First 11.3 impressions (the good, the bad and the ugly)

English Open Chat
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I installed OpenSUSE 11.3 yesterday, replacing Ubuntu 9.10.
Today was my first day using the new OS, so I now have my first impressions about it.

[Note: my english is broken and I live in GMT -3, so don’t expect any answers soon to any comment here ;)]

The Good.

  • Very smooth installation. Simple, clean, fast, easy. Smooth.
  • Very nice visuals. It’s cool, feels nice, very usable. KDE4 is a nice environment when it comes to look n’ feel. Also, the searchbox at the top of the start menu made my life easier today.
  • Powerful configuration tools. Simplify most config tasks.
  • Great, power management options. Really, really great!
  • Lots of others I will remember when there’s no use to them, as when you are about to fall asleep.
  • Lastest and greatest nVidia Driver all the time. Sublime.

The bad (this is going to be long)

I have several problems with 11.3, but I’m not sure they are all originated in OpenSUSE, but in underlying components.

Network Dreams: for some unknown reason, the wireless adapter (Atheros AR5001) closes the connection after a few hours working well and the only way to get it working again is to shut down the box and start all over again. Probably an ath5k driver issue.
Printer Nightmares: the printers component in OpenSUSE it’s not very good, at least to my needs. I simply need to install a Samsung CLP-315 printer connected to a windows box. From the GUI I cannot search for printers, my only option is to give the name of the box in the network and the printer. That doesn’t work, apparently the firewall blocked something. I must provide the IP of the computer having the printer and, even that, doesn’t work (I still don’t know why, the printer is ‘seen’ but not printing anything). Adding printers, specially [gnu/linux] supported ones should be simpler.
Virtual lock: Finally, I run windows in Virtualbox. I need to access the network shares (in windows boxes) from it, but for some reason, the network is not accessible. I can browse the web, though, but no the network shares. OpenSUSE firewall has NIS and Samba clients allowed, but that didn’t seem to mean anything to VBox…

The Ugly

  • The box gets really hot (CPUs show 90°C, then throttle speed to cool, and all over again) when running VBox or flash in a browser. That’s normal, though. With Ubuntu was the same. Now what I miss is the ability to choose the CPU frequency easily. Now I simply can’t find an applet to do that (KDE thing, in Gnome is simple, regardless the distribution).
  • By default, OpenOffice’s links launch applications with %U parameter, which render them unable to open remote folders. I must manually edit the link to %F to be able to work.
  • No Palimpsest disk utility by default :frowning:
  • Still didn’t find an applet to show me system temperatures for all components (both CPU cores, GPU and HDD).

Summing up

I’ll try to fix the few issues I have. Done that, keep OpenSUSE for long. Fail that, back to Ubuntu I think…
Several of the problems (printing and file sharing) could be the firewall not allowing clean connections to the network, other, like the default settings in OpenOffice launchers and the inability to search for printers are more OpenSUSE related.

Great work. 11.3 is a very good release, despite the particular problems I’m having.

Greets,
Anibal

[Note: hardware: Acer Aspire 5520G: Turion TL-58 (1.9Ghz.), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Atheros AR5001 Wifi, DVD-RW, 1280x800 display, 5-in-1 card reader (still untested, SD should work though), nForce Chipset (¿520?), gForce 8400M 384 Mb. video adapter]

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This is likely a settings issue. I recommend you start a new thread, with an appropriate title “openSUSE-11.3 Virtual Box server with windowns client unable to access network shares” or something like that.

This is likely desktop dependant. You should be able to edit this in your desktop to have the apps launched the way you want. I recommend you start a separate help thead on this.

I do not do this my self, but MANY users do. I recommend you start a separate help thread on this.

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I agree separate threads make sense here, hope it’s still okay to give some hints.

Now what I miss is the ability to choose the CPU frequency easily. Now I simply can’t find an applet to do that …]

I do not know a KDE-applet for that either, but you can check and set cpu-frequencies pretty easy within the command line with a tool called ‘cpufrequtils’ (via the oss-repo) which offer the commands ‘cpufreq-info’ and ‘cpufreq-set’. ‘cpufreq-info’ explains itself pretty much, it needs no arguments and shows the current speed and profile. Using ‘cpufreq-set’ isn’t much harder to use, after checking which profiles are available you simply set frequencies (as root) for example like this:

cpufreq-set -gperformance   ## or
cpufreq-set -gondemand

Still didn’t find an applet to show me system temperatures for all components (both CPU cores, GPU and HDD).

I personally use a small system-monitor called →GKrellM. Give it a try.

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Thanks for all the answers! But, I’m not sure I need help yet. I’m sharing impressions, what happened to me in the first day using OpenSUSE 11.3. Maybe other useres encounter have similar or dissimilar experiences and that would be a good imput for developers.

I’ll give a try to the suggestions about system monitoring and cpu frequency management.

By now, the printer is not a nightmare anymore, and is printing like the first day :), Windows from Virtualbox can access the network as far as I give IP addresses and not Netbios Names, so it’s clearly something about the firewall. I’ll read some documentation and try again…

The OpenOffice problem is deeper than I thought. I can open remote files now, but they are copied to a temp folder, so I can’t save them back. Also, from the Open/Save dialog within OpenOffice I can’t open or edit remote files. Again, I’ll search the web for answers before opening a new thread on it. But, as a default behavior, I still think it’s not the best possible choice.

Greets,
Anibal

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50%+ of my problems when I started using linux where due to permissions issues, the rest was my lack of knowledge.

Your OOo issue may be due to lack of permission to write to the share?

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Bruno, I don’t think so because the share has no restrictive permissions whatsoever.

It’s the simplest of the windows shares, a shared folder with read/write allowed to everyone on the network. I was able to write to it from Ubuntu! Is something with OOo at a level I couldn’t figure out yet…

By the way, day 2 went without any wireless adapter hiccups, so it could have been an isolated incident.

Greets,
Anibal

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Well, first week using OpenSUSE 11.3 ended very, very good:

No more printing problems, Samsung CLP-315 works like a charm.
No more Windows-in-VirtualBox network shares access problems, everything is perfectly accessible now.

OpenOffice still opens remote files as copies, but is not so bad.
The network card goes down very ocassionaly, sure a driver issue that will be solved sometime and it’s not actually very annoying.
When browsing local network Dolphin asks for credentials from time to time. Closing and reopening it solves the problem. Not very annoying, so I’ll look for it sometime.

Summing up:

OpenSUSE is completely up and running at full speed, alone in an all-Windows environment, blending perfectly in it :wink:

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About the printers management, I’m agree with you, but you have always the choice of use the cups cp, in your favorite browser at http://localhost:631/admin, you can browse in to add your printer, and is well documented.

About the cpu management, in kde there is the powerdevil daemon, int the systray there is that battery icon, or in ‘configure desktop’ icon on the suse main menu search power management inside the advanced tab. There is profiles for management the cpu.

About the the temp sensors, there is the widgets on the plasma desktop, just click on the upper right corner button on the desktop, or lower right corner button on the main bar, beside the power off button, and then ‘add widget’, you can search for a lot widgets to do the work. I just using the named ‘Minimon monitor’ this is a superkaramba widget, you must install super karamba first. You can done with ‘zypper in superkaramba’ as root in a terminal.

I know how you feel, since I came from ubuntu too, but just give it a pair of weeks, and your really enjoy it!

Regards

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Thanks ealvarez79! I’ll try the superkaramba minimon applet to see how it works.

Even if the printer issue is resolved, I tried using cups directly, but without more luck, the search printer didn’t work either.

I know about the power management, but I still miss the gnome applet to instantly switch processor speed. More than power management I do CPU overheating management, which is better when quick!

I’m getting every time more comfortable with OpenSUSE, it’s really a good distribution! Maybe in a week, if still have something not working as expected, I’ll do a post in the corresponding forum asking for help.

Greets!

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I had the wireless dropping out problem too, getting the latest drivers from Welcome - Linux Wireless fixed this. My wireless is Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter.

I just did a 11.3 upgrade (KDE) from 11.2 and I just wanted to say that it is the best upgrade ever, especially after the 11.2 nightmare I did a few months ago. The upgrade fixed the obnoxious delays I had on boot up and also other delays running certain programs (I used to have a big delay running Konqueror as root). Plus it corrected other problems I made when fixing 11.2, I can now right click on the desktop and get a menu and plasma desktop no longer crashes. And unlike the 11.2 upgrade where I spent hours fixing things, the only thing I had to do this time was get wireless drivers from Welcome - Linux Wireless and bring back my bootsplash and login screens. A added plus, the new KDE has a nice polished look to it.

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mikislate, thanks for the tip. I went to Linux Wireless webpage and read the wiki about this particular problem. They suggest a solution, but I’m a bit reticent to add a startup script, not to talk about one I could not understand what the heck it does :wink:

My problem seem to be related to CPU overheating. The last two times it happened the CPU was nearly 90 celsius degrees for a few minutes. I’ll check that.

As far, I really like OpenSUSE. KDE 4.4.4 has a really good look and feel, and functionality seems quite good!

Maybe in a few days I’ll post new threads with the problems I’m still having, being the most annoying one about network file access, specifically the one described here by other user.

Greets!
Anibal

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I didn’t add a startup script, I just downloaded compat-wireless-2.6.35-1.tar.bz2 from the page stable - Linux Wireless and installed it. There is an option to uninstall in case the new drivers do not work.

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I need to add now that I can’t verify I was having the wireless network dropping out problem with 11.3. I was actually having Flash problems. But I did definitely have the wireless dropping out problem with 11.1 and 11.2.

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One more thing since I have seen this problem out there on several occasions. I was having the “Enable wireless” being grayed out (after 11.3 upgrade) problem when clicking on the Knetwork system tray icon. Also, “Manage Connections” did not show at all and I had to configure my wireless using System Settings and also had to wait 5 minutes after boot up before any wireless connections would show. In my case this problem was caused by the system looking for a nonexistent NFS drive. So in /etc/fstab I changed the drive option for the NFS drive from “soft” (probably not recognizable by Suse) to “noauto” and that fixed everything.