PC with three other distros on it, so I filled in the instructions to place its GRUB on the 10.1 partition, so I could chain to it. The install did this, but it also replaced the MBR GRUB, which was a bit of a nuisance as it did not find my main "working" Fedora Core which was on a different drive. Fortunately I had notes from the Fedora install, which failed to load GRUB at all, on how to load it manually.
Having played around with 10.1 and worked out a migration strategy, including how to make KMail usable (the default setup is pathetic), I installed it standalone on a new PC, the old one suffering from a few hardware problems.
Kontact/KMail, once sorted, is a real improvement on Evolution, the only thing I miss is multiple signatures. But if I had not used an experimental install to work out how to tidy it up before committing myself to the migration, I would be using Thunderbird. Do the KMail packagers ever try and use the default version? So much space is taken up with icons and empty space that there is not enough left for the message window and the mailbox tree. Otherwise lots of great features.

I tried again....and again.... and finally I'm extremely satisfied with openSuse 10.1. However the update process, and hence a vital part of the installer is horribly broken.

I found this at aich tee tee pee ://en.opensuse.org/Download

sorry about the aich tee tee pee but board rules prevent me from posting links until I have made 1 more post. Then of course you will be directed to porno ad pop ups, money harvesting, browser hijacking, toolbar stealing, trojaned, flash animations and my ebay shop


And here aich tee tee pee://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-security-announce/2006-Jun/0004.html I found this


Also there is a link aich tee tee pee://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ZEN-Update_System_problem_in_10.1 to advice on fixing the Zen updater

So they knowingly shipped it with a major and vital tool broken...incredibly bad/stupid decision. "Performance and memory useage is not optimal"

Not optimal????????!!!!! It's freaking outrageous!!!!

Novell's work around is not exactly ideal. Of course they have to promote their own tools that don't work even after being patched, even though there is a superb non-default alternative. The best thing is during the install process to choose to install Smart and uninstall ZMD. Ignore the offer to update during the install and on completion use Smart to collect and install the official updates before updating Smart itself and configuring it for use with the 3rd party repositories. You are now in business with a brilliant distribution, but they make it as difficult as possible to get to the point where you realise you have something fantastic!

Having been using this distro for a little while (and having also played with Debian Etch, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Mandriva meanwhile) I love it. If you have beagle running the performance stinks but once you disable this, and other services you don't use, it is surprisingly lightweight. I found it uses a tiny amount more RAM than Debian on my notebook. However I believe the difference is accounted for mostly by the pieces of hardware that I couldn't get working under Debian and hence used no resources Xubuntu, with it's supposedly lightweight minimalist XFce environment, used at least as much RAM as openSuse but with inferior hardware support. Stock Ubuntu seemed similar, better hardware recognition, even more hungry for RAM. As for Mandriva I'm not sure I've ever owned a monitor or notebook whose screen it could tolerate. bleh.

I unfortunately stumbled into one serious unfixed bug that could leave a new user bewildered enough to re-install or at least delete his/her user account and start over with a new one (and then have lots of fun with directory/file permissions): if you use Gnome desktop and open a KDE application as root from the terminal using su your ICE authority file becomes assigned to root and on next login you can't log in as user. You have to log in as root again and delete all ICE files in home/user/ and reboot. This bug was attributed to K3b and Novell claimed to have it fixed but actually it happens with numerous KDE apps and still occurs on a fully up to date system. Novell also claim that if you use gnomesu this will not occur but in fact it does.


Ok enough moaning, pretty much everything else is 1st class. If Novell were not so dumb as to knowingly ship a distribution with a severely broken package manager that will possibly never perform as intended in 10.1 then they would have avoided a lot of bad press and received the praise due to them for getting everything else so right. They should be a little more forthcoming about the fix, swallow their pride and actually advise people to use alternative package managers until 10.2 appears with all this stuff fixed....it will be, right?


edit: one other potential stumbling block: openSuse uses ipv6. It doesn't run alongside ipv4. If the ipv6 module loads at boot then ipv4 is disabled. If you are behind a router that is administered by someone else and they disable ipv6 you are pretty much screwed until you figure out how to stop the ipv6 module loading at boot. Once you have done this ipv4 runs by default and once again you are back in the happy world where domain names are resolved and you can fully enjoy your internet connection. It would be more sane to be able to run the two protocols side by side instead of either/or. A certain other globally dominant OS does this by default so I know it's possible (I'm sorry and slightly disgusted with myself for mentioning it but is true, please don't beat me).

Its amazing that SuSE 10.1 is still broken. Its been quite a while since it launched. You were probably referring to the distro SuSE drove me to -- Ubuntu.

Novell must have done something with the 10.1 distribution I installed. During the install process it had a step where it "configured" online updater. It took a long time and watching my hub/router, it was obvious it was downloading something. At any rate when I got to the desktop, the taskbar updater didn't want to work right, but when I went into YAST2 and run online update it worked fine. (other than it screwed up GRUB so upon rebooting 10.1 wouldn't load.) After booting with the install CD and choosing "boot installed system" I fixed GRUB and everything settled down. I ended up running online update several times before it picked up all of the patches. Now the taskbar icon works fine and my system seems happy.

You got lucky

It seems they have now set it up so initially it downloads only libzypp update as a fix for the package manager problem. It has a side benefit: previously it would try to download all patches and update all selected packages. This could mean a really enormous downoad and an install process that grows from 45 minutes aprox. into several hours, unless your download speed is several megabits.

I did a lot of openSuse installs trying to figure out if there is a repeatable method that works (there is, but it certainly isn't Novell's procedure) and I'd say you have maybe a 10 or 20% chance of the install process updater succeeding. I prefer to know the install process is going to work and that I will have a working package manager.

At least with the recent change your updater fails much faster than before and so saves some time

Outstanding distro!
Never has Novell come with anithing better! Love it

I upgraded from ancient SuSE 9.0 to 10.1 about 3 months ago. As an upgrade over that distance, it did not surprise me that a few things broke (like not recognizing the existence of the mouse). It also killed a few apps on the way in, and I could no longer play any video. It tried to downgrade my Firefox to a lower version too - very odd. The biggest surprise was not getting the M in LAMP (no MySQL, or it just declined to install it).

Sensible thing, in retrospect, might have been to install it fresh rather than as an upgrade. But it is working and I was able to reinstall/fix most of the missing stuff. Overall, I am happy with SuSE 10.1.

Lesson learned: Keeping up with new releases is a better idea than letting it slide for years.

Good point! I also upgraded at first, but it screwed up some things. So I went with clean install

I just built a new system and installed 10.1 and I'm please to say I'm really happy with it. Sure I had some issues with online updating, but after updating a few times thru YOU it seems to be stable now. I like the overall presentation and might even say that I'm impressed.

I know some people have bitched about the Zen updater and thinks that they should have not tried to improve on YOU, but I don't mind that there trying to improve it. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and will hold my judgement until the tool is mature.

So a thumbs up from me.

i had an opposite experience. poor wifi support in suse 10.0 for me it didn't work well with our security settings even after running the intel firmare updates. 10.0 also had really poor support for my laptops intel video chipset only allowing a maximum 800 x 600 resolution, even after trying to get sax2 to force the settings to no avail did it work.

Installed SUSE 10.1 those problems were fixed, and my laptop runs pretty well. I can print via IP to LDAP and iprint printers, but the novell client doesn't run as well as I would like it to. Funny since Novell owns Suse.

We run netware servers at my job and it is kind of a pain to actually mount netware shares via linux, and the gui is not very intuitive when configuring this type of thing.

Overall, I like 10.1 but I think there is definite room for improvement

I am also a KDE man myself, I prefer it over gnome.

I doubt anyone feels that things can never be improved. The people who have "bitched" are actually complaining about something that Novell shipped even though they knew it to be broken. Novell even use the word broken. If it was something trivial then maybe no big deal but to knowingly ship a distro with broken package management and a broken update tool is well worth complaining about.

If you installed in the last few days then it seems like Novell have implemented a change to the install process' online update which helps (you say you had to update "a few times thru YOU" to achieve stability. Mildly inconvenient but this is a massive improvement, believe me. If you'd done the install a few weeks or months ago probably you'd have been "bitching" hard