Dell Vostro 3500 openSUSE 11.2 liveCD KDE

caf4926 · November 1, 2010, 10:49am

Thanks to @oldcpu, he is a master researcher and trawler of the net

Yes, we sure kick some butt

oldcpu · November 1, 2010, 10:59am

The openSUSE community is one of the main reasons I have stuck with openSUSE all these years. That and the packages of the Packman packagers.

Reference openSUSE, I’m not sure your back ground. Some notes on openSUSE repositories:

OSS - this is the main “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository, open source software only.
Non-OSS - this is another “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository, but in this case it contains non free (as in freedom) software, such as Flashplayer, Java, Opera, IPW-firmware, RealPlayer etc.
Update - this is the “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository for official security and bugfix updates for both OSS and Non-OSS packages
Packman - this is the LARGEST of the “non-official, openSUSE community” repositories, and it offers various additional packages for openSUSE. Highly recommended to add !!

Those are the only 4 repositories I recommend to new users. There are MANY dozen others, but installing more can cause problems wrt sorting dependencies and one can even run into incompatibilities/problems with packaged applications from OTHER repositories as they will not get the same level of testing as one will see on OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. For example packages from the videolan repository are known to have problems with packages from the Packman repository, and visa versa. Hence I typically recommend that users do not keep the videolan repository enabled.

Note also “zypper”, the command line updater for software, is VERY good. Some guidance here: SDB : Zypper usage 11.3 - openSUSE

glistwan · November 1, 2010, 11:08am

oldcpu:

The openSUSE community is one of the main reasons I have stuck with openSUSE all these years. That and the packages of the Packman packagers.

Reference openSUSE, I’m not sure your back ground. Some notes on openSUSE repositories:

OSS - this is the main “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository, open source software only.

Non-OSS - this is another “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository, but in this case it contains non free (as in freedom) software, such as Flashplayer, Java, Opera, IPW-firmware, RealPlayer etc.

Update - this is the “official” SuSE-GmbH managed openSUSE repository for official security and bugfix updates for both OSS and Non-OSS packages

Packman - this is the LARGEST of the “non-official, openSUSE community” repositories, and it offers various additional packages for openSUSE. Highly recommended to add !!

Those are the only 4 repositories I recommend to new users. There are MANY dozen others, but installing more can cause problems wrt sorting dependencies and one can even run into incompatibilities/problems with packaged applications from OTHER repositories as they will not get the same level of testing as one will see on OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. For example packages from the videolan repository are known to have problems with packages from the Packman repository, and visa versa. Hence I typically recommend that users do not keep the videolan repository enabled.

Note also “zypper”, the command line updater for software, is VERY good. Some guidance here: SDB : Zypper usage 11.3 - openSUSE

Thanks. I know that already. I’ve been using openSUSE for something like half a year on the other ASUS laptop.
I started off with 11.2 and than did a version upgrade using zypper dup (worked like charm btw).
I especially like the switch vendor function in the GUI for zypper.
I also have the latest KDE stable repo and mozilla build service enabled. Never had any problems caused by package incompatibilities whatsoever.

caf4926 · November 1, 2010, 11:21am

Just a small point
Not being Picky - But I’m fairly sure Real Player is not there any longer.
It’s not even needed these days, thank goodness.

oldcpu · November 1, 2010, 11:29am

Ahh … could be … I just copied and pasted from a repository wiki …

But if you look here at that wiki: Package repositories - openSUSE … you will see the wiki is also out of date for “NON-OSS” for RealPlayer.

iamtuxmeister13 · March 25, 2011, 9:38pm

I know this Thread is a little old but i am reviving it for the sake of an issue that I had, and found this thread describing it exactly.

OpenSuSE 11.4 and the Vostro 3500 has the same “black screen of death” symptom after installing.

 The problem is the default screen resolution of the vostro (3400/3500) 1366x768 is not properly supported in graphical boot. The simple solution is to remove the vga=mode-0x317 vga=0x317 from the kernel line. this will force a text mode boot until the windows manager loads and then Xorg can handle the strange screen res.

Great news overall all hardware has support accept for the fingerprint reader ( the manufacturer is working on linux support for sometime later 2011). 64-bit mode is stable I have no complaints.

caf4926 · March 26, 2011, 5:15am

iamtuxmeister13:

I know this Thread is a little old but i am reviving it for the sake of an issue that I had, and found this thread describing it exactly.

OpenSuSE 11.4 and the Vostro 3500 has the same “black screen of death” symptom after installing.
 The problem is the default screen resolution of the vostro (3400/3500) 1366x768 is not properly supported in graphical boot. The simple solution is to remove the vga=mode-0x317 vga=0x317 from the kernel line. this will force a text mode boot until the windows manager loads and then Xorg can handle the strange screen res.
Great news overall all hardware has support accept for the fingerprint reader ( the manufacturer is working on linux support for sometime later 2011). 64-bit mode is stable I have no complaints.

Thanks for the update