To be clear, I’m not a novice at this, I’ve used SuSE since 6.0 and I am an embedded developer by trade with a lot of Linux experience.
Installation of SuSE 11.1
I was upgrading from 11.0 and had a 4 disk RAID 5 system configured that was completely recognized by the upgrade from 10.x to 11.0 without any problems, it just worked. From 11.0 to 11.1 the story is completely different. It completely destroyed my array. It overwrote 3 disks, changing their filesystems and essentially left it as a unbootable shambles. I ended up having to do an installation as a new machine.
In trying to layout the 4 disks as a RAID 5 array the screens are unintelligible and in the end I still don’t really know if I have the same configuration as the previous system. In fact I’m pretty sure I don’t and that one of the hard disks is not being used. Since you have changed the way sysinfo shows the disk layout I can’t seem to find an easy way to check what the configuration is.
Using the Installed System
What can I say here, things that used to work, have always worked are no longer working. The desktop (kde4) is a complete disaster. You have these widget things that are not as useful as the old dekstop panel tools. I want to (for instance) create a URL icon on the desktop. I have to bring up dolphin, use the create URL in the desktop folder and then, it doesn’t work. I can click on it until I’ve worn a hole in the mouse button and the URL never gets opened by my browser. Its just dead.
Now lets talk about the application tray!! Gawd, it’s full of things that aren’t actually running. In some case there is no icon being displayed, its just a space.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BASIC SET OF KDE SCREEN SAVERS? Instead I have a small selection of the old crappy stuff. It’s not complete by any measure to the previous system.
What’s up with Amarok? It crashes about twice a weak. I usually come home and there’s the email app running waiting for me to send off the latest crash report to Amarok.
Eclipse, I don’t particularly like Eclipse but I do use it for browsing large projects. I loaded it onto the system and then saw I had to add the CDT plugin. For some reason it’s not part of the SuSE packages so I go to download it using the built-in tool management in Eclipse and it says, “Eclipse has not be properly configured to be modified”. That’s bogus… WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
GET YOUR MTA CONFIGURATION RIGHT OR GO HOME!!!
I configured the mail client to use sendmail as as “direct” for the connection to the internet. It worked since in this case I don’t use the MTA configuration tool in Yast. I ran into a problem and actually brought up Yast, clicked on the MTA icon and then decided to just exit the tool (which I did correctly). Your tool then proceeded to re-write the main.cf file and it did it WRONG!! For a direct connection you leave the value for the field “relayhost” EMPTY!! DO YOU @#$%@%##@$ HEAR ME!! Anything else means that you require to configure a relay host.
This is but a short list of the problems I’ve run into. It basically fuels my growing frustration with your distribution. I don’t think I will be using your distribution much beyond this version which is disappointing since I’ve used it and gotten to know over so many years.
Good Luck!!