My experience installing OpenSuse 10.3 beta 2

USALUG - A great community for Linux enthusiasts everywhere.

Well I haven't made a blog post in forever, and since we need some new and different kind of posts, and Crouse was nice enough to send me the OpenSuse book from Oreilly, so here we go.

The books title is Suse Linux written by Chris Brown. You can find it here. I read through the book and learned quite a few things about OpenSuse Linux, which I think I already had a pretty good understanding of it. The book was very well written, easy enough to understand for a new Linux user, and enough thorough information for the seasoned user. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who runs OpenSuse, or as a gift to someone.

So....thanks Dave it's a great book.

Now onto the install. I've always liked Suse. I first installed Suse 9.1 when I was a Linux Newb. Germ was nice enough to mail that one to me Very Happy . I then installed OpenSuse 10.0 and ran that on my laptop for quite a while. I then got tired of waiting for YaST to load, and moved on to some other distros. I had been reading some good things that the OpenSuse team has been doing and decided I'd try out the new beta.

OpenSuse takes a bit longer to install than some other distros, such as Ubuntu, or PCLOS, because it gives you the opportunity to pick which apps you want to install as part of the process. So for me I go through everything and deselect the apps that I don't really care for and install the ones that I want. It normally takes me about 2 1/2 hrs to get it installed start to finish. The install went real smooth. When I was finished with the install the first boot took about a 1 1/2 min. fairly quick boot time. The biggest thing that I have noticed is that YaST loads A LOT quicker Very Happy . Adding new repositories was also much faster. I quickly added some libs and such to give me a well rounded install. I didn't have to wait the usual 5-10 mins to wait for the repos to update. The OpenSuse team did a great job improving YaST. I then set to changing some of my settings on the desktop. I tried to load compiz, but I still can't get the settings manager to load. Compiz works on my PCLOS install so my h/w should be ok. Since this is a beta I'm not that worried about it. On the whole this beta is good enough to be put on a system for full time use. I'm definitely looking forward to this when it goes final in a few months.