John Roach

     Geeking for life...

Analysis of openSUSE 11.1

Friday, June 19, 2009

Hi there. It has been some time since I wrote my own news. The reason is that lately IEEE has had these great articles that I wanted to share with you. Hoped you like them. Now back to business.

I have for long been a fan of Fedora due to its openness and available packets for almost everything and moreover flexibility of RedHat helped me through the deadly marshes of Linux world. However Fedora lacked something. That something was user friendliness. True it does have community friendliness but it lacks the friendliness which new users who have no experience with linux need. I new user to Linux must not be chocked to death with driver problems or repository clashes and dual-boot bugs.

OpenSUSE has many pros but many out-of-the-box bugs too. Let's start from the installation.

Installation :
So far this was the easiest installation ever. I just emptied a partition on my windows drive and simply installed openSUSE within it. The dual-boot settings was all done automatically. For this openSUSE gets 50 points!!

First Boot : (Driver Problems)
It seems that openSUSE has the same driver problems as Fedora. The moment I installed openSUSE the video card was not able to work properly (NVidia 6600 GT or TD don't remember ) I got this weird screen with lots of bright colors. The problem was resolved by taking the following steps ;
Step1: Reboot machine and write 3 at the end of the boot line in the boot menu.
Step2: In command line (init 3) write " zypper ref && zypper up " and update your system.
Step3: After update write " zypper ar http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.1/ "
Step4: Write " zypper install x11-video-nvidiaG02 nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-KERNEL " where KERNEL is your supposed kernel name which you can learn from entering the following command " uname -a "
Step5: Reboot your system and cross your fingers.
By taking these five simple steps you will now be able to boot openSUSE.

Playing Around:
As you can understand instead of YUM in Fedora openSUSE uses ZYPPER which is kind of funny name for package handler. The user interface is ... well... different really... it's almost like XP. ( I am using gnome... just couldn't get used to KDE ) And that's about it... If I were to give a windows user a Linux and had to choose between openSUSE and Fedora I would probably give them an openSUSE. However openSUSE lacks the Fedora repo's and such...

Hope you guys liked this peace.
I would like to hear more from you!

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About John Roach

  Currently attending Hacettepe University Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Student, programmer, amatuer poet and writer. His hobbies include chess, playing the piano and writing stories.



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