openSUSE 10.2 Released with KDE 3.5.5

openSUSE 10.2, formerly known as SUSE Linux 10.x, has been released with KDE 3.5.5 and KOffice 1.6 (Krita is installed by default). As well as the usual latest free and open source software, openSUSE comes with the new KDE Menu "Kickoff", integrated with the latest Kerry Beagle. Some screenshots are available on the openSUSE wiki.

Comments

What a nonsense to put this on the dot! Please, stop posting articles
that are about some distribution release. There are enough other sites
that report about this.

I agree.

Is disagree. That is important news. Esp. as each major distro features a KDE derivate release which could inspire KDE original.

by superstoned (not verified)

also, suse does a lot for KDE. it includes and pioneers things not in kde, like the faster startup patches from lubos (where in suse for sometime, until they got into kde 3.5.2) and now the new KDE menu. many suse developers work on kde, all in all i think suse is worth mentioning.

Oh, in that case; can I please have a dot story of my own when I buy a new cool tshirt as well?
Afterall, I do code a lot for KDE!

Seriously;
announcements of companies releasing (derivatives of) KDE isn't news for the dot. Really; its not.

> announcements of companies releasing (derivatives of) KDE isn't news for the dot. Really; its not.

Good, solid argument.

No its a bad argument.

KDE should promote itself and spreading news about companies and distributions that have adopted KDE is part of that.

So if a distribution releases with KDE as (one of their) default desktop(s), then it should be posted.

If we don't, new users will think that KDE is losing momentum, because all distributions are moving to GNOME, according to the news on the Internet..

>>Oh, in that case; can I please have a dot story of my own when I buy a new cool tshirt as well?

No, but you could announce a cool new line of kde gear at your favorite internet store.
Especially if that store donates some of its revenues to KDE.

by superstoned (not verified)

when you release kde-code, you have a dot story (koffice), and there is people behind kde, where developers have interviews; and a dot announcement indeed.

http://people.kde.nl/ :D

I have nothing against news about distributions release, but since we are apparently talking of a distribution with a special relationship to KDE, what I'd like very much is an article about the official reaction and comments of KDE as a project to the Microsoft-Novell deal.
This is not an anti-KDE opinion, I'd like the same from GNOME with a little extra addon about their stand on mono, btw.
Did I miss them?

by Francis Giannar... (not verified)

Please tell me why it's nonsense to put this on the dot. As others have expressed, I find it very interesting hearing about new distros which use KDE, PARTICULARLY if they're trying out particular modifications of KDE (as openSUSE has).

The only annoying thing would be "beta released! RC released! Final released!" One post every 6 months (i.e. Kubuntu) or 8 months (openSUSE) about a new version of a distro with KDE is good taste, in my opinion.

Because it is more about OpenSuse than about KDE. In my opinion.

I'm not convinced that that's a valid methodology for submitting articles to the dot. For one, because openSUSE and KDE aren't distinct entities or projects: KDE is an upstream and big part of openSUSE. But more importantly, because it's not about whether an article is predominantly about KDE, but whether its content does have some connection (a *strong enough* one) to KDE. I think new Distro releases do (as I said, particularly when they announce specific innovations in KDE).

As long as *somebody* writes up a news item (like apokryphos did), *and* the Dot editors do accept and publish it (like they did), there will be published news items like this on the Dot. Period.

Here is *your* chance to change this: submit your own news items, written by yourself. Simply avoid the type of "distribution release articles", and come forward with more interesting stuff. Be creative.

No need to take issues with apokryphos' initiative. *I*, for one, liked to read this news on the Dot.

Besides, a lot of kde people are involved in openSUSE, so news about this distribution is also news about KDE.

If some distribution news just contains "we packaged KDE" I would agree. But this openSUSE release is interesting as it contains newly developed features like the start menu (which may influence KDE4's Plasma). About those the article could have contained some information though.

indeed, opensuse is a strong supporter of kde, and has interesting releases with new innovative kde features.

More then enough reason to post in on the dot.

it s good news every1!

by anonymous (not verified)

...sad...

by Carsten Niehaus (not verified)

Well, I am using it since the last beta came out on one computer. So far, I didn't find a single bug. No crashes, no nothing. So SUSE did a very well job here. Of course it helps that KDE 3.5.5 is itself very stable.

And I love the new kicker-replacement!

by anonymous (not verified)

> So far, I didn't find a single bug

Then, you didn't work with it.

by apokryphos (not verified)

Obviously not. Considering you're still going under "anonymous" and we have no idea if you're one of the other anonymous' on here, you haven't stated any of the bugs found. So, the situation is a little ridiculous.

Presuming you're the other "anonymous" though, it seems quite obvious that the only "real" bugs you might have (can't verify) you experienced are very specific. Radeon card (using particular window manager, compiz), particular Laptop. Both problems that wouldn't be experienced by everyone.

> and kicker was not even replaced :o)

Well, the K Menu is part of the KDE panel, kicker, and the K Menu has changed, so it's not entirely wrong at all to say that kicker has been changed/replaced.

by Carsten Niehaus (not verified)

Aha... Strange analysis. What bugs did you find? I am running OS 10.2 now on 2 machines, and even though both machines ran for 6 hours now (after typing my first message) I still haven't found a bug... Following your logic I was idling for 6 hours just waiting for your reply.
Perhaps OS 10.2 is really stable if you do things like webbrowsing, kdepim, OOo? Perhaps you should start adding real content to your replies?

by Gene Venable (not verified)

It's been working fine for me. I have had many problems with many distributions, mainly with sound, but this one went perfectly so far. My favorite environment at the moment is Window Maker, though I have also installed KDE and GNOME and many others. These days, I am using one of my computers for Linux and two laptops for Windows. I'm mainly watching movies and browsing the web and writing emails--what else is there ?:)

I was running 10.2 RC 2 and upgraded thru Yast. It went perfectly, to my surprise.

I'm also running a variant of Ubuntu called Linux Mint that is working almost as well.

by AC (not verified)

and kicker was not even replaced :o)

by Carsten Niehaus (not verified)

Oops, KMenu of course :)

by Anonymous (not verified)

...sad...

by apokryphos (not verified)

This is actually the most stable distribution I've tried out in over at least a year. I'm very interested in finding out what's unstable for you; please do expand.

by Lparry (not verified)

Compared to (K)Ubuntu, which crashed practically every day, whether kernel panic from the bcm43xx driver, which works beautfiully in SuSE, only the Kickoff menu has been slightly dodgy, with the drop shadows etc. but who cares.

They had done a good job compared to 10.1 which was terrible, especially with KDE compared to Gnome.

Network Manager still doesn't work, but YAST works brill, including the package management system, no annoying dependancies on ZMD, that is a memory hog.

It is important for people who aren't knowledgeable about KDE base distributions to find out the best solution recommended, that has been lately recieved, not something outdated.

It also shows the technological achievements of the latest kde release, whether trivial bugs or otherwise.

by Joachim Werner (not verified)

What exactly does not work with NetworkManager?

by anonymous (not verified)

"Yast -> Add repositories" didn't work for years stable. It's like gambling if the repositories are available or not

madwifi is broken if I suspend2ram my notebook

xorg/xgl/radeon/compiz does have graphic errors (on fedora6, there isn't a single pixel broken)

no program for the volume keys on a thinkpad notebook (like ubuntu)

that's after 1/2 day using 10.2...

And I don't want to wait for 10.3:
> http://www.suseblog.com/?p=168
> --- snip ---
> There are still a lot of bugs open for 10.2 and I’m sure real usage
> over the time will find some more. We will release via online update
> security updates for 10.2 as usual and release also the most severe
> bug fixes. But most bug fixes will only be done for 10.3, our next
> release coming out next summer.
> --- snip ---

by AC (not verified)

>>"Yast -> Add repositories" didn't work for years stable. It's like gambling if the repositories are available or not

hmm, after 1/2 day of use, you discovered that adding repositories doesn't work for many years?

interesting ;)
by the way, i never had any problems adding sources to yast

>> madwifi is broken if I suspend2ram my notebook

does madwifi ship with opensuse?
Thats new, since it was removed from 10.1 due to licensing issues.

>>xorg/xgl/radeon/compiz does have graphic errors (on fedora6, there isn't a single pixel broken)

you mean ATI radeon?
Well, you can blame ATI for not releasing opens source drivers and for not (yet) supporting Xorg 7.2...

>>no program for the volume keys on a thinkpad notebook (like ubuntu)

Hmm, never needed any program to use volume keys....

But nog offering support for special keys is not the same as being unstable.

only unstable stuf in your list are about non opensource drivers that are not shipped whith opensuse.

by anonymous (not verified)

> hmm, after 1/2 day of use, you discovered that adding repositories doesn't work for many years?

1/2 day with 10.2 ;) ... 10.0, 10.1 doesn't work stable too.

> you mean ATI radeon?

With FC6 it works.

> Hmm, never needed any program to use volume keys....

It's a useful feature to see the "hardware"-volume of my Thinkpad and not only the Software-Mixer volume from Gnome/KDE/whatever.

by apokryphos (not verified)

> With FC6 it works.

Why? Because Fedora ships an older version of Xorg. openSUSE 10.2 was released a lot more recently, and includes Xorg 7.2.

by AC (not verified)

>>It's a useful feature to see the "hardware"-volume of my Thinkpad and not only the Software-Mixer volume from Gnome/KDE/whatever.

Ah, but then you should just install the application that makes this possible.

i'm not familliar with a thinkpad, but i'm sure that it's shipped with an addon cd that gets thinkpad specific features running under linux.

>With FC6 it works.

With 10.1 also, but that's besides the point.
point is that opensuse ships with a newer version of xorg, and that ati has not (yet) provided drivers for it.

It's a bit like installing Vista, while ati does not offer support yet.

by superstoned (not verified)

> by the way, i never had any problems adding sources to yast

well, it's really picky about how you enter the sources, the syntax has to be perfect. one / too many and it won't find anything. this has annoyed me, as it took me some time to figure out how it wanted it's sources put in. now i know, so it works, but i think it should be more smart about it. about the volume keys, well, that's more a hardware thing i guess, tough i'd love to see those work better. i have a laptop with a volume scroll thingy (how's that in english?) and it works only in windows.

by superstoned (not verified)

and let me add 10.1's package management was totally broken. i spend many hours on it, but it's still a pain in the ass. if i could get rid of zmd... wow!

by otherAC (not verified)

superstoned: don't tell me that you are not aware of smart :o)

by superstoned (not verified)

i am, but should it not work out-of-the-box? how could they have shipped 10.1?

by otherAC (not verified)

I guess the release dude did not have enough authority to prevent pushing developers adding the unstable and new zmd into the last beta of opensuse 10.1

But that did not break the packaging system (at least not that i'm aware of), it only breaks the updater in systemtray

by apokryphos (not verified)

Yeah, you can. There are two Software Management Patterns:
* ZMD and friends
* openSUSE software management

Now, although ZMD has actually been fixed and is working pretty well now, you can select the openSUSE SM (which I find a little quicker) and hence you can remove ZMD (and friends) completely. It's a very easy click. Here's a screeny of the Software Management "Patterns":
http://en.opensuse.org/Image:Screeny102_software_patterns.jpg

by apokryphos (not verified)

Erm, don't interpret that comment incorrectly. *Every* distro release has bugs; it's a case of trying to strike the balance of new software vs. stable release. I'm sure the author of that post doesn't think it's less stable than other Linux distributions that have been released; I'll wager good money on that.

SUSE/openSUSE has usually been *very* good with laptops (well before decent support was added in Kubuntu); true, I've only ever tested a Dell Inspiron and a couple of Fujitsu lappys, but it always detected them flawlessly there. I hear it's sometimes worth changing the keyboard setting in kcontrol if it isn't detected appropriately.

> "Yast -> Add repositories" didn't work for years stable. It's like gambling if the repositories are available or not

This works flawlessly now with every appropriate repository I've tried. It also worked perfectly in 10.0 for me; only problems in 10.1 (which everyone knows about). Have you got an example of a non-working repository? (without using ZMD pattern)

by Joachim Werner (not verified)

> no program for the volume keys on a thinkpad notebook (like ubuntu)

Last time I checked both the HP Compaq and the Lenovo ThinkPad I am using had the hardware volume keys automagically enabled, even with a nice on-screen display, on openSUSE 10.2. This is supposed to work. If it doesn't, please report it as a bug and specify exactly what doesn't work.

by antxx (not verified)

The OpenSuSE team works fulltime with KDE improving it as they can, soy this article is a must have in the KDE news!!

by gerd (not verified)

what about kickoff, will it become part of KDE4?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)
by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

It's now at:
http://mslinux.org/
(no more www).

by otherAC (not verified)

but not updated :(

by Samuel Weber (not verified)

And it works beautifully. Opensuse really puts alot of effort into these releases, and I can feel it.

-Sam

by AJ (not verified)

It's somewhat more responsive and faster than 10.1 (if you don't count the *@!_[#^ package system) and runs stable till now (since beta2). The only thing which bugs me is basket (yes I know, it's not shipped with suse). It crashes randomly and very often, but without being reproduceable. I can't get even a single useful backtrace, it's driving me nuts.