OSBlues

For me and probably a great many others, the most anticipated Linux release of late has been that of SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED10). When Novell released the public beta I rushed to download the 5 CDs and burn them. I then, having recently moved house, found myself in a situation where I had absolutely nothing to install it on as my house was still in boxes. When I finally got round to unpacking my office equipment the first thing I therefore wanted to do was install this puppy 🙂

The install went very well. I was very impressed with this distro’s ability to detect my 200GB disk attached as a third IDE device on my motherboard, no other distro has ever managed this! The install made a pretty reasonable assumption that I wanted to install in the 150GB of free space on this drive and reuse the swap space allocated for an existing linux distro. Good assumption but not what I wanted to do. I simply told it to use my second disk and overwrite the exisiting linux distro, which it was happy to do and was childsplay really. I answered a few no-brainer questions and the installation of files started, I was impressed at this point with the ‘slideshow’ and ‘details’ (I think that was what it was called) tabs during this stage. Slideshow provided some nice blurb about the OS and it’s features while the details tab allowed me to really see what was going on. I like the way the installer showed me how long it was likely to be until a disk change, very neat. On the subject of disk changes, this is where the installer took a turn for this worst. I watched the time counter get to 0 and expected the installer to ask for disk 2, it didn’t, it simply rebooted. I would consider myself pretty techy and even I was worried at this point, no warnings, no nothing, just a reboot. My fears were unnecessary as the installer started back up again after the reboot got straight back to where it left off and asked for disk 2, that’s fine but why not tell me it’s going to reboot? One thing I noted at this point was that the installer now only had the details tab rather than the option of the friendly slideshow, this struck me as a strange inconsistency which might scare a non-technical user.

The rest of the install is a blur, so I guess it went pretty well. All of my hardware was detected correctly including my graphics card and monitor combo which has always been a headache for SuSE. No other SuSE install has ever configured X correctly on this machine. So all was good, apart from one major bugbear. On logging in to my new spangly desktop my first impressions were immediately marred by the realisation that the X config had somehow left me with a 20 pixel (or so) black strip down the right hand side of my screen. I could probably delve into xorg.conf (or similar) and tweak a number that reflects the geometry of my monitor, but I shouldn’t have to.

I’m really encouraged by what I’ve seen so far in SLED10 and to be honest I haven’t had much time at all to play with it. I was particulary impressed that Banshee managed to play my music collection (from an NTFS partition) with no problems at all, even though the entire lot are encoded as AAC, now that’s pretty good for linux.

Beagle seems really good, although rather slow on my test machine. I have however, managed to crash beagle just by clicking on one of the little arrows to see more results 😦

I really would like to test the distro more and I’m pretty confident that Novell will kill any little bugs before final release. Since installing SLED10 I’ve spent some time installing Arch on another machine so that I can move this blog off of my windows machine (the dual boot with SLED10). With this blog now running on Arch I can spend more time in SLED10 🙂