After the fights I had with 11.2, 11.3 has been a refreshingly simple
version for me but I have a couple of nagging little inconsistencies. Having
lots of disk space (for a change), I’ve tried 4 scenarios: clean install,
full install retaining /home, upgrade from 11.2 and upgrade from 11.1. I
have been using 11.1 since 11.2 left me unimpressed, to say the least but I
did have a usable installation of it from the evaluation testing I did.
Both 11.1 and 11.2 were up-to-date and had all the additional software I
wanted installed and configured. The reason for all the messing around has
been to preserve a substantial database environment if possible - it takes
forever to rebuild that blasted server!
Surprisingly, the totally clean install gave me the most grief. Getting the
Nvidia 6100 working was a real hassle as I have an issue with the BIOS
assigned IRQ and the automagic detection is unable to get display info from
the SMB bus. The clean install resulted in the vesa driver being used and
it took lots of monkeying around to get the Nvidia drivers to work.
Ugrading from a working 11.2 installation was reasonably straight forward.
Despite the IRQ issue, I at least got the nv driver installed to begin with
(I had the Nvidia driver running under 11.2 - finally) but I had problems
with getting anything higher than 1024x768 resolution, even after installing
the Nvidia drivers.
Upgrading from 11.1 actually worked the best. That upgrade step with 11.2
was a disaster so I was pleasantly surprised. The nv driver picked up the
1440x900 resolution I was using and carried it forward and installing the
Nvidia drivers went smoothly.
Now for the annoyances. Ignore the clean installs - both the totally clean
and retaining /home involved a lot of work even before I would have started
to re-install the apps.
11.2 upgrade was workable and simple except for fighting with the video.
What got lost were several Yast functions that got totally lost. sshd
config was no longer on the menu, for example, and I had to re-install the
item to get it back. There were a number of other similar omissions in the
result and I spent quite a while finding which ones had been missed. These
were all system/KDE components which were present in the 11.2 system but
missing from the update. All the custom add-ons were there and working
including menu items I had added to 11.2. Weird - only default items were
missing
The 11.1 upgrade was 100% functional but I am left with 3 questions.
-
The Configure Desktop->Default Applications item does not offer Konqueror
as a file manager option (personal preference, don’t like dolphin). How do
I get that back? -
The 11.1 upgrade enables compositing but none of the other processes make
it available. I’ve got several other machines to upgrade, most from 11.2,
so what would have made the difference and how do I get compositing on those
installations which claim it is not available? -
How do I get a merge of the custom menu items into the new default menu?
All the kickoff slabs are complete but the classic style menus aren’t being
updated with the 11.3 (KDE4) options.
–
Will Honea