Adventures in openSUSE Linux

First, I must reiterate that this blog in no way is intended to be explicitly technical or even well organized. Rather, it is meant to be more conversational. So in this posting I'll be stating my impressions now of the recently released 12.1 and some notes to new users. Honestly I have very mixed feelings about this release. But when you consider the complexity of all the things a Linux distribution entails, with all of its technologies and software this should ultimately be no surprise. Likewise with bugs; considering the complexity there will of course be bugs. 12.1 offers a lot of new technologies, very little of which I actually care about or find personally useful. Bugs... it seems like this release is especially buggy. However I don't think that is actually the case, but rather that some of the bugs that have cropped up are just a bit more "in your face" than some other bugs that have cropped up. Some of these I ran into myself, but I certainly can't ign...

I don't know how many of you have 3G hardware built into your netbooks, but as you can probably guess its not always straightforward. Frankly, it took me months to figure out what I was doing and get it working consistently. Then while I was running 11.4 I decided to give Mandriva a try (which had some critical flaws) and so I reinstalled openSUSE. Now all of a sudden the process I had figured out so well, didn't work as it should have. I was tired of reinstalling and trying to figure it out, so I figured I would just wait until 12.1 came out and pray that the fresh install of it would fix my problem. So now I have installed 12.1RC2. And at first it looked encouraging, though the hardware wasn't accesible quite I could however go into the NetworkManager Mobile Broadband tab to set up a connection and it would show me Verizon as selectable. That is what the crucial problem I have been having is about; Verizon is not selectable for some odd reason. Maybe, just maybe I some...

I had long been vaguely aware of Linux, and the only distros I was aware of was Red Hat, SUSE (openSUSE as well), and Ubuntu... oh and I vaguely remember seeing ads or something for Mandrake, though I was clueless as to what it was. Finally I had a chance to get my hands dirty with it when my exes Vista laptop went blue-screen and never came back. In retrospect I probably could have recovered it, but at the time assumed it was a lost cause. I first burnt a disk with Ubuntu, and simply couldn't get it to boot even after trying to trouble shoot the installer. I went with Ubuntu first since the tech mags I read from time to time made a big deal about it being the most user-friendly and reliable. Clearly that wasn't my finding. I looked at Red Hat next, but realized it was a commercial product and had no knowledge of Fedora at that time. So the next stop was openSUSE. I first became aware of openSUSE when I saw a small article about Novell acquiring SuSE and creating the openSUS...