openSUSE 11.3
SUSE Linux was one of my very first distros; I used to buy it from CompUSA and other places back when I first got started with Linux. These days, of course, one can simply use openSUSE instead of buying it at a store. This week I decided to look at openSUSE 11.3, the latest and greatest version.
OpenSUSE is known for being one of the more preeminent KD-oriented distros, but it also supports GNOME (and now LXDE). Since I reviewed Linux Mint KDE last week, I figured I’d go with the GNOME version of openSUSE 11.3 so I could take a little break from KDE.
What’s New In This Release
Here’s a sample of what you’ll find in openSUSE 11.3:
Netbook Support
Smartphone Support
SpiderOak Personal Cloud
Btrfs Support
Zypper Package Management Enhancements
Improved Package Dependency Handling
LXDE Support
Linux 2.6.34
Alsa 1.0.23
X.org 7.5
Nouveau Nvidia Driver
GNOME 2.30.1 (With Support for GNOME 3.0 Preview)
I’ll cover the GNOME changes in the desktop section of the review.
The netbook support offers the KDE Plasma Netbook Workspace, and the MeeGo netbook interface. I like the KDE netbook edition, but I haven’t tried MeeGo yet. Still, it’s good to see both of them being offered for openSUSE users. It’s great for netbook users to have a choice in desktop environments.
Zypper can now list packages that can’t be updated, and it can tell you why. You can also remove dependencies of a package by using the -clean-deps option. OpenSUSE 11.3 also features better package handling in general, letting YaST also remove dependencies needed by a removed package.
The smartphone support will be very much appreciated by Android, iPhone or Blackberry users. OpenSUSE 11.3 now lets you sync music, access photos or use your phone to connect to the Internet. It’s great to see this kind of smartphone connectivity in openSUSE, the developers seem to be supporting all of the major phone platforms.
You can connect your smartphone to OpenSUSE 11.3.
The SpiderOak (what a weird name!) personal cloud is a cool idea and reminiscent of Ubuntu One. It wasn’t installed by default, so I had to go into the Software Manager and install it. After the install, I found it in the Internet applications menu. Signing up for SpiderOak was easy and quick; the SpiderOak interface is very well done and quite intuitive.
You'll need to install SpiderOak via the software manager.
Signing up for a SpiderOak account takes just a minute or two.
It’s easy to set up a backup, see your status, sync and view your files. You get 2GB of space, if you need more you can buy it. You can opt to be billed monthly or yearly, starting with 100GB for $100 per year or $10 per month. SpiderOak is a great addition to openSUSE, I’m very glad to see it included. I think it will prove to be a very valuable service for many openSUSE users.
The SpiderOak service in OpenSUSE 11.3.
I’m also happy to see LXDE support in openSUSE 11.3. KDE and GNOME are both great, but there are folks that really believe less is more (I go back and forth on that personally). So having LXDE as a desktop option in openSUSE opens the door to having it used by minimalists who prefer speed to gratuitous desktop features and functionality.
Although I decided to do this review using the GNOME version, I couldn’t resist the temptation to install LXDE and run it for a while instead. Whenever I run LXDE or some other minimalistic desktop environment, I always wonder if we really need all of the stuff that we get in KDE or GNOME. Sometimes less can really be more.
The minimalistic LXDE desktop in OpenSUSE 11.3.
On the next page, I’ll take a look at the hardware requirements and the install routine.
(14 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)
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I grabbed a copy of openSUSE 11.3 nearly right after it’s introduction, and I feel that this is the best SUSE release since the community openSUSE project started. You can run it live in various flavors, you can get a complete distribution, there is a huge variety of additional software available, and you can run a wide variety of desktop environments, smaller window managers, plus if there is a Web browser, Email client, or text editor that is widely available, chances are excellent that there is a SUSE repository somewhere that has it.
Jim reviewed the GNOME version, and it is good, but Novell deserves a LOT of credit for continuing to advance the cause of KDE, even though they have employees on their payroll who work directly on the Mono project, which has strong ties to the GNOME efforts. Years ago, Novell acquired the Ximian GNOME project, so you’d think that they’d only care about GNOME – and they do, but they have a great deal invested in the KDE project as well, and in fact, during the “rough early times” of the KDE 4 project, openSUSE live CDs containing VERY EARLY snapshots of KDE were available.
Unlike Jim, I tested mostly the KDE variety. I wanted to see how well they implemented KDE SC 4.4, and I can tell you, they did an AWESOME job. Like Jim, I also installed a few other desktop and window managers (and Jim might be pleased to hear that the ones I tried ALL had the SUSE branding and themes).
As far as the Web applications, I am pretty certain that I was able to install an implementation of Google Chrome, and assuming that is correct, it IS indeed possible to create your own Web application environment. I do not recall whether or not I also installed Mozilla Prism or not, but I suspect that a SUSE build is available for it somewhere, so building a SUSE version of a Web app system is no big deal.
Speaking of that, SUSE has one of the strongest “build a system” tools and infrastructures of any of the major distributions, at least equaling, if not exceeding what is available in Ubuntu.
All in all, openSUSE is an outstanding general purpose system, which can be configured to be a solid desktop or server system, but it also has the tools from which interested parties can construct Web application distributions, small, light distributions, and a wide variety of other things. Just because openSUSE 11.3 does not directly include all of these things does not mean that you can’t do it; SUSE is one of the best at ALL of these things.
If you are not a Debian or Slackware only kind of person, then openSUSE 11.3 is well worth the time and effort to install and use. By default, it’s a bit bigger than many other distributions, but that does not prevent you from scaling it down, or pumping it full of even more software. It is a very flexible platform, and the versions that openSUSE has available for download are all very good and worth examining.
My biggest complaint is that Novell didn’t tighten up and polish this distribution when openSUSE 11.0 came out, which I felt held a lot of promise, but had a number of issues. The issues and concerns I had were all nicely ironed out, though, by the 11.2 release, and this latest release is really good by just about any measuring stick.
I admit, I have fallen big time for openSUSE 11.3!! Have been an admirerer of the lizard since I saw it at a internet shop in Thailand in 2005. However, it gave me problems with reiserfs (lost data) and I didn’t like the way that I had to manually input a ftp link in order to do a netinstall.
Then I discovered Ubuntu and Linux Mint and never felt the need to look at openSUSE again.
Then after reading distrowatch about this 11.3 release, I decided to try it in virtualbox on a windwos host. Well, I was impressed with what I saw. I got rid of the services I didn’t need and the memory consumption dropped to at about 490mb and everything works very nice.
Because I’m busy with other things I will leave it like this but before the end of the year, when I will restructure all computers in my house, I will give openSUSE 11.3 a well deserved place on one of our main computers.
I have been using opensuse since 9.1 arrived all those years ago, and i have never lost my affection for it as an easy-to-use kitchen-sink distro.
I’m particularly looking for to 11.4 in march 2011, as Btrfs and KDE 4.6 should be default choices on installation.
Opensuse is indeed a good, stable and above all professional distro however…
When I downloaded the Gnome-LiveCD and played with it my wireless was recognized and connected without any interference. I thought that is good and now lets install on the hard-drive. After done that and booted up the new system there was no wireless and even no network indicator, lan worked though. This puzzles me very much.
Why all works out of the box with Opensuse 11.1 and not with Opensuse 11.3 is for me thus a riddle.
The best Opensuse so far for me was version 11 and 11.1.
What Fedora 13 can do why Opensuse 11.3 cannot do? All quite confusing and so I installed Ubuntu 10.04. And guess what? All works!
If somebody can tell me why my wireless does not work after physical install I might reconsider trying Opensuse again.
@Jim, based on my reading you may have not discovered that OpenSUSE does allow us to have the classic cascading menus. I am not where I can take a look before writing (and I do need to refresh my memory), but I can tell you that the classic style is available for both KDE and Gnome. With Gnome, you get a choice of having the System menu separate or integrated into the main application menu. Granted, it is not the default, but one thing I love about OpenSUSE is that it is configurable. Also, YAST is there regardless of which desktop manger is in use.
[...] openSUSE 11.3 Review | Desktop Linux Reviews Categories : [...]
@ Max – Sometimes these things just happen… I had a similar situation with Mandriva. The live CD worked just fine, but when I installed to hard drive, the wireless card would not work… when I finally got it to work, it caused kernel panics… clearly, not an ideal situation. Sometimes some distros just don’t work with our hardware and you have to look somewhere else. Good luck!
Thanks for the review – I am new to openSUSE – OK with Ubuntu, useless with Fedora but quite excited with openSUSE – seems slick and responsive. Can’t get used to KDE so it is Gnome for me.
OpenSUSE installer messed up my (multi XP – Lucid – open SUSE 11.3) boot process – didn’t recognise Ubuntu, thought that all ntfs partitions were operating systems and left me with a grub menu on booting. Sorted with fixmbr, fixboot and reinstall Grub2 from Lucid.
Only 2 problems so far – openSUSE does not recognise my web cam and won’t/can’t install the logitech drivers – and doesn’t give access to ntfs partitions which Lucid does.
But, hey, I have 2 other operating systems to choose from and the web cam works on those 2 and if I need to edit ntfs to sort out XP I can do that from Lucid.
It is said that variety is the spice of life!
I haven’t put a stopwatch on openSUSE, but I reckon it is quicker than Ubuntu Lucid and even quicker than XP ;-)
Maybe one day openSUSE will recognise my wifi usb dongle. openSUSE is the only distro that consistantly fails to connect using wifi. This latest release actually detects my wifi dongle but fails to connect. It is a ‘Linux approved’ dongle that works on the other main distros for the last 2 years but openSUSE does not like it, although a few Mandriva releases failed as well.
Apart from that, it looks nice with the eye candy as KDE does and it does all the things I need to do. I do prefer Gnome at this point as it is more efficient and less distracting. Apart from the wifi problem with openSUSE I find no compelling reason to switch from Ubuntu.
I’ll wait for the next to test it again
What kind of sentence is this “I absolutely will not start a sentence with a word that isn’t capitalized”? Are you really serious? Couldn’t you find anything smarter to write(complain) about? This is plain ridiculous! It is OK to complain about the slab menu, but to complain why they have decided to use “openSuSE” rather than “OpenSUSE” falls in line with the complaint “my favorite color is pink, so your favorite color can’t be pink because i say so”, or “your name can’t be Jim because i do not like it, could you change it to Kirk”.