I’ve been reading some of the reviews about openSUSE 13.1, so I thought I’d give it a look. I downloaded and burned the live KDE version and gave it a spin. Very nice, except for one thing so far. When I go to run anything from Libre Office and click either Office (working from memory here as I don’t have it running here at work) or any of the specific applications from the sub-menu, there is a visual indication it has been selected, then nothing. As far as I can tell, everything else works fine, which made me think the burn was fine. I burned the .iso with Brasero at 2X because I have in the past run into errors when telling various burning apps to burn at maximum speed.
Has anyone else run into this issue? I’m assuming it’s just me, but I thought I’d throw the question out there just in case.
Regardless, I am seriously thinking about installing this on my laptop because it simply looks great. I do have one other question, though. I know that the live KDE version has fewer applications than the install DVD (and fewer window managers and desktop environments). I also read it can’t be used to upgrade an existing installation, which is fine; this would be a fresh install. Are there any other differences I should be aware of or any other things I need to be aware of if installing from the live KDE instead of the full DVD? (Does the latter allow selection of specific applications or application groups to install or leave out? Or do you install everything then weed things out afterward?)
Sorry to combine so much into one post, but I’m excited about trying this and wanted to gather all of the information into as few sources as possible. Thanks.
The Live DVD only has enough to get you started; once you have installed from the Live DVD, you will find that the first time you open YaST, you will get a long list of packages to install to complete the installation.
The main point of the Live DVD is to test whether it works on your hardware, not to provide you with even a minimum useable desktop.
In a KDE LiveCD, you should be able to launch, not just “select” a LibreOffice app.
Unknown why you should experience any problem, maybe your machine has very limited memory?
I have found that regardless any “minimal” requirements, running the latest KDE smoothly requires about 1.5GB RAM.
If your machine has limited memory, an openSUSE install gives you other Desktop options which require less memory… If you prefer KDE, then I might recommend LXDE(And if you prefer Gnome 2, then XFCE)
Only if you want lots of desktop effects; I’ve been running KDE very smoothly in 1GB and up till six months ago I had another machine running KDE in 768Mb.
I’m now running it with 3GB and it is no smoother than when I had only 1GB. In fact, the only thing that runs more smoothly is LibreOffice and that isn’t a KDE app!
Although not an exact exact proof, my first look at 13.1/KDE was in Virtualbox, and it absolutely did not run with only 1GB RAM. After playing around with the RAM settings a bit, I found that 1.5GB worked fine.
If running a LiveCD, wolfi has a point I would guess that files which normally be deployed to disk may be deployed in RAM (after all, who wants to read system data off an optical disk?).