The Distro Tour Project: openSUSE 10.2
May 15th, 2007This is the first part in my Distro Tour Project, featuring openSUSE 10.2
Contents:
- Installation
- Hardware
- Default Applications
- Performance
- Software Management
- System Administration
- Documentation
- Other Special Features
- 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.
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
Just some small updates, while I'm trying to get off my ass and migrate the site completely to Textpattern.
May 17th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Thanks for a nice and balanced review.
Wrt. adding the repos. When you add repos in openSUSE the package data is immediately downloaded, that’s ~40 megs for OSS - which is by far the largest repo. Adding the other repos will be much faster.
In contrast when you add a repo for apt-get the metadata is not downloaded until you do apt-get update.
So it’s primarily just a matter of when you have to wait. However I do believe openSUSE will download substantially more metadata as the package descriptions (not just summaries) are also searchable, which I believe is not the case with apt-get.
Btw. KWord is in the OSS repo. But the package is called koffice-wordprocessing.
If you tick off “descriptions” in what’s to be searched should be found.
May 17th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Great, well looked into review.
Just a note that as I mentioned Koffice is available on the DVD and CD4 (or online of course as well, as cb400f mentioned), and kdesdk (and hence Umbrello) is on CD5 or the DVD.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
@cb400f: You are correct about apt-get not fetching the metadata until you issue an apt-get update command. However, the way I see it, adding a repository in openSUSE is a combination of adding a repository on Kubuntu and issuing the updated command. And from what I understood from http://en.opensuse.org/Software_Repositories, only the metadata is fetched, the same thing that apt-get update does. APT can also search through package names and descriptions, even maintainer names. So it’s quite puzzling to me why it took so long (hours, even) to add the OSS repository, more than all the Kubuntu repositories combined.
Anyway, I am going to follow up your suggestions by installing openSUSE 10.2 again, but this time on my desktop instead of my laptop. Maybe I will have better luck.
I still don’t know why I couldn’t find KWord *after* installing openSUSE. Maybe it was because the installer never asked for CD’s 4 and 5 during the installation. I really don’t know. But I’m definitely willing to take a second look.
Thanks for the tips! Appreciate it a lot.
May 18th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Storing the repodata in XML format is part of the issue, but the main issue is that it currently downloads all changelogs and filelists, which take up significantly more space. Current thoughts are that this might be disabled for a default install in future, in fact.