I installed SLED-11 SP1 on my 32-bit Athlon-2800 (Asus A7N8X motherboard) with 2GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 8400GS PCI (not PCI-e) graphic card.
Some observations, and this is by no means intended to be a complete nor partial review …
**Slick installation:
**
The installation graphics in SLED are even more ‘slick’ than what I have noticed with openSUSE … possibly the resolution is higher ? … possible the colour selection of the patterns is superior … possibly I just have not done an openSUSE install for a few months and I forgot how nice it looks …
Media Check:
The installation has some neat menus right at the start, for the user to check the quality of the burned CD. openSUSE does not have these menus.
Gnome is Default Desktop
One is not given a KDE nor Gnome selection. Instead Gnome is installed by default. Later, when one is given the chance to review their planned Software Install, one can change to KDE from Gnome by selecting the KDE base pattern and de-selecting the Gnome. I went with the default Gnome setup. There is no xfce nor lxde selection.
Development pattern in software install
In the software update selection, to add the various compilation packages it is not called “Base Development pattern” but rather I think it was just “Developement Pattern” … It also picked up kernel-source and kernel-syms automatically by that selection which I think is a nice touch, … I always have to do that manually in openSUSE.
Repository observations
The repository setup tried to add the ATI repository (even though I have nVidia graphics) and kept failing there. It did add the nVidia repository. I assume many users would like that. I confess once I had completed the install I deselected the nVidia repository. I note having the nVidia repository did NOT automatically help with the SLED graphics (more on that later).
The repository setup kept failing with one repository, which I assume is the main SLED update repository … possible because I have not yet put in the commercial activation code … I’ll add that in a later install effort … For now I wanted to stick with the evaluation version and get a feeling of that.
Partitioning:
The partitioning failed to guess the partitioning setup I wanted in my PC (which has 2 hard drives and multiple partitions). That was no surprise (every distribution has the same hiccup and no crystal ball into my partitioning wants) and it was a simple, albeit slow, process to redirect where I wanted the / and /home installed.
Grub boot manager menus:
The grub proposal did NOT include my openSUSE-11.3 install that I wanted to keep. So I had to go and manually edit the grub selection from the installer menu. I suspect only a solid average user (which is what I consider myself) or an advanced user (someone out of my league) would feel comfortable in doing that sort of edit. I simply added sda5 to being a grub selection, telling grub to look for /boot/grub/menu.lst on sda5 as the openSUSE-11.3 boot selection. I later tested that and it worked. Note not having openSUSE by default in SLEDs grub boot proposal is NOT an issue. I suspect most SLED users will not have openSUSE as a selection and those who do will likely be skilled enough to apply a solution similar to what I applied.
MP3
The software selection automatically included gst-fluendo-mp3. I don’t know if that typically happens with openSUSE or if that is only a SLED feature.
fbdev driver and sax2
The release notes warned if graphics don’t work, one should use “sax2 -r -m 0=fbdev” , indicating sax2 is still on SLED and indicating a conservative but solid approach. The fbdev driver works with almost all graphic hardware. I noted there was an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and the fbdev driver was specified in that file.
The installation was very slow (much slower than what I experience on openSUSE) but it was successful, and I was able to boot into a gnome desktop. A check of the /var/log/Xorg.0.log indicated the desktop was using the fbdev graphic driver (and not “nv” nor “nouveau”). I later rebooted and installed the latest nVidia proprietary driver (and then ran nvidia-xconfig to recreate the xorg.conf file).
Sound.
Sound in Gnome ‘just worked’. I note this out of total suprise as my experience with Gnome on openSUSE is sound never worked, or when it did I had to fiddle a lot. I hate fiddling. So this was a pleasant surprise. A BIG surprise.
Packman
I added the SLED SP1 packman repository manually. There is no menu selection in YaST Software Repositories for this (unlike openSUSE which has such a community selection) and I think Novell have adopted the best approach here.
I note the SLED SP1 packman repository is very thinly populated. Mplayer and libxine1 installed. vlc was missing a dependency and would not install. I suspect I can rebuild the missing vlc dependency and I may do that this evening.
Conclusion
Installation was slow but painless. But I had no time to play as it was very late in the evening when I finished.
I have to rush off to work now. Maybe more observations later.