Blog
Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs Open Sauce OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians
Our Blogs Open Sauce OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians | OpenSUSE 11: nice kid, bad custodians |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 27 June 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 2 I have a USB printer, a Samsung SCX-420, which works well with any 32-bit Linux (in fact, it works with Windows and Mac OSX as well). I could not set it up with OpenSUSE. I did not try to burrow beneath the graphic interfaces provided and get it working simply because the average user is not expected to do so - the GUI is expected to do the lifting. My monitor also posed some challenges to OpenSUSE. When installing from the GNOME live CD, it was configured with a 1280x1024 resolution which is not the best it can do. But after looking through the list of supported LCD monitors, I found that I had to settle for this as my monitor - a BenQ FP222W - was not listed in this database. Installing what is deemed to be necessary proprietary add-ons like Flash is not as simple as in other distributions but this could be due to some kind of problem with Firefox 3. What I normally do is open Firefox and load a web page which requires Flash; one then gets a message within the browser window saying that additional plug-ins are needed and clicking on that message takes one to a location where one can install Flash. This process does not work on OpenSUSE 11. I had to shut down the browser and use the software installation tool (YaST) to install Flash. For reasons unknown, this meant pulling down about 75 meg of software to satisfy various dependencies. After the software came down the pipe and was installed, Flash worked within Firefox. The KDE4 shipped with OpenSUSE is the most stable of all the three shipped versions of this desktop environment that I've played with. I did not have a single crash and found most of the features a great improvement over the old interface. It retains the level of tweakability that any average user would want. (I could not see the system in all its glory as I could not configure a screen resolution of anything more than 1024 x 768.) The developers of OpenSUSE have customised GNOME quite a bit but some of the features are clumsy. The menu is ungainly and the "more applications" tab brings up a huge window with every single application listed within. A tree-like menu would be that bit more elegant and refined. More good news: you can still remove Mono, the infamous attempt to clone Microsoft's .NET development environment, and all its insidious dependencies without breaking anything in OpenSUSE. I had to remove a total of 39 files, both applications and libraries, to get it off my system. Anyone who is planning long-term usage of the distribution would be well advised to remove Mono as it could lead to problems down the line. OpenSUSE has all the applications that an average desktop user needs. It is a distribution with an excellent pedigree. If only it had better custodians.
Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now
|
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
