brief note about 11.1 install experiences

Just a quick summary of my 11.1 experience on my workhorse.

New install on new machine, x86_64 dual core Athlon, 4GB RAM, 2x750GB SATA disks in software RAID-1. EXT3 and XFS filesystems.

Installed from DVD. No drama, although I had to run through some hoops to get the installer to accept the disks which had already been partitioned, RAIDed, and /home already had some data on it from a test install of 11.0

I run quite a few services on my machine: postfix, dovecot, apache2, mysql, squid, nfs, samba, ldap, dhcp, tftp; so I took some time to transfer the configurations from the old machine and get the services up and running first.

Copying the GBs of data from old machine over a tar/netcat connection (didn’t want the overhead of ssh) took a few hours so I did that overnight (I have Gb NICs but no Gb switch). Rsync took care of the last minute diffs.

No issues with video card, I chose a model which had been on the market for some time (Radeon 2400). In any case, I don’t need fancy video as I’m usually in front of a thin-client anyway.

Sound was a bit trickier. The documentation was the main problem. I thought I needed an alc889a driver and spent some time looking for it, but finally realised from the ALSA docs that snd-intel-hda was the right one, just needed a couple of module options. Better documentation on the model= option would be good. After fiddling with the sliders and the very useful speaker-test ALSA util, got that to work.

Flashplayer just worked. Though I note I’m still using 32-bit flash plugin with nspluginwrapper. Should try the 64-bit one sometime.

Restricted formats worked after I installed the extra software from the third-party repos.

Esound to my thin client worked after I installed libxine1-esd.

Had the DVD device ownership problem like everyone else.

A couple of troubling freezes, but maybe it was because I was fiddling with the network cables and KVM cables. So far it’s been running solidly for 12 hours.

Boy those Mozilla apps are memory hungry. Firefox and Thunderbird have virtual footprints of 500MB each. Resident footprint is more like 100MB each. Always has been so, wonder what that’s all about, should research.

Webserver, PHP, Rails, seem fine. Haven’t execised SMB much. Not likely to do much with GUI file management, prefer the CLI for that.

Found that some packages, like cacti, are not in the main repos any more and need to be located using the build service. A trend?

KDE4 improved. Finally it remembers that I had more than one Konsole window open in the previous session.

Generally satisfied, about the level of hassle I expect to have from a new release, but I can understand that some people have had less than satisfactory experiences.

But I still haven’t figured out how to sort desktop icons by name. :frowning:

Forgot one other slight glitch. I entered a static nameserver in YaST but yet it didn’t write it to /etc/resolv.conf. Something to do with the newfangled netconfig. I tried the suggestion in /etc/resolv.conf to edit /etc/sysconfig/network/config, but that didn’t work so I just edited /etc/resolv.conf manually, which disabled netconfig. Will have to research now netconfig is supposed to work.

You have a good point here.

I once saw a Ubuntu table with a list of laptops, their sound hardware audio codec, and the model option (and any other special tweaks) that need be applied. Sort of like the openSUSE HCL but dedicated to sound, and a far nicer format. Of course, I immediately lost the link and could never find it again.

But I think we could use something like that on openSUSE, where we take all the ALSA-Configuration.txt file entries (or as many as we can) and assign them to a big list of various laptops, motherboards, sound cards … etc … (I don’t quite have the format worked out).

Of course, the big problem then is trying to populate the table with any degree of accuracy.

Sounds (ahem…:)) like a job for a wiki…

Amazing how it’s gone: each new release of suse/linux/Windows needs more overhead!
I resurrected an old pc of mine which had RedHat7 isos. It all fitted on 3 cds and could do a complete install on less than 500 meg with more than enough room for /home and your personal data!
I started in the age of 1200 baud modems, tight code and text messages with everything on a bbs. Why is it that now every new release of s/ware or os is more memory and processor hungry than ever?
My notebook upgrade from 11.0 to 11.1 works but lots of things don’t work on upgrade - ldap for one.
A bit disappointed that I had to compile/install ati drivers for my desktop pc because there is no 11.1 ati repo.

Actually you’ll have to ask Mozilla about that. I suspect those apps will cache as much in virtual memory as they can. As far as total footprint is concerned, it’s around 500MB. Same if you go with Kubuntu or any other KDE distro. To make a sizable reduction you would have to use leaner GUI apps. No, not GNOME, that is pretty hefty too, but something like openbox for the WM, and different browsers than you’ve been used to.

You can reduce the footprint drastically to about 100MB for a text only install, and that is appropriate for a server, but who would want to go back to those days for the desktop. It would take me twice as long to compose this message. And thanks, but I don’t want to go back to 1200 baud modems, I like my broadband connection.

Good old days are only good because we forget the bad old days.

Below is a URL that might be the table I was thinking of, although this version is in French (and not English) … The table has gaps, as I know of codecs / laptops not covered … and I think the table could be expanded from Laptop’s to motherboards and sound cards …
audio_intel_hda - Documentation Ubuntu Francophone

Here is a different Ubuntu URL, this one in English, but without the table I don’t think it is as readable as the French version.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gutsy_Intel_HD_Audio_Controller

I’m wondering if after I get back from vacation (I leave in 2 days for a 2.5 week vacation) if I should create such a page for openSUSE. … I’ve got so many other projects on the back burner, that I’m not certain it is worth while creating such a page for openSUSE. … But it might be … :

One negative view, suggesting such a table is not required, is the view noting that the “autoprobe” in alsa (to determine one’s audio card’s setting) is getting better and better, and the requirement to specify one’s model is becoming less and less.