Re: Suse vs OpenSuse

From: Michel Catudal (mcatudal_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/20/05 

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:51:59 -0500

Le Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:43:30 +0200, David Wright a écrit :

> Michel Catudal wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> It all depends what is important for you. If you enjoy having suseplugger
>> crash at almost every boot then SuSE 9.3 would be considered better
>> otherwise you would consider SuSE 10 to be better
>
> Never had SuSEPlugger crash on 9.3, so sounds like it is something specific
> to your configuration...

I have a 32 bit installation and 64 bits installation and it does it on
both. My wife's computer is a 32 bit pc with SuSE 9.3 and the problem
is also present there.

> I've never needed to compile anything with SuSE - apart from the ATi
> drivers, but they didn't work anyway. And I've never had a problem with the
> Gnome desktop locking up either (or having to be killed), the only thing
> I've noticed is that the "taskbar" items appear in windows instead of on
> the taskbar occassionally, but apart from that it behaves itself.
>

When the app is not available or you are fixing bugs or writing you own
apps there is a definite need to compile programs. It is also usefull to
be able to compile program when you earn a living doing that, don't you
think?

>
> Apart from the ATi driver problem (graphics chip was only on the market for
> about a month when I tried to install SuSE on te laptop, so the drivers
> didn't cover it), I haven't seen any problems with 9.3. 10.0 does however
> have some nice touches and the default colour scheme looks more
> professional than 9.3 IMHO.
>

I never had problems with ATI under SuSE, just Fedora where it would
always crash my PC so I gave it to my son who runs SuSE and winblows.

>> There are few outstanding bugs though that are not likely be be fixed
>> in version 10.
>>
>> 1-When choosing French as the language during installation it defaults
>> to the AZERTY keyboard whether or not you have choosen an AZERTY keyboard.
>> Choosing a US Keyboard goes around the problem. It is very annoying
>> to have a keyboard where you have no clue where some important keys are.
>
> Same with German, I would guess with other languages as well. If you select
> a different language, I guess it will assume that you will also be using
> the keyboard for that language, for probably 95% of users it saves them the
> step of changing the keyboard from the default US to the default for the
> language they've chosen. As I've never owned a PC with a US keyboard, I
> would feel it very egotistical if, upon changing language the keyboard
> didn't change for that language as well, but as SuSE is a European based
> distribution, I guess it has a better world view than some ;-)
>

Whatever problem you may have with German doesn't compare with the
problem with the French keyboard.
Your percent is a bit off though. There are roughly 7 to 8 millions French
speaking people in Canada, about 3 millions here in the USA. France's
population is close to 60 millions. Your 95% figure is a bit off, the
only thing I can see is that the German who wrote the install program
are too dumb to realize that not everyone uses the AZERTY keyboard.
What is very annoying about that shitty keyboard is the very important
keys are switched around so it is entirely possible to enter a password
that you will never be able to use since during installation it keeps
the keyboard as AZERTY and on reboot use the correct QWERTY keyboard.

>> 2-By default the gnome install doesn't allow going to the console with
>> ctrl alt F2 (or other function keys). This is extremely infuriating.
>> Whoever made the decision for that default should be shot.
>
> I don't use Gnome that much and the console even less frequently, although I
> have found that certain keyboards (newer Microsoft keyboards) and certain
> KVM's (E.g. Belkin) don't support the switching to the consoles.
>

It is not a keyboard problem but a SuSE problem. I have no such problem
with Slackware or Fedora.

>> 3-The cursors keys on the right of the keyboard don't work in most
>> applications. The numbers are entered no matter what the status of Num is.
>> It works correctly in some applications but doesn't in most. The keyboard
>> driver should obey the status of the Num key and not act as an obnoxious
>> *** by overridding the choices of the owner of the computer.
>
> Currently running under KDE and the KDE and Gnome applications here obey the
> num lock status. Not going to switch whilst typing this message, so can't
> answer about Gnome. As the first thing I do with a PC is switch on the num
> lock and use the cursor pad for moving the cursor (using the num pad
> reminds me too much of the bad old IBM PC days ;-) ) I haven't tried it
> before now, so can't really comment on this issue.
>

I hate to have to use the arrows under the scroll key as I find the ones
on the right better situated. It is obvious that if you are stuck with
that AZERTY *** that you would prefer to force the numlock on since all
the numbers under the functions keys are only accessible with the shift
key.

>> 4-An upgrade blows the MBR, there is no option to keep that from happening
>> and a boot on PC Dos and fdisk /mbr is needed to restore the sanity of the
>> computer after an upgrade to any SuSE version.
> <snip>
>
> I don't have any dual boot machines, so I can't comment on this. (Well the
> only dual boot machine has swappable boot disks.)
>

Not a practical choice. I boot on 6 different OS. Winblows is on it's own
PC, I don't trust microsoft anywhere near OS/2 or Linux.

>> 5-The permissions aren't set correctly for video and audio access. The
>> PC is basically crippled until you fix that. Running under root or not
>> using the sound or video are not acceptable options.
>>
>
> Again, never touched video and audio settings, but currently listening to
> streaming Radio 7 and often watch videos or DVD's with a standard user. The
> default settings seem perfectly adequate.
>

On a clean install access to video and audio is no available for the user.
This is where my beef is. It seems like the install assumes that you have
no interest whatsoever in playing DVDs or playing music with anything but
their choosen apps from KDE. Since I rather choose my own and hate KDE
none of the applications that I like work with the SuSE default on the
permissions for the hardware.

Since I don't give a rat's ass whether my son (20 years old) plays on
my computer or not I don't need the paranoid setup of SuSE. My son ain't
gonna screw with my computer and if someone else does there ain't nothing
I can do about it since I don't own a gun.

> Most of the problems you've mentioned have never cropped up here (5
> different machines, 2x Athlon, 1x AMD64, 1x P-III and 1x P4-M, each with
> different BIOS's and support chips).
>
> It sounds more like there are some problems with your installation or
> configuration in particular as opposed to 9.3 or 10.0 in particular. I'm
> not saying that there aren't any problems with SuSE or Linux (ATi drivers
> are a complete pain in the neck still for example), but most of the issues
> you've raised either don't exist on a "normal" comfiguration, or are aimed
> at making life easier for international users...
>
> Dave

If you do a search on the web you will find similar problems with the
SuSE plugger bug. So far the only solution I've found was to rename
susepluger to some other name so it would not try to load.
SuSE had an update and the description of the reason for the update
states the problem that I've had but it doesn't fix ***.
What is baffling is that the problem doesn't exist on SuSE 10.0 and
SuSE can't fix it on SuSE 9.3 

-- 
Tired of Microsoft's rebootive multitasking?
then it's time to upgrade to Linux.
http://home.comcast.net/~mcatudal
We are the Cybernetic Entomology Experts