Fortunately for me, that short phase seems to be over. Or rather, will seem to take on a slightly lessened and more regulated pace. For the simple reason that summer vacation’s over and my friends and online buddies are mostly back to school. This means that I should also be getting back to what I’m supposed to be doing: learning Qt and KDE programming. My list of dream apps to start is getting longer and longer. So I better start hacking. I hope to produce something really soon. Though I’m not too confident in releasing them immediately for public consumption since I haven’t envisioned on them actually being popular in the first place. And then there’s still some conceptual/theoretical Qt/KDE issues I have to resolve (such as to go cross-platform or not).

Speaking of school, my classes formally started last June 7. Unfortunately, I have no idea on what we’re supposed to be really doing and how. The course guide (sort of like a syllabus) was supposed to have been distributed last month, but I still have to see even a shadow of it. We do have our textbooks already (custom made lessons and activities) so I’ll probably just go through them. For this semester (June – October 2008), I only have two courses: Discrete Structures in Computer Science and Principles of Programming. So far, the first subject is mostly about logic, a subject I’m quite familiar with from my Philosophy degree. What’s interesting is that both these books are more than a decade old, just reprinted. While the principles of logic haven’t probably changed for the past centuries, I’m not sure how accurate a very old book on principles of programming would be. Being principles, I suspect they haven’t really changed that much, but I still have that uneasy feeling. Only one way to find out, I guess.

Time to dig in and be, erm… “productive”!

Contents:

1. Installation
2. Hardware
3. Default Applications
4. Performance
5. Software Management
6. System Administration
7. Documentation
8. Other Special Features
9. Conclusion

Note: I installed Mandriva 2007.1 Linux Free edition. So whenever I refer to Mandriva defaults, I refer to the defaults in this edition.

1. Installation (2/5)

My installation experience with Mandriva 2007.1 was a terrible one, but wasn’t without its own merits. The installation process itself was pretty easy and fast. It only took around 30 minutes to actually install the whole system, excluding the configuration/setting up portions (partitioning, choosing packages). The installer also offers some very basic defaults, and gives an Advanced button for those who wish to tweak even further.

My biggest problem I had with the installer is really the user interface and the workflow. This is the first installer I’ve ever encountered that doesn’t allow you to go back or even cancel the process. If you have made an error during installation or wanted to cancel the installation, your only option would be to turn of the computer. Maybe they made it that way so that you really, really installed Mandriva. Just kidding, of course. Another big problem I encountered is the arrangement of buttons, which are inconsistent, to say the least. I do not know if it’s a cultural thing, but somehow I’ve grown to expect that certain buttons would be in certain places. But it’s not really the installer’s fault in the final analysis. It’s more of how Mandriva Control Center behaves or looks. More on that later.

My last issue with the installation is the partitioner. There are two completely different partitioning interface for the normal mode and for the expert/advanced mode. The normal mode will require you to use a slider only to resize a partition. You cannot enter a specific numerical value. On the other hand, the expert mode will only let you enter numerical values, which is expected. Perhaps not being able to specify an exact size is what they consider as a beginner/normal level option. Whatever it was, it was sort of weird not being able to do that.

I should probably mention another hiccup that I encountered that happened after installing Mandriva and booting into the newly installed system. It stalled during the boot process. After much poking around, trying to determine what was causing it to seemingly freeze, I figured that it was trying again and again to connect to the Internet. During the installation process, I setup a PPPoE ADSL Internet connection, and configured it to connect at boot. Little did I know that Mandriva will refuse to continue the boot process until it got connected to the Internet. I found this behavior to be both weird and annoying. I had expected that the system would try to connect once, and having failed, would continue booting.

2. Hardware (4/5)

Hardware detection was actually pleasant compared to the installation. When I plugged in my printer and turned it on, Mandriva automatically detected the new device and started the printer setup dialog, which let me easily install the correct HP driver. The scanner also worked after the driver installation. The laptop’s display was automatically detected during the installation. It correctly set the maximum resolution, but somehow got the color depth wrong, which was very easy to correct (during the installation). USB devices worked with no problems. Of course, the built-in card reader didn’t work (I doubt that it will ever work out of the box), but that’s not a big problem. However, I did encounter a problem with my USB Bluetooth. There was no autodetection that occurred, nor did a configuration dialog popup. There was also no settings for Bluetooth in the Mandriva Control Center, other than setting up a Bluetooth Dial-up Internet connection.

Other than that Bluetooth hiccup, everything worked fine. Nothing much to report, as nothing out of the ordinary happened. And that’s good, right?

3. Default Applications (4/5)

Mandriva 2007.1’s default applications are like many other KDE distros. It ships with KDE 3.5.6 by default, which was the latest stable release at that time. It also comes with a whole bunch of the most popular KDE apps like Amarok, K3b, Gwenview, and Digikam. Surprisingly, it doesn’t come with Kaffeine as the default video player. Instead, it installs KMPlayer, which is currently my own media/video player of choice. It also comes with Kdenlive, a video editor for KDE that seems to be gaining popularity. Of course, it comes with your usual OpenOffice.org and Firefox, but with Konqueror as the default browser. However, Firefox seems to be the browser that is launched when accessing Mandriva Control Center’s documentation from the Help menu.

What sets Mandriva apart from others would be the inclusion of GNOME/GTK+ apps in a default KDE installation. Nvu, GNOME Planner, The GIMP, and GnuCash are all installed. It was actually quite a surprise that Inkscape wasn’t installed, too. While I’m a big fan of KDE, there might be some areas where non-KDE apps would make more sense or are probably better. Whatever Mandriva’s reason for including those apps, this mixture of KDE, GNOME, GTK+, and Qt (Scribus) apps gives user a taste of the rich variety of free and open source software.

4. Performance (3/5)

I experienced no crashing apps while running Mandriva. I never experienced crashes when I previously tried out openSUSE 10.2 as well. Makes me wonder what I should be doing to test for crashes.

Mandriva’s overall performance was a bit of a puzzle to me. The system generally feels and looks responsive and fast, and apps start almost immediately when launched. However, KDE’s bouncing icon (launch feedback) hangs around much longer than it’s supposed to, specially when starting Mandriva Control Center, that it somehow gives the illusion of being slow or unresponsive. There are also times when it seems that the system takes a nap for a few seconds and doesn’t respond immediately, even for simple tasks like clicking on the K Menu. Looking back, it seems to happen most after I leave the laptop idle for a few minutes. Probably KPowersave is set to do that? I can recall no difference between openSUSE’s and Mandriva’s power settings, so it puzzles me quite a bit.

5. Software Management (3/5)

Installing software was very easy on Mandriva, definitely better than my experience with openSUSE 10.2 (which, I was told, will be better in the next release). The process is pretty straightforward. You select a package to install and it will also mark other packages that it needs to be installed. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t display correct what other packages will be installed. Sometimes I get a blank window and have to click on the More info button to see the packages. When two versions of the same package can be installed, it will ask you to choose which version you want. Sometimes the default choice is not the correct one. This happened when I tried to install KDevelop. The default version of libgraphviz that it was suggesting to me was not correct. I had to choose the other version before I could install KDevelop. Packages are grouped into categories, similar to Selections in openSUSE (but not quite similar to patterns). Metapackages in Mandriva are not so evident. In fact, the official documentation makes not mention of those. I later found out, through the wiki, that metapackage are prefixed with “task-”. Not quite intuitive, I think. Still, I was pretty much able to install (and remove) apps to my heart’s content. I was lucky not to run into any of the fabled “RPM dependency hell”. Maybe that’s a thing of the past. A strange thing about installing software on Mandriva is that it downloads and installs software one at a time, rather then downloading all of them in one go and then proceeding to install the packages. Another, small annoying detail, or lack of it, is that there’s no overall progress indicator. You only get to see, for example 1/35 (1st out of 35 packages to be installed) for some moments, when the package is actually installing. There’s no indicator while the package is being downloaded.

Rpmdrake, Mandriva’s graphical software management tool, was quite easy to use, standalone or inside Mandriva Control Center (I didn’t quite try to use the command line tool, urpmi). The documentation does quite a good job of showing the different parts of rpmdrake’s window. You just mark a package for installation by ticking the checkbox beside it. To uninstall something, you untick the checkbox. The package set at the top of the category list acts as a sort of filter, allowing you to view installed apps only, upgradeable apps, packages not yet installed, etc. A package search field allows you to search for packages by name, description, or filename installed by the package. Unfortunately, you can’t search by a name and description, or any combination of the three. Adding software sources (repositories) has never been easier, at least for the official ones. Just click on the Add button, select what type of source (update or distribution) and choose a mirror near you, and it automatically adds all the sources. No searching for URL’s. No adding them one by one. Adding an official repository is not as easy, but not difficult either. You click on the Add Custom button instead, and fill in the necessary fields yourself. I experienced this myself when I had to add a KDE 3.5.7 repository (which, by the way, is not available from Mandriva, but available for Mandriva in the KDE website).

6. System Administration (4/5)

What can I say? Like YaST, drakconf, the Mandriva Control Center, is great! Everything you need to graphically configure your system is available. Setting up an Internet connection (post-installation) is easy. Configuring the bootloader is easy as well. Heck, changing a lot of stuff is easy! MCC (Mandriva Control Center) does suffer from one thing that I also found lacking in YaST. You need to run two completely separate apps to do things that are generally considered to be “configuring your computer”: MCC and KControl, KDE’s own Control Center. It would have been nice if YaST or drakconf would be able to integrate KControl modules into their UI. Although, that’s probably less likely with MCC than it is with YaST. Anyway, more on MCC later.

One thing that quite annoyed me, though, is that it constantly asked for the DVD, for packages to install. As if the basic packages needed for configuration haven’t been installed yet. I didn’t do much investigating afterwards.

7. Documentation (4/5)

Documentation for Mandriva 2007.1 comes in two forms: the Starter guide, which is basically your user manual, and the DrakX Tools user manual, which is the manual for Mandriva Control Center. Both are available on the DVD. Neither are installed by default. You will have to install these documents, through the package manager. I can’t seem to understand why they don’t install these essential documentation by default in the first place. Maybe the presumption is that the user bought a boxed Mandriva set? While it’s not a big problem, I think it’s quite an inconvenience. I couldn’t seem to find a free version of the Documentation for Mandriva 2007.1. You have to be a Mandriva Club member to access that. There are online docs available, but for Mandriva 2006 and Mandrakelinux 10.1 only.

Once installed, the user is able to choose two formats for the documentation: HTML and PDF. The Documentation itself is done quite well. I think that the style of the documentation is more application-oriented rather than task or subject oriented. What I mean by this is that reading the Starter guide feels more like a walkthrough or a survey of the different applications that are installed. It’s an approach that is quite new to me. Not a bad thing, though, just new for me. I did notice, though, that the contents of the DrakX Tools manual and the corresponding sections in the Starter Guide are actually the same, which makes me wonder why they have to be separate docs. Maybe I overlooked something. But they sure do look very similar.

Mandriva does have a wiki, although the theme for the wiki seems to be development-oriented. Although there is a section on end-user documentation, to supplement the official documentation with community-contributed and free documentation. It was there that I learned about metapackages in rpmdrake, which wasn’t mentioned at all in the official documentation. The wiki also holds other information, like community activities, etc. But, like I said, it’s mostly focuses on development information.

If there’s one thing that’s quite prevalent in Mandriva, it’s the amount of available support and service options, most of them commercial, but there are some that are free ones as well. The most popular of these is the Mandriva Club, where members are offered different services or different levels of access to services. I vaguely recall Mandriva being criticized for how they handled this system, but I’m not really familiar with it. So I’ll leave it at that. There’s another support service called Mandriva Expert, where you can ask gurus for help, and the gurus get paid, although I’ve read that you can get help for free, but not as fast. It’s a rather unique way of helping users outside of the traditional methods of commercial support. I’m not sure how successful it is, since I’ve only been hearing about the Club. Free support options include Forums, some publicly accessible Knowledge Base articles, Mailing Lists, and IRC (yay freenode!). Mandriva also offers other kinds of support for different kinds of customers: enterprise, public sector, individuals, and partners. The Mandriva website is testament to the breadth of services that the company offers commercially.

8. Other Special Features (3/5)

Here are some of Mandriva’s most notable special features:

la Ora Theme
Mandriva makes use of a visual theme called la Ora. I don’t exactly know the origin or meaning of this name. Anyway, la Ora provides Mandriva with a consistent visual look across desktops and widget toolkits. So whether you are using KDE or GNOME, Qt or GTK, you have at least a uniform look. The colors used for Mandriva 2007.1 Free is quite pleasant. Not your usual KDE blue, but quite a nice shade of blue. The window manager is simple yet “shiny”. I did, however, had a difficult time grabbing window corners to resize windows. As a widget style, la Ora feels a bit weird, specially with menus. When you hover the mouse over the menu, it seems as though the menu is depressed, when it actually isn’t. I find this to be a confusing behavior. Neither the widget style nor the window decoration are configurable, so that’s definitely a minus. la Ora gives an alternative to the default Plastik/Plastik-like look on most KDE distributions.

Mandriva Control Center (drakconf)
Like openSUSE’s YaST, Mandriva Control Center, or drakconf, is Mandriva’s all-in-one configuration tool. It lets the user configure and administer the system in a complete graphical user interface. While it somehow looks like YaST in its layout, MCC does have its own strengths, and its own weaknesses as well. To me, personally, the greatest strength of MCC is its modularity. Each setting or configuration available through MCC can be run independently as an app of its own, with their executable names usually prefixed by “drak”. What does this mean? It means that you don’t have to load the whole MCC if/when you need just a single module. Mandriva’s K Menu is littered with these individual modules. Rpmdrake, the software manager, is a separate app of its own and is also embedded in MCC. I’m very sure that YaST is also modular. However, MCC’s modularity is made pretty obvious in the menus and even in the documentation. Another strength of MCC is that it logs every change or configuration that the user makes, and provides a way of viewing those logs too. MCC also has an “expert” option, which then displays some modules that are hidden when in normal mode.

The most annoying thing about MCC, at least for me, is the inconsistent placement of buttons. I do not know whether la Ora or MCC itself is to blame, though. Anyway, to make a long story short, buttons are either not where they usually are, or they do not appear in the same place in different modules. Sometimes, the Cancel button is at the far left, sometimes it’s at the far right. Sometimes there is no Quit button to get out of a module. Another peculiarity about MCC, which seems to be tied to the widget style, is the way checkboxes or radio buttons behave. While it’s quite normal that clicking on the label or a radio button would probably select that radio button, it’s quite strange that clicking on a blank area on the same row as the radio button, but far, far to the right, would also click the radio button. It’s as if the whole row is occupied by the radio button, including the empty space. Maybe they did this for accessibility or usability reasons? I really don’t know.

And probably the last shortcoming of MCC is that it’s GTK…

Default Settings
While I don’t usually review defalt settings, Mandriva’s are so different from your usual KDE distribution that it’s worth taking a look into them. A very important note, different editions of Mandriva 2007.1 seem to have different defaults, specially with regards to the K Menu layout, the wallpaper, and the color scheme. So different editions, different default experiences.

My first impression is that Mandriva has setup things to resemble Windows as closely as possible. It has customized the taskbar to appear like Windows: the horizontal menu launcher, a bunch of quick app launchers, the taskbar, system tray, and a clock. And like Windows, the K Menu is launched with a single button, the Win key. Another thing that Mandriva has setup similarly to Windows is double clicking to open files and folders. I wonder if they did this to make former Windows users more comfortable. At any rate it’s not really a big problem, except that the Win key is dedicated to launching the menu and that alone. So that one less modifier key available for use.

Mandriva also has some pretty nice defaults when it comes to the look and feel. As previously mentioned the color scheme is quite pleasant on the eyes, definitely a refreshing blue. The wallpaper “feels” a bit like silk, and is somehow peaceful. It’s beautiful, but not distracting, like what a wallpaper should be. I also liked the KDE startup sound that Mandriva has. Too bad they didn’t have a corresponding exit sound.

There is one default setting that I found to be a bit irritating, at least on Mandriva Free edition. I find that the K Menu is a bit too “fine combed”, that there were too many submenus. Some entries were buried beneath 3 sub menus. Of course, the default KDE menu layout isn’t without faults, as it is almost devoid of organization. And the menu layout can be change in MCC anyway. But never underestimate the power of defaults. Still, it’s not a big, irreversible flaw.

Metisse
While Mandriva provides Compiz and Beryl, it ships with its own brand of eye candy: Metisse. From the French In Situ project, Metisse aims to deliver innovative, fancy, yet efficient window management. But while Compiz and Beryl where really meant to be window managers from the start, Metisse’s target usage initially went beyond simple window management. In any case, Metisse offers some different effects and usages that most people would probably be used to by now. Personally, I prefer Metisse’s Desktop Grid over the Desktop Cube (Compiz/Beryl). While the latter is fancier, the grid is both fancy and usable. I also find the metaphor of a grid more intuitive than a cube.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Metisse to work on my installed Mandriva, but managed to get it working from Mandriva 2007.1 One (Live CD installer). Mandriva offers a very simple dialog to install and enable 3D Desktop Effects from MCC. However, you can only enable, disable, or choose which fancy window manager you want from MCC. You have to separately launch their own configuration apps if you want to tweak the settings.

Metisse is like a breathe of fresh air from all this Compiz/Beryl craze. However, it probably needs a bit more work to be able to compete with its more popular cousins.

9. Conclusion:

Mandriva seems to offer a stable distributions, with its own distinct “flavor”, and a whole set of support options. Mandriva has different editions custom made for different needs and audiences. Mandriva offers a wide variety of services, mostly commercial. It’s MCC, like YaST, is a great administration app. The package management system seems to be stable and usable. Metisse is an innovative and interesting alternative to Compiz and Beryl. And the default settings will make former Windows users feel at home in Mandriva. All in all, Mandriva 2007.1 is a pretty solid release. But it sort of didn’t give a “Wow!” feeling, although it did have special features mentioned above. It felt like a plain, solid, no-nonsense distro. Whether that’s a good thing or not, you decide. What Mandriva 2007.1 Free does feels like is a sort of demo version of a commercial product. The general impression that I have of Mandriva is that it is really a commercial product. It has different editions, each with their own unique blend. Using Mandriva Free is like using a demo product. You have icons for buying it, bookmarks to commercial services, etc. This is not a bad thing, though. To me, one of Mandriva’s strengths lie in the services that it offers. There are people out there who prefer a boxed set and commercial support over free options. Final verdict: Mandriva is a stable, no-nonsense distribution, with a commercial twist.

Overall rating: 3.4/5

Contents:

1. Installation
2. Hardware
3. Default Applications
4. Performance
5. Software Management
6. System Administration
7. Documentation
8. Other Special Features
9. Conclusion

1. Installation (3/5)

Installing openSUSE 10.2 is easy and very flexible. New or inexperienced users are presented with very sane defaults. At the same time, tabs or buttons give advanced users more features. One very neat feature of the YaST installer is the very helpful sidebar. The sidebar has two functions: providing help for the different stages and options of the installation and listing the installation steps (people who have installed Windows XP would probably be familiar with this). Switching between the two sidebar functions is as easy as clicking on a button located at the bottom of the sidebar.

The partitioner was a bit of a mixed blessing. The laptop originally had 2 partitions, both of which were NTFS partitions. Trying to resize the NTFS partition was a bit nerve-wrecking. Fortunately, resizing was very easy and graphical. The user has the choice of using a slider to change the size of the partition or manually entering the size in megabytes. The resizing utility shows you a graphical “before” and “after” representation of the partition. Fortunately again, no harm was done to the existing NTFS partition. Then came the part where I had to create new partitions for openSUSE. This part was less graphical than resizing. The user is basically presented with some forms/fields to fill up with information about the new partition. For one, it doesn’t immediately or visibly indicate how much disk space is left for new partitions. Secondly, it also doesn’t let users create a new partition of a particular size, at least not in the same way as the partition resizing utility. The partition creation part looks really more like a plain graphical version of the parted and mkfs commands. It, of course, wasn’t all that difficult, thanks to the context help in the sidebar. But maybe it could have been better.

The selection of packages to install by default is also very nice. The user is initially asked to choose between KDE, GNOME, or some other window manager, but has a choice of changing or adding to that later on during the installation. One of the new software management features introduced since openSUSE 10.1 is Patterns. More on this later, but basically it lets you quickly install a group of related packages, and their dependencies, based on a certain function or task, like development, base environment, entertainment, etc.

All in all, the installation was a breeze. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really that fast, and you had to wait for it to finish installing everything, because it asks for more user input near the end. It would be nice if the default installation asked all the necessary user input, including user management questions, at the beginning so that the user could leave the installation alone (I forgot the term for this).

2. Hardware (3/5)

Hardware detection and management was a bit less than perfect. openSUSE wasn’t able to detect and set the correct display resolution for my laptop. I had to manually set it during the installation, and set it again after, because I was notified that the settings were not correct and untested.

Plugging in a bluetooth for the first time launches the bluetooth configuration dialog and all goes well. Running hcitool scan shows me my phone’s address. The weird part is that my phone can’t detect my laptop. Or rather, it has only been able to successfully detect and pair with my laptop. I can’t seem to figure out why, as it worked without a problem on Kubuntu. But I heard that Kubuntu patched something to make bluetooth work.

Adding a printer, an HP PSC 1350, was the easiest and most flawless part. The model was correctly detected and the driver was properly installed. Scanner also worked perfectly after the printer driver was installed. But like any other Linux distro, the built-in card reader didn’t work. It is probably more of a printer driver than a distro problem.

USB devices, like flash drives and memory card readers worked perfectly. Only the laptop’s built-in card reader doesn’t work. I haven’t had any chance to burn a CD or a DVD so I wasn’t able to test the DVD burner. Attaching a USB mouse also worked nicely.

3. Default Applications (4/5)

The default applications on a KDE-only installation is not that different from most KDE-centric distributions. The versions of the software is quite up-to-date, considering the time when openSUSE 10.2 was released. Firefox (2.0.0.2) is installed by default, but Konqueror is still the default web browser. OpenOffice.org (2.0.4), rather than KOffice, is installed, with no way of installing KOffice from the CD’s. Kontact and KMail are the preferred PIM and e-mail client apps, although Thunderbird can easily be installed. K3b, Amarok, Kaffeine, Digikam, Gwenview, and Konversation are also chosen as the defaults, rather than they’re “main” KDE counterparts, given how more popular (and, IMHO, better) these apps are. Krita and Karbon14, as well as OpenOffice.org Draw, are there for your graphics creation and editing needs. Also installed by default are games to keep you occupied for hours on end, like Frozen Bubble, KSudoku, and SuperTux.

There’s nothing I really could complain about, except for the inability to install KOffice from the CD’s.

4. Performance (3/5)

I sort of expected openSUSE to be slow, given some of the comments about it, like how bloated or slow it is. So imagine my surprise when I felt differently. Of course, speed here is a bit subjective, as I don’t have any benchmarking tools to really measure. But KDE is very responsive and apps start very quickly. It was almost as fast as my Kubuntu system.

The only area where openSUSE was very slow compared to anything else is in boot and KDE startup time. I was able to count 27 seconds from the time I chose openSUSE from GRUB, up to the time the screen flickers to start up KDM. A few more seconds are spent starting up KDM, and more than 10 seconds to startup KDE itself. I am not really sure what is causing this, as this was a default installation.

On the brighter side of things, I haven’t had any stability issues at all. Konqueror only crashed once or twice, which I am quite accustomed to by now.

5. Software Management (2/5)

This is probably the most difficult area of openSUSE that I encountered. Having used Kubuntu almost exclusively for more than a year now, I’m am unfamiliar with any other package management system. So I’m relatively new and very ignorant when it come to installing software on openSUSE. And yet, at the same time, I’ve had some experience with how software management (DEB). Still, my personal experience with installing software on openSUSE was far from ideal.

One of the innovations introduced in openSUSE since 10.1 is Patterns. A pattern is basically a group of related software and their dependencies, grouped together by functionality or role. For example, a KDE Development pattern would include the packages that a user would need for developing KDE applications. A Games pattern includes a selection of games. Patterns can install other patterns that they depend on as well, for example the KDE Development pattern would install the pattern for basic development (not specific to any desktop environment). Patterns can somewhat be compared to metapackages, except that the groups are more based on a more generic role or function than on technical considerations. I found the concept of patterns very interesting and useful, probably more useful than Debian’s debtags (implemented in Adept’s GUI). However, my joyride ended there.

Software management on openSUSE is very different from what I have been used to on Kubuntu. For one, if you did not have an Internet connection during installation, you are not even provided with a sort of default list of online sources from a mirror nearest to you (that could probably determined by the locale setup in the installation). While the installation CD’s do have a lot of software readily available, it didn’t include the ones that I wanted to install. One has to add an online installation source/repository to be able to access other software. However, that process itself also left me scratching my head. Unless I accidentally skipped some parts, I couldn’t find any mention in the startup guide on what installation source/server to add. It does say how to add a repository, but now what. One has to go to the online documentation to figure that out.

Adding an installation source is easy. It’s the waiting for the source to be fetched that’s causing me to go bonkers. For some reason I couldn’t understand, my first attempt to add an installation source lasted for hours! Ok, I tried to use a mirror (Taiwan). Still the same. And that’s just for the oss repository. I can’t imagine how long it would take to add the non-oss (non-free) repository and the kde repositories. Quite curious as to what’s happening, I asked about it in #suse (nice people in there, by the way). It seems that it was the dreaded ZENWorks at fault. They recommended that I uninstall it. Well and good. I tried again… and still it lasted for hours. Finally, after sleeping through the whole process, it finished. Happy as a bird, I tried to search for KWord or Umbrello. Nada. So I thought, maybe I need some other repository. So I try to add another one. However, in between this, my Internet connection hiccuped. So when YaST was trying to scan the installation sources, it complained that it couldn’t access the source I just added. It also asked if I wanted the source to be automatically removed. I said no. And guess what? YaST removed it. I have absolutely no idea what just happened.

I’ve had other problems with installing and removing software on openSUSE. But I won’t blame everything on the system, as they are more probably PEBKAC issues (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair, a.k.a., the problem is the user). Still, this initial encounter with software management on openSUSE has really left a bitter aftertaste. The sad part is that I’m not sure if I have the time to wait for another installation source to be finished fetching or if I want to wait at all.

6. System Administration (5/5)

Now that the rant is over, I can happily report that administering and configuring the system is as easy as point and click on openSUSE, thanks to YaST. Almost everything you need to manage the system through a GUI is there, from hardware, to X (SaX), to the bootloader, and even reading log files. What can I say? I really admire the work that was put into YaST in order to provide a central and graphical system administration tool. Of course, die-hard command line fans would probably beg to disagree. But then, Konsole is the perfect tool for them.

Setting up an Internet connection is also very easy. As a side note, the only (KDE) distros that I’ve encountered so far that has a built-in GUI to setup a PPPoE ADSL connection are openSUSE and PCLinuxOS (I’m presuming Mandriva has one too). Kubuntu doesn’t have one, so I have to use the command line utility pppoeconf. KNOPPIX and MEPIS use pppoeconf also, but the difference is that they have K Menu entries for it. That said, I’m not finding KNetworkManager extremely useful. It seems that this app (which is also included by default in Kubuntu 7.04, by the way) is more oriented towards wireless connections. While it does have a simple way to connect and hangup the DSL connection I made it doesn’t have a direct way to configure it (I have to go through YaST), nor does it correctly report the status of the connection (specially when I get randomly disconnected). I guess I’m still looking for that all-in-one Internet setup utility. Or maybe I just feel that PPPoE ADSL users are left out a lot.

7. Documentation (5/5)

One of the things that has “wowed” me in openSUSE is the amount and quality of documentation that they have. According to the openSUSE website, the DVD includes all the official documentation, while CD Installer users have to download them, which sort of sucks. But getting them is worth it, in my opinion. The documentation looks very professional and complete. You don’t need to be online to use them. Although the Startup Guide does make some outside references, it only refers to the more detailed and advanced Reference Manual. There are also GNOME and KDE Guides to get you comfortable with the different environments.

The openSUSE website is itself the community wiki. And as a wiki, I’d say it looks really nice. And by “looks”, I’m referring to the style/theme. I haven’t had much time to browse through most of the contents of the wiki, so I can’t really compare it to the breadth of the contents of the Ubuntu wiki.

I just wish Kubuntu’s (not Ubuntu’s, which I haven’t actually read yet) could be as good and as complete as openSUSE’s. I can’t really complain much, since I know how hard the Kubuntu documentation people have worked on it. There’s always room for improvement though. One thing I don’t like about the current Kubuntu Desktop Guide (or rather, the one for Kubuntu 6.10) is that there are a lot of sections that are rather incomplete and just link to guides online. While I do not question the quality of the community-submitted guides (ok, maybe I am questioning a bit…), but it produces some problems. For one, the user must be connected to the Internet to access the linked guides. Another is that not all of the guides are of good quality or have very relevant instructions when it comes to Kubuntu.

8. Other Special Features (4/5)

YaST
SUSE is probably best known for this setup program. It literally means Yet Another Setup Tool. YaST is the sort of glue that combines almost all of your administration needs under one roof. This makes it very easy to configure your system, as you will be using a consistent and unified tool. Of course, those who prefer to go the manual route can still edit config files by hand. YaST is also the app that is used when installing openSUSE, so users will be quite familiar with its interface and workflow. The same helpful context sidebar in the installer is also present in YaST on the installed system.

One “complaint” that I have for YaST is that it doesn’t include any module for configuring the desktop, as in those modules found in the KDE Control Center. Maybe they’re trying to reduce duplication or confusion. Or maybe it’s not technically possible to integrate the KControl modules into YaST. It would probably have been nice if all the configuration were in one place, both those user-specific ones and system-wide ones (which seems to be what YaST is for). It’s only now that I appreciate that Administrator button in KControl and System Settings.

Kickoff
openSUSE 10.2 introduced a new KDE main menu, which was the fruits of some brainstorming and usability studies. They called it Kickoff (while the GNOME counterpart seems to have been called Slab). It also seems to be partly inspired by an existing K Menu replacement called KBFX. While it does present some improvements over the current K Menu, I’m not sure how the usability aspects/studies were implemented.

Some of the improvements of Kickoff over K Menu are a multi-tab feature, a configurable Favorites list, the Document and Application history shown at the same time, and built-in integration with Kerry for easy searching. There are some things I don’t like about it though. One of them is the inability to rearrange the tabs. I also find it quite cumbersome to use, specially on this laptop, and I have to use quite a range of motion to get to an app that’s 2 levels deep in the menu, not to mention having to go back if I selected the wrong category or submenu. I find it slower to use in most occasions. I guess I just have been spoiled by Katapult (and Kommando).

Kerry
Of course, who could forget about Kerry, the KDE front-end to Beagle. Not being a fan of these search engines (I tend to be meticulous about where I save my files), I don’t find it particularly exciting. Maybe one day I’ll find a use for it and fall in love with it. But by then, I might have fallen for Strigi already.

sysinfo:/
I think this is a relatively unknown SUSE feature. sysinfo:/ is a kioslave that displays essential system information in Konqueror. From it, you immediately see information such as processor speed, RAM, video card, etc. More importantly quickly access important system folders and or mounted filesystems. Of course, the information here doesn’t update real-time, you have to hit F5 or Reload. It also doesn’t present user-made folders, and I haven’t found a way to configure it. It’s a fairly useful utility, but maybe it can be improved.

9. Conclusion:

Maybe I tried openSUSE at a wrong time, in terms of software management. Version 10.2 is a sort of transition period, in between a seemingly disastrous 10.1 release and a hopefully improved 10.3 (where ZENWorks integration will be removed). Other than a frustrating experience with trying to add an installation source, using openSUSE for about two weeks has been a pleasant experience. It has full GUI tools for configuring the system and lots of apps to address users most basic needs. openSUSE also tries to be innovative in some ways (whether they have actually succeeded is another question), not only on KDE but also on GNOME. It has an excellent documentation that is both complete and easy to digest. It’s quite unfortunate that I wasn’t able to get a “feel” of the community. Other than that, I could say that openSUSE is a great Linux distribution for desktop users (specially the kind who loves to point and click).

Overall rating: 3.6/5