Here is my success story!

[newtosuse]

First, hello to everyone! I have been enjoying the fantastic help provided here on the forums and appreciate all of you who are so willing to counsel people new to suse, like myself.

I wanted to let you all know my story on how I got here. Several years ago I somehow got a set of Novell dvds for SUSE. Tried to install it, totally screwed up everything and quit. Disappointed in my own lack of understanding regarding linux, I attended a 10 week course for newbies via LUG. We loaded GENTOO, it was a lot of fun and I learned the absolute very basics, sort of. After the 3rd week, my son was born and yet again, I had abandoned linux never completing the course. This was about 11 years ago.

Fast forward to today. Of course, the very same child that stopped my linux progression then, has now got got me started back into it. Through his unmonitored websurfing, he attracted the fake windows xp security virus. That virus was so much fun (joking of course), that out of pure frustration I decided right then to revisit linux after all these years. Despite my fear of blowing up the computer at install like I did so many years ago, I tried it again.

I am very pleased to say that I have successfully loaded SUSE 11.2 on an older Compaq and even my Dell Latitude D505 intel 855GM. Both computers were running with all the additional programs I wanted and both installed in well under an hour.

I am very happy with the ease of installation, and both computers are running better than ever! WOW! Thank you SUSE community!

With such a positive experience, I have already started turning friends to opensuse. I look forward to being on this forum. And I have already resolved some minor problems through all of your collective experience. Thank you again!

[ken_yap]

Well done and welcome to the forums. Have a nice time here and have a lot of fun with your openSUSE installs.

[rob_h]

newtosuse
Welcome along to the openSUSE forums. Again, well done for your successful return to Linux.

[newtosuse]

Thank you Ken and Rob! I have already learned quite a bit here. Again I appreciate all of your guidance and input!

[consused]

Welcome here. Nice story, and good to hear about your success with 11.2, so now you can enjoy the distro and keeping it up to date. I never tried Gentoo, but heard they source good documentation for "newto" users. Enjoy your time in the forum.

[ZStefan]

I am very pleased to say that I have successfully loaded SUSE 11.2.

Check the success of the installation in the following ways (apart from hardware issues).

See if you can play dvds.

See if the clock works at Clock Applet

See if you can play videos from Yahoo News.


If any of these does not work, the installation cannot be declared fully successful.

[newtosuse]

ZStefan thank you for providing some good testing ground. Ok, here is what I found out.

Clock Applet is not showing.

DVD - sound skips in Totem (and screen messes up when going to full screen), Video skips in VLC, however the dvd played great with SMplayer.

Yahoo News and Youtube played fine. However Hulu has choppy video and gets worse at full screen in all browsers, FF, Chromium and Opera.

The above is referencing the Dell Latitude D505, I have not taken this test with the Compaq yet.

Any help on resolution would be appreciated. I am going to try to figure out the Clock Applet now.

Thanks again ZStefan. I look forward to any help on the Hulu issues and others.

[ZStefan]

I am using some other version, so the following may be approximate or too much, too safe.

Install a bunch of java packages, and a bunch of plugin packages (search). Verify that Firefox is 64 bit. Among java packages and plugin packages, prefer the 64 bit ones, if possible. Install IcedTea Java Web Browser Plugin. Rename (to save) the folder ~/.mozilla/firefox Delete and re-install the firefox. Reboot. Check the clock again.


If the dvds play with smplayer, that's ok; consider done. I prefer to use kaffeine from KDE3.

If hulu plays choppy, it is likely because the processors or the graphics card are fully loaded and still cannot provide enough throughput. Monitor the CPU usage during play.