Installation
Because I didn’t have any blank media to write on, I chose to install OpenSUSE from the ISO image stored on my laptop’s harddisk. To install OpenSUSE from the harddisk I first had to copy linux and initrd from the 10.3 repository to the /boot folder, and then point to them with GRUB by appending the following lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst:
title Install OpenSUSE 10.3 from the local HDD
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/linux
initrd /boot/initrd
After partitioning, I had meticulously spent time selecting the desired software packages. Everything went so smooth that nothing was going to get in the way. But at the last step the devil 
came to say hi. It’s impossible to mount the partition which contains the installation files. 
To make things worse, the installer didn’t allow me to take a step back and fix this, instead it crashed miserably, losing all my setup preferences. I repeat the whole setup process this time without mounting /dev/sda5 as /windows/D. It didn’t work. Some error popped out telling me the installation media cannot be accessed. Because there’s no way to install OpenSUSE 10.3 from data saved on my local machine, i had to “network install”. Obviously, third time’s a charm. More details about installing OpenSUSE without a CD
KDE4
There’s not much to say about K Desktop 4 because it’s not usable. I was really excited to try it out but for the most part, it was just a boring black background with a panel, a non-functional menu, and some desktop widgets. You can zoom into and out of the desktop, and the widgets show promise. It’s an empty shell of a desktop right now.
Hardware:
Network
Both network devices have been detected without problems by SUSE. There are two applications that monitor the connection status, KNetworkManager and KInternet, but if you want to modify the IP address, you have to do it trough YaST2. I prefer something simple like the Gnome network manager, where you can also save multiple configurations: one IP at home, another at work. So simple, but yet so hard to find this in KDE. Or maybe it’s hidden from the simple mortals.
3D
My computer can take advantage of it’s ATI 3D graphics card to run Compiz. To activate it, I just write in the terminal: gnome-xgl-switch --enable-xgl && rcxdm restart
Works out of the box, no problem. It’s not something special anymore, most distro have the feature these days. Many people like eye-candy, I personally think it’s useless, especially on the laptops where power saving is crucial. I ran the small 3d benchmark available in linux, glxgears:
- with Compiz enabled: 1248 frames in 5.0 seconds = 249.037 FPS
- without Compiz: 8107 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1621.325 FPS
Please not that I haven’t got the ATI proprietary drivers installed.
Sound
I experienced something annoying with the Amarok player. When the volume bar is above 60%, sound goes distorted to the speakers. This is probably caused by the sound engine which by default, to my surprise, is Gstreamer/yauap and not Xine. I thought that switching to Xine would solve the problem, but things only got worse: no suitable codecs are installed with Xine. Letting Amarok fetch the codecs automatically didn’t work eather. I will probably install they via YaST later along with the most awesome media player in the world, VLC.
Last time I had SuSE installed on my Laptop, the voulume/mute controls on the keyboard didn’t work. In OpenSUSE 10.3 they work perfectly:
Conclusion
While OpenSUSE 10.3 is a robust and stable distro, I feel that Novell is throwing in “the bleeding edge” as a test platform for SLED. Instead of pushing new software, the team should focus on improving YaST which indeed has new gnome-like icons but inside it’s the same stiff control center. On the other hand, I am really impressed with the hardware compatibility, the only peripheral that didn’t work out of the box is the webcam. I’m also happy to see that the fonts have improved since the last release. It’s defenately the best looking linux distribution out there. To sum it up, OpenSUSE 10.3 is just like a luxurious car: beautiful and powerful but uses lots of gas.
you got the first review to post on internet…….
this is what i was expecting from Novell……..
clean, professional looking OS with no such great wonders inside……..
you are right in pointing out that Novell has made opensuse as a test field for SLED…..too bad for opensuse if things go like this……
waiting for some more reviews though…….
Comment by cyneuron — October 4, 2007 @ 6:58 pm
[...] is another review. While OpenSUSE 10.3 is a robust and stable distro, I feel that Novell is throwing in “the [...]
Pingback by Boycott Novell » Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE 10.3 — October 5, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
SuSE has always been one of the more bleeding-edge distros, and I’m looking forward to tinkering with it. Why were you surprised the installer couldn’t access the install files locally? The only form you had them in was an .iso image.
Comment by Richey — October 7, 2007 @ 9:38 am
@Richey: yes, I could not install SUSE from the ISO file stored on my laptop.
Comment by Crevete — October 7, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
Am I the only one who finds the Package Selector interface very confusing…?
Comment by JD — October 8, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Package management on both the big corporate distros (Suse and Redhat) seem both bloated and slow compared to Debians. Their package management doesnt seem to offer anything extra to compensate for the slowness. Therefor why not switch over when its all free anyhow? Surely automating conversion of rpm’s to debs couldnt be that hard. Why labour year after year with slow ungainly package management when you can just copy from someone who knew how to do it better?
Comment by stolennomenclature — October 8, 2007 @ 11:04 pm
Being a Suse lover myself, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about??? Yes this distro is good……….
The only draw backs I see are:
– Why have both yast and the gnome ctrl panel? (IMHO the last-mentioned should be canned)
– Yast continues to be painfully slow when doing anything else than searching for updates, adding repos and things alike…
Comment by p3ppit — October 10, 2007 @ 8:02 am
About your sound distortion problems, I’ve had a similar problem across several distros. The solution I found is simply turning the PCM volume down in KMix. I keep it at about 50%, which keeps all distortion away. Hope that helps.
Comment by saucy — October 20, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
I haven’t writeable DVD-driver and tried install from hard disk and got this errors too. But I copied iso-image to another partition of my hard disk. And then error was showed me, I set in URL string “device=/dev/sda_with_iso_copy” and it’s work! This is dance with
shamanistic tambourine
Comment by Dezorer — October 21, 2007 @ 2:58 am
For those with distorted sound issues on a laptop, probably snd-hda-intel and Alsa stuff. I’ve found out that when you use the volume control then ‘Edit’, then enable ‘Channel Mode’, close the dialog. Look at the Volume Control dialog again at the tab Options. It probably says 2ch, change it 6ch and your sound suddenly goes on maxed too! If it doesn’t work try adding ‘options snd-hda-intel model=3stack’ in your /etc/modprobe.d/sound file, at the end. This fix usually fixed my sound in Ubuntu and Fedora, but didn’t seem to fix it in OpenSuse 10.3.
Comment by Serph — November 10, 2007 @ 10:26 am
hi new to open suse 10.3
i want to conect to internet
could you tell me how to configure internet connection
Comment by rupendra — December 5, 2007 @ 7:27 am
Very new to OpenSuse but I love it so far.
Please instruct how to configure internet connection and Netwrok card.
Comment by Graeme — January 14, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 and left the default KDE 3.5 desktop alone instead of trying to use KDE 4 or Gnome (which SUSE was never designed around to begin with). So with KDE 3.5 and YAST2 I have noticed that it is a very stable and easy to setup operating system. I just love YAST and all of its configuration options that are properly labled and explained as to what the settings are for and what they will do if you change them. Also, YAST’s package management is one of the best I have seen and almost as good as Synaptic. I would say that is a tremendous advance for an RPM based distribution. In the past, I have found RPM to be difficult at best. However, YAST makes the package management a breeze. Also, the 1 click links on the opensuse website are invaluable and very useful. If you don’t try to use GNOME or KDE 4 then with the base KDE 3.5 I think this is a a wonderful distribution. I will be using it for a while. Ubuntu is still my favorite among the Debian/DPKG/Apt-Get distributions.
Comment by John Keels — May 28, 2008 @ 5:13 am
Have anybody tried compiz fusion. Isn’t it really the best thing that ever happened to any Desktop environment till date?? And no, I am not talking about KDE or Gnome, I am talking about Mac, Vista and Linux.
Honestly speaking, when I saw Vista, which comes as defualt, I was like ‘wow’.
Then I saw compiz fusion in Internet. I thought of trying it out. And after I installed when for the first time I lay my eyes on it… it killed me. Same thing had happened when I saw Neo dance to the bullets of that Agent, and saw Max Payne do the bullet dodge.
By the way, in my HP pavillion notebook, the PCM volume control doesn’t work. It shows in kmix and alsamixer but no matter whether the volume is at zero or 100, it’s all the same. It doesn’t make any difference. Can anyone tell me what’s the problem?
Comment by Manna Hazarika — July 27, 2008 @ 1:03 am
Oh, don’t tell me how openSUSE 10.3 is good…
I spent 2 weeks trying to install it on my PC!
1st error:
During installation from DVD it suddenly looses it: “cannot find openSUSE repository package”.
This is a first bug. Ok, then I copied iso image to my HDD in Windows partition (NTFS).
2nd error:
After formatting Linux partitions, the message appear:
“Error
Failure occured during following action:
Mounting /dev/sda1 to /windows/C
System error code was: -3003″
People say this bug is because of new Ntfs-3g driver which allows to write to NTFS partitions
from Linux. They say the Windows was not turned off properly and partition has errors.
Ok, I checked disk with chkdsk /F and turned off Windows normally. No changes.
During installation openSUSE cannot mount NTFS partitions and interrupt installation.
Many, many bugs.
Ruslan
Comment by Ruslan — November 22, 2008 @ 6:49 am