It appears the kinks have been mostly worked out of the RC I tried previously. About the only reason I even considered turning away from Ubuntu/Xubuntu was because it could not properly communicate with my DVD-RW. I couldn’t play music CDs without lots of struggle, and could not burn anything at all to CD or DVD. Those are essential to my work, so it caused me to check openSUSE after the full release came out.
As you should expect, on this machine it was quite ready to go to work. I had to burn the DVD ISO on my wife’s Winbox, but it was worth it. The installation was pretty much finished and ready to use in about a half-hour. It took only a few moments to fight YaST over how to use my harddrive. I didn’t want to preserve anything but my separate Home partition. Once that speed bump was passed, it was pretty smooth sailing.
The first thing to fix was sound. As with Ubuntu, and just about any current distro and the Intel HDA onboard sound chipset, it required digging to find the proper incantation in the ALSA configuration. The canonical HOWTO is part of the SUSE Support Data Base: SDB:Intel-HDA sound problems. I find it somewhat foolish to bury the bundled documentation in the kernal source package, when it should be in the ALSA documents. So I had to install the kernel sources and inspect /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt. I already knew the codec was ALC888, found under the heading “ALC882/883/885/888/889” in the file. Similar to Ubuntu, there was a specific driver for the recent Dell Inspirons: 6stack-dell. To get this added in the right place, it was simple enough to use YaST > Hardware > Sound and edit the sound device listed there, adding that bit of information to the line for “board model.” Once I had that, YaST restarted the sound server automatically. As before, this took care of the issue of speakers playing when headphones were plugged in.
openSUSE didn’t have the problem with the GUI crashing when I played Aisleriot. I never did understand what the problem was with Ubuntu, nor did anyone else seem to know. I can also play music CDs without the struggle. Naturally, not all the nifty packages are available as with anything based on Debian, but I can build pretty much anything I want. You may want to check my previous test on the RC release on how to include extra repositories.
As noted with the RC of this release I chose not to accept the typical route to getting the extra codecs and Flashplayer, since I still see no reason to tolerate the reflexive jump to plastering 32-bit on a 64-bit OS. There are few bugs still, such as autowrap not working in Gvim, but I’ll get over it. Also, migrating my Thunderbird configuration meant renaming the folder from ~/.mozilla-thunderbird to ~/.thunderbird, but the version with SUSE works better. I note Ubuntu had crippled the Spidermonkey development package; you had to remove Firefox to get it. I prefer to have what little ECMAScript is implemented in building Elinks, and SUSE’s Packman does it right.
Otherwise, on this particular hardware, openSUSE 11.2 appears to be a keeper. I’ll surely report if something breaks down the road.
Update: One minor issue is Aisleriot no longer contains the original “bonded” card set, but is limited to some ugly stuff I can’t see clearly. I chased down the SVG file from an online source directory someone had open to the public, and downloaded the bonded.svg and copied it to /usr/share/gnome-games-common/cards/. Then, to make sure, I ran gconf-editor and modified the choice — apps > aisleriot > card_style — and changed it to “bonded”. Then when I opened the game, I got the old style cards back.
I use the Dirty-Ice color theme, and while I don’t care about using the underlying CleanIce engine, I get tired of error messages. So I chased down a source RPM to build it myself. It’s not to hard to use the standard /usr/src/package directories with rpmbuild -bb package.spec to get anything for which I can find an SRPM.
I’ve also built Xiphos, and that will be detailed in another post.
Update 2: I find Gnome-screensaver is broken every where I’ve tried it. This time it allowed my system to go down far enough it refused to wake up when I hit the keyboard or clicked the mouse. Sorry, GNOME, but it’s not a laptop. I killed and changed the command call in the start-up list to Xscreensaver.
