9.3 First Impressions

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 04/28/05 

Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 08:02:30 +0200

Well, I installed 9.3 on a couple of my machines and restored my data and
profiles. So far everything seems to be working well. I've encountered a
couple of minor problems, but in general everything seems to be working
well.

The Old Laptop is working fine with 9.3 - it doesn't go into suspend mode
every 30 seconds like it did with 9.1. It did have a slight problem finding
packages on the DVD, it couldn't find Thin Keramik or xawtv, but those
weren't biggies, I don't use think keramik and I don't have a TV card. At
least SuSE installs on it, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FC3 and Yoper don't get
as far as the installer, I just get a black screen with two vertical blue
stripes.

When I installed it on the Athlon 64 machine, it went without a hitch,
everything works fine.

On a 32-bit Athlon desktop system everything went fine as well, and it
certainly seems faster. So it looks like it might be a DVD drive problem on
the old laptop :-( With 9.2, the desktop refused to load from DVD, I had to
load it from CD and then use an NFS share from another machine as the
installation source for the DVD contents, but this time it worked fine.

I read the DVD guide, posted a week or so ago, and in 10 minutes, I had a
working DVD player under 9.3 - something I never managed with SuSE up til
now, although with 9.1 and 9.2 it wasn't worth trying as the main machine
with SuSE on didn't have speakers connected.

KDE: Well, a couple of nice changes here over the previous version under
SuSE 9.2 (I didn't do a manual upgrade to 3.4 under 9.2).
1. It recognises Firefox now and automatically reloads it if it was open,
that is a big step forward for me.
2. Knode seems to be working correctly now, it doesn't come up with a
permanent hour glass mouse pointer after posting, a little thing, but it
was annoying with the old version.
3. Konq now works with the forum software used by Funcom, when I click on an
e-mail with the link in, it opens to the last unread message, same as
Firefox does under Gnome or Windows. The previous version would open the
correct page, but stay at the first post on the page.

Firefox: Under KDE, it is the same old problem, it ignores the font settings
of both KDE and Gnome (both set to use 8 point fonts) and uses 12 point
fonts for some reason, so the menus look huge and child-like in comparison
to the other apps. If I run it under Gnome it is fine. Been trawling the
group archives trying to find which config file to edit for this, but the
one I found (.mozilla/firefox/.../metacity.conf) and changing the font size
in there doesn't work. If anyone can remember which file, please post. I
thought it was under .gconf or .gnome, but I haven't found a reference yet.

Gnome: Looks much better integrated than before, and it seems to now load
all the taskbar icons into the taskbar as opposed to having icon sized
windows all over the desktop like the previous version (happened 80% of the
time under 2.6 at login).

Evolution feels a lot more friendly than before, will just have to see if a
new plug-in for Exchange Server is available, the old one that I downloaded
when I installed 9.2 didn't work with Exchange Server 2003, looks like MS
had slightly altered the way it worked over 5.5 and 2000 and Novell hadn't
caught up at the time... At the moment I'm stuck using IMAP/SMTP to talk to
the Exchange, but I'm thinking of dropping it for OES or Postfix, depending
on whether I need to keep the Windows server much longer... It would be
nice to be able to access my contacts and calendar entries from Kontact or
Evolution, but at the moment I am restricted to using Outlook 2003 on my
Windows machine.

Open Office seems to be fine as well, but has the same problem as the old
version with my Invoice files, it keeps inserting extra tabs and extra
lines around the total compared to MS Word, which messes up the formatting.
Don't know why, and it is only on the Sub-total and Total lines, the rest
of the document is fine...

As the only KDE apps I currently use are KNode and Kontact (I also use
Evolution sometimes), I'm thinking about switching to Gnome now that it
seems to be better integrated, at least it will solve the menu font
problems with Firefox, Evolution and OO.o which I use regularly...

In fact that is the one really annoything that I have left with Linux, that
the Gnome based apps won't run correctly under other window managers, if
they could work out Gnome isn't running and get the font size information
from the active windows manager or from the Gnome configuration files, they
would be about perfect (I sometimes use Ice or fvwm as well, so it isn't
just KDE).

Niggles: I wish some of the dependencies weren't there, I have some media
players and they insist on installing TV Card software, why I don't have a
TV card! Same for bluetooth, I don't have any bluetooth devices, so why
must I install the drivers? Same for Palm Pilot software, I don't have one,
don't want the software installed, but Evolution and Kontact have
dependency problems if you try and remove the software... I'm sure with
some work I could probably get rid of those packages, but when it starts
saying that the applications I use on a regular basis will be affected, I
leave them alone, for now...

Dave

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