10.0 Beta 4 Review

I installed Beta 4 on a desktop and 3 laptops and the results follow:

Desktop: Worked Fine

Dell 600m: Mostly good, but wireless doesn't work (uses intel pro 2200) card. I wonder if the ndis wrapper for the intel cards is not 100% open source, maybe that's why wireless support is not included.

Dell Latitude D610: Installation hangs on the first cd when starting yast. This is a new bug that did not occur in beta 3

Toshiba satellite P35: Same ial and fnfx conflict as in beta 3. After install, the system is unstable and prone to freezing.

For me, this release has been a step down from beta 3. I still think 10.0 will be pretty good, but not quite as good as 9.2 was. Whatever suse was doing to produce 9.2, they should do it with this release.

Well...I was disappointed with beta 3, but I just did a clean install of beta 4 and
have to say that it's working perfectly....all of the problems I had are gone...so
they are on the right track! I think that 10.0 will be dynamite!

Downloaded beta 4 but havn't installed yet. I hope my usb devices will work
maybe I'll plug in my mp3 player during install to make sure it's included in the fstab. I hear all the changes for this one are under the hood.

Yeah,
I guess it just depends on what hardware you're running. Also, it seems that when they fix a bug for one type of hardware, it introduces bugs for other types of hardware.

I was only planning to test a couple of the beta releases, but this beta testing has become a bit addicting. Strange how that works. Submitting good bug reports has been more difficult than I expected though, because of the amount of info the developers need for each bug.

I agree 10.0 will be pretty cool. There doesn't seem to be any major changes in 10.0 over 9.2/9.3, there's just lots of little improvements that make this release enjoyable to use. One example is how smooth and sharp the installer is. There are still a few bugs here and there, but the hardware detection is just awesome, no other linux distro that I've tried even comes close.

I think the unknown quantity that will determine whether this release is just good or excellent is multimedia support. Linspire is an american company that has to obey all the patent laws in the US, and they still managed to have pretty good multimedia support. We'll see what Suse comes up with in early October.

Out of curiosity, has anyone been able to get the intel ip2200 wireless cards working so far? I'm getting a bit frustrated that my dell 600m laptop wireless won't work.

Have you tried the "extra" apt repository at ftp.gwdg.de to see if a firmware or non-gpl module will work?

About the other comments, I don't think that there is ANYTHING revolutionary on 10.0, but incremental improvements as you say. I think that it will be a nice start to the new project and we might see some more interesting things in the 10.1 line...

Mutli-media hasn't been a problem AT ALL here as the apt repositories (Packman, especially) seems to have everything necessary to make it all work. The "base" repository also has all of the mad and other things. Packman carries a lot too, including libdvdcss2 (which you build yourself)....I'm anticipating that repo to fill up as we get closer to the actual release.

Either way, this distro is "mine" for a long time....I came from the Fedora side and was very impressed with SUSE starting at 9.1.

Have installed Beta4 this morning on IBM R40e (2684) in the hope to get the ACPI working. Regret this did not work so booting with ACPI=off.

There is a kernel patch for this but dont know why it isnt included!!

The rest seems to be good and I think the final release will be great if they continue the way they have so far.

I think that they are working on the patch. I had a bug with ACPI...NOT the operation, but a utdelete logging issue...at the TIME THAT BETA $ was being "spun"...they had that patch all opened up and were reworking part of it...so that might be why it didn't make it into the iso's. I think that they plan to patch the ACPI issues as soon as they can. I don't know this for sure, just speculation.

So far so good with beta 4 for me on my ASUS laptop (which plays nice with Linux anyway)...I'm putting more software on it from the repo's....ftp at gwdg is very slow today. I was reading where it's overloaded most of the time and they are working on that...getting more mirrors and things.

Suse is my favorite distro, hands down. 9.0 was my first serious excursion into Linux, and I've bought every copy since then just to support them.

Right now, though, Suse just doesn't play well with my laptop. I've tried it with 9.3 and 10.0 beta 4, and it's just not up to par. I'm getting ready to kill my beta4 setup and reinstall Ubuntu, but I'm hoping to switch back when they release 10.0 final. A month is too long for my laptop not to work.

There's two things I really like about Ubuntu that I'm hoping SuSE will adopt. The first is a one-cd install. It's ok to put out 5 cds, but make a base install fit on the first cd. Everything else can go later. The second thing I'd love is for Suse to officially support apt and synaptic. Both of these things are getting merged in from Super (along with the performance tweaks from Yoper... very cool), but they're not in and stable yet. Once they're official, look out world.

have someone the line of fstab for a sda removable device?
I need the one that do the automounting.

thanks