NewLuna

I looked at OpenSuse 10.2 as a Win2k replacement.  I’ve been impressed with Suse over the years so I was looking forward to see what Novell brought to the table with 10.2.  Like I said before, I am not going to judge a distribution on its setup process (OS installation, mp3 setup, flash setup, adding printer, etc), however I am going to mention some installation pitfalls I ran into during the 10.2 install. 

The OpenSuse 10.2 (DVD) install is very straight forward and point-click friendly.  That said, I did run into one glitch when it came to video card detection.  It successfully detected my video card and I was presented with a screen where I could adjust the screen size.  The PC suddenly locked up while I was making screen size adjustments, and I couldn’t continue with the setup.  I rebooted the system and the setup process thankfully let me start where I left off.  Interesting though, the faulty screen settings were now tied to the user I created during the initial setup and I couldn’t delete that user (User1).  I had to create a different user (User2).

I finished the setup and rebooted the PC to find that KDE would not initialize.  The problem was that I had User1 setup for automatic login, and the GUI wouldn’t load up because the faulty display settings were tied to that user (my assumption).  With very little Linux command line experience, I managed to delete User1 from the system through the CLI.  I then rebooted the system and KDE loaded successfully.  I manually logged into KDE with User2, created User1 again, configured User1 for automatic login, and then later deleted User2.

With the system in proper working order, I worked on adding my network printer.  I have an HP OfficeJet 5510 All-In-One printer connected to a Win2k box.  OpenSuse could connect to the printer and it had the correct driver but for some reason it would lock up during the print process.  After 2 to 3 hours of searching the Internet, I finally found the solution.  I had to disable bidirectional support in the printer settings on the Win2k box.

I wanted to test out the printer using OpenOffice so I started using the word processor application.  I have a relatively fast CPU and over a gig of memory and OpenOffice was still painfully slow to load up.  That brings us to the most valuable applet OpenSuse has to offer: the OpenOffice preloader.  It loads portions of OpenOffice into memory to cut down on load time.  This applet is a must have if you’re using OpenOffice in OpenSuse.  Launching an OpenOffice application now felt snappy and responsive.  Printing worked flawlessly.

Speaking of preloaders, I only wish OpenSuse offered a preloader for Firefox.  I use Firefox on my Win2k box and I love it.  I installed the win32 preloader so Firefox loads fast in Win2k.  However, Firefox takes an eternity to load in OpenSuse.  I quickly converted to Konquerer as my default browser for that reason.  Konquerer’s load time is quick and it has the latest features including tabbed browsing.  However, Konquerer does have its share of shortcomings:

Konquerer will not draw a web-page until it has completely loaded where IE or Firefox will gradually draw the page as it loads.  This can get annoying when you’re trying to view large pages.  In addition, it appears as though Konquerer has a timout period on how long a page should take to load.  It seemed like I’d find 5 pages every 30 minutes that would produce an error saying that the page couldn’t be loaded in Konquerer.  These errors occurred after a longer than normal load time.  I would simply refresh the page and it would load fine.
Clicking on a hyplerlink causes the browser to immediately jump to the top of the current page before the new page loads.

I would expect setting the default homepage in Konquerer would force Konquerer to immediately load that homepage whenever I start Konquerer from the KDE desktop icon located in the KDE panel.  That is not the case.  The user is forced to hit an intermediate page.  I figured out that I had to access the icon’s properties and add the URL to the end of the application path.