Just installed openSUSE 11.3 today after spending about a year with Slackware and then a short stint with Fedora. I wanted to try something a bit different from Slackware, which I really like, but was curious to try out some different tools like yast and zypper. I really appreciate the flexibility of openSUSE in terms of the installer and then also the different software/desktops and installation methods. I opted to use the DVD and install a KDE desktop. I am still learning my way around openSUSE but I have been really impressed so far. I think zypper is great and I have found it easier than apt-get or aptitude and more flexible than yum. Anyway I wanted to say hello to the openSUSE forums. Oh and thanks for the guy who did the sticky on multimedia on the forum.
Hello Mike. As just another openSUSE forum user, I would like to welcome you to the openSUSE forum.
As a new user, I am sure you will have more questions about using openSUSE and we want you to ask away. Anytime you ask a question, make sure to post info on your installation, software or hardware, depending on the type of question. We will assume you have made some attempt to fix the issue before you asked for help. This is mainly so you know enough to ask a question we might have a chance to provide real help with.
Once you get good with openSUSE or ANYTIME you see a question for which you think you have the answer, please jump right in and give it your best shot helping the user out with their issue. Also, if you see a question for which you have any interest, it might be a good time to jump in and figure out the issue yourself. You will learn a whole lot more about openSUSE when you take that kind of effort on to yourself.
And, always try to be kind to others here and by all means try to have a good time using openSUSE and the openSUSE forum.
JohnVV wrote:
> hi there i too am ? new to suse but an old timer with linux
> mostly fedora and Cent
welcome old-timer…we constantly need ‘seasoned veterans’ around
here to help the new folks…of course, not all of your experience is
directly applicable, but a lot of it is…how you coming with finding
the differences (there are a pile, i’m sorry to say)…
you might wanna take a read here: http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts
well damn! someone has rewritten (or i miss-remember it) and now it is
mostly written for the Redmond Ship Jumpers (rather than those like
yourself)…
so, here is something you can do: as you find the differences,
document them and maybe write a wiki article for old-timers. maybe…
biggest diff is (afaik) YaST and Zypper…both slick…
i also run cent5.5 and i still find that i am about to type a yum command into suse
after years on fedora ( 4 to 11 ) with a few years using mingw& cygwin before .
the OP came from slack and fedora so…
the basics are the same no matter what distro . just some of the bits under the hood and the Chassis and body are diff.
Thank you for all the good wishes. Unfortunately my stint on openSUSE was very short. I am not sure what happened, I have tried quite a few distros before and found that my hardware was usually well suported (I have an Lenovo y430 with intel core 2 duo and intel integrated graphics and intel 5100 wireless chip). However shortly after installation I noticed all sorts of degradation in performance and stability. Kwin kept freezing and crashing, even with desktop effects disabled, lots of artifacts in general rendering of the desktop, zypper/yast errored out after an upgrade and wouldn’t install the LXDE desktop (all sorts of database error messages), web browsers (firefox and opera) would slow to a crawl and just eat cpu cycles. So after numerous hard-lockups that required a hard reboot I wiped it and went back to Slackware which I am most familiar with. Honestly I tried openSUSE with the mindset this would be my distro to use for a long time because I thought it would be simpler to maintain than a Slackware box and I would be more apt to encourage people I know to use it, however being quite busy this week I frankly didn’t have the time to troubleshoot all that went wrong to fix it. It is a pity cause I think the tools of openSUSE are great (love zypper, yast, and suse studio) but I am not sure why it was so unstable with my hardware. I will still come back and try openSUSE again but maybe I will skip 11.3 and see how 11.4 fares. Anyway you guys have a very nice community here and I am sure I could have found fixes to the problems I encountered unfortunately I didn’t have the time to invest this week.
Darn Mike I feel like I hexed your install. Actually, openSUSE 11.3 isn’t looking like a stable release and I think you’re 100% skipping it for 11.4 or trying the prior 11.2.