Karl wrote:I just switched my laptop from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE 10. Overall its pretty nice. I even found how to upgrade KDE to 3.5. I was amazed that everything on my laptop worked with no settings needed. Screen dimming, FN keys, etc... Ubuntu only had some of the keys work. And I had to hack at some scripts to get the screen to dim on battery.
Well, welcome to SuSE my friend
Just for information, there is no distribution called OpenSUSE, the distribution is called SUSE Linux and it's maintained by the openSUSE project.
Karl wrote:Now I'm wondering if I should have installed just SUSE Linux. I'm having trouble with my wireless card. I searched around and found the IPW2200 firmware can't be included with the OpenSUSE version so the left out support for it. I guess I could download and compile everything my self. But I think wireless support should be included.
Unless you're a Richard Stallman-style free software purist, then I suggest you install the so called "SUSE Linux 10.0 Evaluation edition", because it includes some proprietary kernel modules, packages like Opera, Flash, RealPlayer and the IPW drivers.
Karl wrote:I am a little confused because they label SUSE Linux as an Evaluation, but according to that article it never expires.
There are two versions of SUSE Linux 10.0:
SUSE Linux 10.0 Evaluation edition
SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS editon
The "evaluation"-label is just a label, it has nothing to do with the distribution you get. It's just a Novell way of naming, which I don't personally understand, but what the heck right?
The Evaluation includes, as I mentioned earlier, proprietary packages and plugins like Flash, RealPlayer, Opera, Sun Java and some drivers too.
The OSS edition, which by the way stands for
Open
Source
Software, includes ONLY open source software, 100% free of proprietary stuff.
Karl wrote:I do have one question for anyone using SUSE reguarding Yast. If I do a system update. And say my kernel gets updated. Then I decide I want to install the kernel sources, it puts in the old kernel sources then I have to go do a upgrade again. Am I missing something or is this just how it is done?
Yeah, it is a little tricky about that, which is something I hope they fix in a future release. But what you could do is just install the kernel-sources during the installation of SUSE Linux, that way you eliminate this problem entirely.
Karl wrote:Other than those 2 issues SUSE has been great.
Happy to hear that you like it!
P'ersonally, love SUSE Linux. I've been playing with it since version 8.2 and using it since version 9.1 , along with Mandrake 10.0, and using it as main distro since version 9.2
) and its pretty good. The one thing I liked most about 9.1 was the hardware detection and dialup program (back when I was on dialup), they really stood out from all the other distros which is probly why Novell decided to buy it.