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opensuse 11 vs. ubuntu hardy

August 20, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

I have been dealing with OpneSuse 11 last few day. I was trying to run a Motorola sm56 modem on it.

The installation was quiete easy. I was able to choose the package categories, manually partiton my disk and let the Suse configure the devices as its own way. After the installation, i didn’t have problems with my Intel GM965/GL960 card and the KDE desktop opened without problem. I was able to choose KDE 4.0 during the installation step but i preferred to use the version 3.5.9 because of its stable functionality. Then i checked whether my wireless card is detected automatically and the answer was yes. After that my probloatic life began with the OpenSuse network manager because although i was able to see my card at the knetworkmanager and create a new profile, i was not able to connect by using it. After opening yast and editing the wireless card information without changing anything but just pressing next and rebooting i was able to connect. Strange hugh? I was once at the #suse channell at the freenode and what they said is the current network manager is bugy. Some even didn’t suggested me to use it :). During the OpenSuse experince i never managed to run the network manager as i configured.

With the new OpenSuse 11, it is possible to use the OneClick property and forget thinking about the rpm repo addition. But you need an Internet connection for it :). OpenSuse has many repos for different branches. For a beginner it may be hard to find the repos and add them to the yast to enable the download from net. I realised also that the software management tool is also bugy enough to force me use xkill to stop it running. It was freezing sometimes while downloading from net and was not able to press the abort button which makes me use xkill. The restarting is making the package download session continue.

I also needed to revert to an older kernel during my experience, but as i read from the forums there is no easy rpm based solution, and it was not possible to use the package manager to install an older kernel to the system.

After all those things i can say i am happy with my current Hardy system. Network manager is working as expected or at least i am able to use the konsole power and configure the wireless card. The default package settings include generally eveything a user needs. After the installation compiz was enabled and i don’t need to do anything extra for it. And from my point of view, I find apt quiete handy and efficient comparing to yum or other konsole tools.


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