This past week I had downloaded the openSUSE 10.2 operating system based on an article I had read, published on DesktopLinux.com
According to Distrowatch’s page hit ranking of Linux distributions, openSUSE has overtaken long time number one distribution Ubuntu over the past seven days.
Yes, I’m sick of the constant security updates I need to make to my aging W2K system and would love to have a sensible replacement that would let me work the way I do now.
First off, the entertainment value such as music, video on my PC is further down my list of important features than other things such as cross-platform connectivity in a mixed environment both local and remote.
Once I had the disto burned to CD (yes cd, I didn’t have any DVD media to use), I went through the installation process and got the system installed. (on my computer using a different physical hard drive).
For the first day, I spent most of my time finding my way around the system and realized it was quicker, and has all the usual unix features, multiple desktops, nice wallpaper, lots of software, easy management without having to reboot everytime a change occurs. It was a bit different in a sense I now had software that would do most of the things I needed, but unfortunately not all.
Open Office worked fine for me, I just need a word processor that would communicate with the rest of the world and it did that. My SSH client was built in and accessable via the terminal which is very flexible, Firefox 2 is included, you can get Thunderbird if you want (just install via YasT). It burns CD’s and DVD’s much faster than the software under w2k (example, 650MB on windows takes about 15 minutes while the same file takes about 3 minutes on openSUSE.)
All in all, I was pretty excited at first blush, but then I started to realize, there were some short comings in store for me (which may not be the case for someone else).
I use my pc for work 95% and play 5%. My environment is a mix of windows and several flavors of unix/linux with the occasional need to talk to an MSSQL server at a remote location in North Carolina.
Currently, my workstation is linked via samba shares to the nix boxes and windows networking to the few windows machines we have on our network. Basically, I just need to click on a folder and I’m reading and writing to files on that sever. If I need console access, I just SSH to the box, not so on the windows boxes, but I rarely go to them, the real workhorses are the nix boxes. There’s also 2 older FreeBSD servers that just keep plugging along.
Ready to get back in the action, I began servicing some of our clients, though it was clumsy at first because of the different software I had to use, but that is something that I would overcome after a week or so, but I began to notice, some of the samba shares were read only. Coincidentally, this occured on 2 Fedora Core 3 boxes (yes old, but they are in production and there is no time to upgrade them). All the shares to servers runing NT4, W2K (Server and Pro), Linux 7.3, FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x worked flawlessly, but the FC3 boxes had a problem. (I had tried the MEPIS unix and didn’t have this problem, but that is another story for another time).
I looked high and low for some information on how to resolve this, but alas, there was none. I even tried to connect via NFS and got the same results. I went to the IRC groups and nobody had a clue, nothing on google ,et al. I spent a day on this issue alone and it never got resolved. I guess I could have downloaded the files to my machine (it did connect in read-only) and then FTP the files back across the room, but I chose not to. Hence stopper number 1. (probably due to cifs, as other distos don’t seem to have this problem).
I also have a bunch of files from Paint Shop Pro (.psp) that I could no longer access. This is not necessarilly a stopper, as I could boot into windows and convert them to a standard file type, but I needed to get access to some of those files and couldn’t without the aid of a co-worker. Hardship number 1.
I also needed to get native access to a remote SQL Server, and found myself at a loss. I normally use the MS Query Analyzer for this, and didn’t have this available to me. To be honest, I didn’t look very hard for a replacement, as I needed access to the server so I moved back to w2k, which is where I am now. Hardship (possibly stopper) number 2.
Another thing I didn’t like was the printing quality. I viewed a pdf file sent to me by an associate using the pdf viewer in openSUSE and needed to print another copy. The printing worked (connectivity was actually easier than on MEPIS), but there were eroneous lines by some of the characters like the “h” and “L” and some others. This was ok for this particular printout but the same file under w2k did not have this. This may be a configuration issue on my part, but I was under pressure to do get some work done. Hardship number 3.
Another curios behaviour was one of the graphics programs (I think gimp) would not read files from the shared drives. Could have been something I didn’t set right, but I was trying to develop a flow in the process and I was tripping over myself.
All in all, I found openSUSE to be about 85% effective for me in my environment, with the remaining 15% consisting of learning curve and show stoppers. Too bad, because I was really excited to finally get away from my w2k environment, but I just cannot make the move at present.
So now I have another hardrive sitting on my desk with another operating system that doesn’t work for me.
I still think, one day the hardrive with my w2k installation will be among the hard disk pile.
Overall, I liked the openSUSE.
But since most windows users are dummer than a box of rox when it comes to computers, I don’t see it being an up and cummer in the desk top world. At least not yet. let’s say it may be too techie for most.
Just my 2 cents
