OpenSUSE 10.2 Goes Gold

[Nomad559]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2070000,00.asp

Despite endless bickering over parent company Novell's recent Microsoft deals, the community Linux distribution openSUSE 10.2 arrived earlier than expected.

Despite loud arguments over Novell and Microsof's relationship, and attempts by Ubuntu to talk OpenSUSE developers into coming over to their distribution, OpenSUSE 10.2 has arrived sooner than expected.

This latest community Linux distribution from Novell, SUSE, and friends is based on a 2.6.18.2 Linux kernel. Users can choose between the KDE 3.5.5 or GNOME 2.16.1 desktop environments, both of which run on top of the X.Org 7.2rc2 windowing system.

When you first install openSUSE, the YaST partitioner now defaults to create new file systems using the ext3 file system. In the past, SUSE distributions had defaulted to using ReiserFS.

[hobbit709]

1. The question is

will it install easily with a wireless adapter or will I be as frustrated as before. So far neither Ubuntu nor SUSE have configured any of my wireless adapters-even though they recognized some of them corectly. The only OS that saw, configured and worked correctly was Linspire.

[RoyGBiv]

2. What's the chipset?

Mostly curious. I'm not particularly optimistic that it would work "out of the box" so to speak, especially since you've already had problems even with Ubuntu, which supposedly works better with wireless than most other distros. Using ndiswrapper can usually make it work fine after some fiddling.

SuSE does so much customized patching of the kernel, you'd think this would be something they'd address. Linspire (and PCLinux from what I've read) has some blobs in the kernel that allow it to function better with certain kinds of modern hardware than the standard kernel does.

[RoyGBiv]

3. It wasn't really early ...

The expected release date was Dec. 7. It went gold on, I think, the 2nd, and the mirrors were mostly synched by the 7th. I guess these days an on-time release actually is an early release, so maybe they have something there.

As compared to what took place with SuSE 10.1, that's certainly early since bugs kept that one from going gold through several unplanned RCs far past the original release date. And then the thing still was a roach motel full of very basic bugs.

I've read good things so far about this release, although comparison to 10.1 may be the perspective from which many people are viewing it. Notably a lot of open bugs still exist in 10.2 that won't be addressed until 10.3.

"There are still a lot of bugs open for 10.2 and I'm sure real usage
over the time will find some more. We will release via online update
security updates for 10.2 as usual and release also the most severe
bug fixes. But most bug fixes will only be done for 10.3, our next
release coming out next summer."

http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-announce/2006-12/msg00004.html

A note to anyone who might be considering installing and doesn't follow the forums on these things, SuSE 10.2 is using a release candidate of Xorg 7.2, which ATI doesn't support yet, or didn't as of couple weeks ago anyway. (I haven't checked since one of the Betas of SuSE was released.) You can get an Nvidia driver that will support it, but it's still a Beta. This is meant as a reference to 3D support. The generic drivers seem to work fine.

[hobbit709]

4. Downloaded the DVD iso

and burned it last night. I'll try to install Mon. Got busy weekend, recording two live shows for a couple of bands on my new toy.

[SKKY]

5. Suse can go freakin' plutonium for all I care...

...I'm done with them. They can't make the WPC54g card work, like Ubuntu and Xandros, they don't get
to intall on my computer.