YJL

This is my second time of installing OpenSUSE but I had forgot what it was like for the first time. I downloaded the DVD spin, the installation only took 22 minutes for my computer. KDE was selected by default, I didn’t change to GNOME.

Before I put the disc to the computer, I had thought about “I should try to avoid using terminal this time!” Well, that hope didn’t last long after the installation finished.

Once the first-time boot, the first thing I had to do was to enable the network, the DSL. It was not hard to use YaST (Administrator Settings) to configure DSL connection, but it needed a required package, smpppd. That was easy again if you know the command-line or you didn’t get locked up from that awesome PackageKit. (Which is also as good as NetworkManager, these two have earned my sincere respect, to keep away from them)

I mounted the DVD to /media and use rpm to install /media/suse/i586/smpppd-*.rpm. I added a new DSL connection, it worked very well. In some distros, I had to remove a default gateway from routing table after just brought up the connection without rebooting.

Next thing is to fix the screen resolution, it is relative simple. I added a new software repository¹ from nVidia and searched for driver again, installed it. Then stuck on a smaller resolution 640×480. Switched back to runlevel 3, ran nvidia-xconfig and set the ModeLine (I need this, or I would have Out of Range, I believed this is the driver’s fault). The desktop effects works well after the driver installed, I couldn’t say it runs fast but smooth enough.

Adobe Flash already in place (or after updated, I couldn’t be sure), the non-free media codecs are not problem either, you only need to add additional software repository². KDE’s Kaffeine uses Xine, thus libxine1-codecs from Packman repository is the right one. However, it would have dependency conflicts, the resolution on OpenSUSE’s YaST is the one thing I have to mention, check the screenshot below:

It provides intelligent options to let you resolve the conflict, in my case, the first one can resolve perfectly. OpenSUSE uses RPM, too, as same as Fedora does. I haven’t seen similar thing on Fedora. If I were using Fedora, I have to manually uninstall those conflicts. But think later, the packaging policy in Fedora might be better, it would actually result a several upgrades when you add new repository, therefore conflicts would not be the case usually.

OpenSUSE is nice distribution, I haven’t had big problem with it (though I have to use terminal). Too bad, I only have few days to try it out, Fedora 12 is available, I am going to try it next.

[1]	http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA is gone.

[2]	http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_Package_Repositories#Packman is gone.