Monday, May 15th, 2006
In Depth OpenSUSE 10.1 Review and other rants…
Ok, ok, so I blew away my Gentoo partition and loaded OpenSUSE 10.1 over the weekend… seemed a fun idea at the time. Now that I recall how many hours went into building the perfect Gentoo setup… I regret it a little. I’m going to buy a server, and am torn between OpenSUSE with Xen or Gentoo…
Anyway, I signed up for Cablevision’s BOOST service which gets me a static IP and tons of bandwidth – so now I can migrate my website/email over to a home server and dump the Windows loving GoDaddy/SenderID mess that I’m on right now. After probably 3-4 hours of explaining to tech support folks at GoDaddy exactly what their problem was that was screwing up the ability for people to email me, I had no resolution… then about a week later, they magically corrected the config I was complaining about. Seems someone else was likely in the same boat as I.
I think tech support hotlines should have a menu option to gauge/input your ability. The problem I have is that I never call for a level 1/2 problem… I know how to fix those on my own. When I call a tech support # it’s always b/c they have goofed something and I can’t fix it myself. But I do understand that there are many “technically challenged” folks out there that probably need help setting up their email.
I propose something as simple as:
- “Press (1) if you admit to being computer illiterate and sometimes wonder why a mouse has 2 buttons,
- Press (2) if you know what email is, can browse the Internet but don’t know what at least one of ‘Linux, Aqua or MMC’ are/do, and
- Press (3) if you can program, do sys admin work and you’re the guy who all of your friends/family/coworkers and the local consultants call if they can’t fix a problem.”
I think this would make it very simple to cater to various skill levels…
Anyway, here’s a great walkthrough of OpenSUSE 10.1. My first complaint is that the Xen kernel won’t let you install nVidia drivers – which prevents you from using XGL – which I’m very accustomed to having… I really, really wish ATI and nVidia would just get over their “my driver is proprietary” attitude and get real GPL drivers into the kernel… GPL is mutual assured destruction and 1 of them can’t just poach the drivers/work of the other NOTE TO NVIDIA/ATI: YOU’RE BOTH DUMPING WAY TO MUCH INTO DRIVERS AND JUST DUPLICATING WORK – GET OVER IT, OPEN SOURCE THEM, MAKE IT EASY ON USERS, AND SAVE SOME DEV MONEY…
Yeah so other than that, the interface, bootup, and menu work is excellent. They did a great job cleaning up the crap in all the typical KDE/Gnome menus. I’m running Gnome now… kinda kills Stephen’s IBM-KDE conspiracy theory but hey, I’ve always been prone to switching back and forth.
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August 9th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Michael Dolan Dot Com: Linux, Law, Open Source » YES! Open Source Graphics Drivers!!! From Intel though… said:
[...] I’ve been very vocal in the past (and here) about the need for open source graphics drivers. It’s never made sense to me what the business strategy is for nVidia and ATI to come up with crazy methods for keeping their drivers proprietary and not distributable by the “free software” distributions (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian). Finally… someone listened to ME … or any of the other 10 millions Linux desktop users complaining for the last 5 years in public forums The common rationale is that these proprietary drivers contain the secrets to how the chips work… as if engineers can’t deduce what a chip is doing by how it’s laid out, the layers, etc??? They can come pretty close without the drivers… So while I may have had the easy street getting 3D XGL running on my laptop with nVidia drivers that worked with my system and distro versions, others got the shaft b/c they had to fight through getting his Intel’s proprietary video drivers to work with XGL. In the future, the positions may be reversed – if Intel gets its way. The Internet is littered with Linux “3D video card problems”. [...]