I’ve been running opensuse 11.1 as an alternate OS to WinXP for about 6 months now and am considering installing 11.2 on both my desktop and laptop, but before I do that I have a few questions that did not find an answer in the faq or the forums so I’m coming to you for assistance.
Here goes:
Does the xfce desktop run better/faster than kde on laptops ?
I hear xfce is much lighter, but nothing on how it performs, and as I kind of like kde and storage is not an issue (my laptop is an atom n270 with 2Gb Ram and a 250Gb HD) I’m wondering if keeping the kde desktop would impair performance in any way.
Now for the desktop install, is there a partition format other than FAT32 that can be read both by Windows (I run XP Pro) and OpenSuse ?
I often work on huge raw video files and the 4Gb filesize limit may be quite a problem over time.
Where can I find and how do I install (I did tell you I was a noob didn’t I ?) codecs for the various video formats ?
I tried installing those on the “non oss cd” but could not open anything with those…
Can you suggest good video playing/editing soft on kde ?
Last but not least, I have a monitor that runs in 1280x720@75hz under WinXP, but when I switch to OpenSuse the refreshing rate drops to 60hz. I tried changing it on the desktop and with Yast, but the settings never apply. The graphic drivers are the last to date and the monitor is PnP and doesn’t need drivers to install. How can I force it to run at 75hz on OpenSuse too ?
Thanks in advance for your help, and keep up the good work.
xfce runs faster than both kde and gnome on both laptops and desktop. I would not say it runs “better” as that is getting into the realm of subjectivity that tends to incite flames from the fans of each desktop. I think KDE3 and KDE4 runs “better” and that is incredibly subjective as others will say the same about xfce, gnome, enlightenment … etc …
RAM and hard drive space are WAY MORE than adequate for KDE. I don’t know anything about the speed of an atom n270.
Yes. NTFS using the ntfs-3g driver. Note one MUST shutdown (not hibernate) their XP cleanly in order for Linux ntfs-3g driver to access NTFS. But note you can NOT use NTFS for Linux operating system , but rather can use it for a separate data share partition or use it for the MS-Windows operating system. Linux needs to install on ext2 or ext3 or ext4, or a number of other Linux specific file systems.
NTFS has no problem with 4GB files. But if you decide to remove winXP, then I do NOT recommend retention of NTFS files system.
Note codecs for openSUSE typically come with packages libffmpeg (provided by dependencies of that package), w32codec-all, xvidcore, libquicktime0, etc … Note Packman packagers repository has the codecs you need. Note videolan repository and packman repository packaged applications conflict , and so other than libdvdcss2, its best to keep the videolan repository disabled.
Playing: vlc and smplayer. Editing software: avidemux and kdenlive. There are also many software conversion packages.
Oldcpu has already said what I was going to say, but just to reinforce it: I’m running 11.2RC2 on a pre-Atom (Celeron 900) Eeepc 900 with only 1 gig RAM, and it goes like greased lightning, complete with 3D effects. No worries about KDE4 on your setup…
I’ve run KDE4 when testing on machines with CPU as slow as 2x450 Mhz, and found it quite usable. OTOH a 1.8 GHz laptop with 240 MiB RAM available is in total meltdown, though perhaps removing ‘Nepomuk’ would slim it down.
I have found in testing, that the new kernel (released only about 6 weeks ago) doesn’t boot on all hardware that 11.1 2.6.27 kernel does.
If you can try Live CD first (you can burn to DVD RW) or alternatively try booting with Netinstall disk. You may need to do the converstion to USB flash memory disk rather than use whirring optics.
Thank you for all the good feedback guys, that helped a lot !
I’m in the process of installing 11.2 on my desktop, so I haven’t had time to try the monitor fixing process, but so far everything is running smoothly. (btw I forgot to mention, the graphic card is a GeForce 8500GT)
This is one thing I love about the linux community: no question ever goes unanswered.
