Here’s what I have found; feel free to add as appropriate:
** ATI Drivers**: What you get with a Radeon chipset during install, is pretty much what you are left with. Updating the kernel module via Yast produces an error that Kysn is a missing dependency (unfindable anywhere, although it will offer ksynoops which doesn’t solve the problem), and trying to install either the 10.4 or 10.5 proprietary drivers d/l from ATI produces (essentially) a “cannot be installed with this version of your OS”. Dunno about Nvidia drivers, perhaps someone can comment.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem if the GPL’s Radeon driver, that is installed, wasn’t such a slug. I had to immediately turn off all desktop effects/compositing before I started to throw ugly, large and very damaging things at my LCD screen. Decent computer – ATI 4770, AMD 550be @ 3.6 GHz, 2 gigs RAM. Result: no testing possible of d/t effects, etc.
Multimedia Formats: Unless you are prepared to do a lot of work, you are SOL with respect to playing restricted multimedia formats through Banshee/Totem. MP3’s don’t work, which is my elementary test. Trying to install VLC (either current or nextgen preview) from Packman or opensuse fails. Ditto Mplayer.
Installing RPMs: There’s a bug (I think) that I put on Bugzilla, re: zypper when you use Nautulis’ Add/Remove or Install software right-clicks on .rpms that you have downloaded. My (non-techie) take is that when trying to install this way, zypper creates a temporary directory of the expanded payload and, somehow during the process, determines that since the directory that it just created now “already exists”, there’s a problem and refuses to install it. Result = uninstalled .rpms.
These issues alone really put a crimp in testing the RC for real world/usable scenarios, which probably isn’t what the developers wanted when they put out this candidate for broad testing. What were they thinking of? Surely not just to be satisfied that everyone could simply boot the LiveCDs?
Ati proprietary fglrx drivers might not work with factory xorg-x11-server 7.5_1.8.0-8.5.
Talk to ati.amd.com about this issue. Nvidia.com is faster adapting: I cannot detect any problem!
For getting vlc and other codecs to work from packman:
Put higher than default 99 of factory.repo in your /etc/zypp/repos.d/packman.repo , e.g.:
priority=11
Factory is faster in development than Packman. If therefore you use a higher priority you’ll get the older but working libs needed for Packmans vlc!
You might want to check on the third party repository
(packman) in the factory repository and the Multimedia sticky
Yes, I’m aware of the sticky and have used it before. But my objective this time was just to install VLC, and that doesn’t work (missing dependencies), either from Suse or VLC repositories. I also didn’t find Factory/Packman as you suggested … perhaps you could point it out to me? In the meantime I installed the various gstreamer items and the old wonder-rpm, w32*** (etc).
Since I usually delete Banshee and Totem (and Amarok and similar junk in KDE), and use VLC pure and simple, my focus is on pointing out VLC shortcomings in 11.3rc1.
Ati proprietary fglrx drivers might not work with factory xorg-x11-server 7.5_1.8.0-8.5.
The standard OSS/Non-OSS fglrx items presented in Software Management don’t work either (missing dependencies). The downloadable ATI proprietary stuff I could understand, but if there’s items in the standard zypper libraries that are erroneous/don’t work, then I assume the developers would like to know. And that’s what I did. Not on Bugzilla, though … hardly that type of issue, and putting it here lets other folks facing the same issue, know about it.
There is nothing related with fglrx in factory. If so, you did not convert all of your
/etc/zypp/repos.d/*.repo
Mixing releases is not a great idea if you don’t know for sure what you are doing…
And every upgrade of factory might be like a dist-upgrade only working
when using “zypper dup”
but NOT “zypper up”
Packman example with higher than default 99 priority and only upgrading when done “zypper ref” before:
