openSUSE 11.2 Gnome edition - Fantastic

Ocky,
What are your download speeds? They can't be THAT slow.

Later...

 

Tressy, it's not the speed, but the maximum amount of data (5 GB per month) that is the concern.

 

I've never downloaded 5 gigs in a given month in my entire life! . I can't relate to downloading that much data. Ocky must be downloading stuff all the time! Of course today I've downloaded a Lucid daily build and yesterday a Kubuntu daily. I guess it does start to add up if you think about it.

BTW, as of about a week ago every computer in my home is running Ubuntu. I dumped Windows 7 (at least for now).

Later...

 

You are not implying that anyone who does something different is wrong, are you? I know that I don't mind downloading a 4 GB OpenSUSE DVD today and a 4 GB Fedora DVD tomorrow. Anyway, the security updates after installation can add too.

When you are living with these restrictions like Ocky, then you make very careful choices of what to download and you worry about maxing out.
Yes, I'm fortunate enough that I'm actually able to watch complete TV shows and movies streamed over the internet.

 

Not really Trespasser. Remember there is one account (5GB) which is shared between my wife and myself. You can imagine that the updates for CentOS, and my 2 Ubuntu's plus the wife's Ubuntu take quite a chunk out of the allocation, not to mention Vbox. So, unlike wilbertnl, downloading just one 4GB DVD per month is impossible.
BTW download speed is 4096kbps which is 512kB/s advertised. In reality it's more like about 410kB/s from local - so it takes me about 26 minutes to download a 698MB live CD. This is the max. speed for private ADSL users here.
Sure it's OK, and much better than dial-up, but slow when compared to what you are offered in USA or Europe, or Korea etc.

Thanks for coming to my defence.

 

Why, yes. Yes, I am!

Thanks for the explanation, Ocky.

Later...

 

Fedora 11+ has a great feature that might be helpful for you Ocky.
It's the Presto plugin for yum, that adds support for delta downloads (enabled by default).
This means that only the bytes that are different are downloaded in order to perform an update of the system.
I watched how a 230 MB update was reported to require only 38 MB of downloads.
It's the same feature that Microsoft uses with Live Mail for Desktop, it saves bandwidth.

OpenSUSE has a similar feature with their delta rpm's, but I didn't see the effects on my bandwidth reported.

 

Many thanks for that tidbit. Will look at it next month when I want to try SUSE in VB.
I have sufficient memory and powerful CPU(s) so this caveat should not affect me at all:-

 

Fedora 12

Total Download Size: 30 MB.
Download Delta Size: 2.6 MB

 

Nice. I have enough MB to download the SUSE 11.2 iso tomorrow for trial.

 

You know, on the surface this may seem funny and far fetched, but in reality maybe not such a bad idea. I wonder how much to post a cd or two to your neck of the woods.

 

Wow, thanks for the thought, but I was really only joking, really. I could buy the CD's here but wtf. Anyway just checked our local ADSL site and the news is quite pleasant.
Larger ADSL data packages coming from Telkom
and....

 

No problem. I knew you were kidding but it seemed to me it may have been feasible and I'd have been happy to help out. No skin off my teeth

As to the possible ADSL upgrade, maybe things are looking up for you

 

I tried openSUSE 11.2 in Vbox and had a nice install. Then added some repositories, Packman etc. that was also passable. But the package management is Stone Age and difficult for me to understand.
For instance to get the Guest Additions in Vbox is terrible. There is no dkms package, one needs to install kernel-syms and kernel-source packages (ensuring that they match the kernel of course ..uname -a)
I tried this in Software Manager via Yast>Available. However once I had them selected for install and clicked Apply, I had to abort because Yast SM. wanted to install all the new packages from the added repositories - nearly 1 GB. So I tried Add/Remove Software, selected the kernel-syms package corresponding to the kernel (there were dependencies), and clicked Apply. After about 400MB I aborted that as well.
None of this nonsense with CentOS which is also much faster, and of course Ubuntu rules as regards package management.
I know that openSUSE is for intermediate users, so maybe I have not 'ripened' enough to use it properly.
My conclusion, nothing special, unintuitive package manager. Not good for me as I need to actually use a distro for my daily tasks rather than wondering how and why to accomplish tasks.

 

Maybe better to illustrate with a screenshot. All I did now was an online update of the
default repos without installing any of the packages available.
Now to get the Guest Additions working I think I need the packages kernel-syms & kernel-source.
So I select them as shown and also selected the correct versions for the kernel i.e. not the
latest one but the one matching uname -a.
Then I click Install. They are then shown at bottom right with dependencies.
However when I click Apply, Yast SM wants to install all the other packages shown as install
on the right side.
Surely there is something I am not doing right or have overlooked.
Strange thing is when I do it via the cli - zypper install kernel-source kernel-syms only those are
installed (+ dependencies) which is fine, but , the latest ones are installed which don't match the
existing kernel. Rather frustrating as one would assume zypper to be clever enough to see which
kernel version is installed on the system.
I am forced to control myself experimenting as the month is young and I have already used a sizeable
chunk of my allocated bandwidth.

Apart from the package conundrum I agree that openSUSE 11.2 is a very nice distro.

 

Ocky, I had the same nightmare you're having with the kernel packages required for the Guest additions. I could not for the life of me install the proper kernel packs necessary, so I gave up after considerable time/effort In no way suggesting you do the same. You have a far better grasp of this stuff than I, so I hope you can figure it out and let us know what's required

 

Ocky, please open a console and try as root this: #zypper install kernel-syms, see what it installs.

 

I have done that as mentioned (as sudo). Do you mean as su - ?
(kernel-syms installs kernel-source as dependency. Was about 90MB all in all if I remember correctly.) .. Will check tomorrow.

 

......that will install a newer kernel than the one that came with 11.2 Live CD i.e. the currently installed one.

Will put this on the back-burner till I have more time and enough bandwidth.
Found also this link in openSUSE forums. It appears there is a ymp package for Dkms.
http://forums.opensuse.org/applicat...rtualbox-guest-additions-opensuse-11-1-a.html

 

Well, that is much less than the hundreds of MB for updates and additional software that YAST reported.
Still a lot when you are on the 'bandwidth watchers' plan.

 

Ocky, this one is for you, although not OpenSUSE related, it is a response to your concern of bandwidth stress.

Here is Fedora 12 again:
Total Download Size: 343 MB
Presto reduced the download size from 295 MB to 73 MB
Additional downloads: 48 MB
(295 + 28 = 343)





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wilbertnl - thanks, that is truly impressive. Pity that the presto plug-in is not available for apt.
SUSE is on the back-burner for now - and quite frankly I find it hard to understand why folks are prepared to fight with something as unintuitive as Yast package management, presto plug-in notwithstanding. Is your main OS Fedora 12 or SUSE 11.2 and which do you find smoother and or easier to use ?

 

Some might find this tad bit irrelevant BUT
on VM
IT is SO slow!
It requires at least 1GB of ram just to be able to install.
When Mint was ready within ca 25 min, Ubuntu within ca 15 min - Suse was up and running within.... 80 minutes.
And the boot times...killing me softly with those...over 2 minutes to boot up.
Also soon after the install process finishes there are 'suggested' updates that I somehow couldn't get rid of...e.g. who needs loads of lingo versions for Oo help files? not me. Before I could install what I wanted I had to wait over an hour to install everything the system suggested.

Wonder if in reality it performs any better, much better or...maybe it's just from the perspective of a true noob wink

peace

 

Actually, painfully slow to install for me, even on the real system.

 

strange. Here i'm using dual boot Mint/Opensuse (tried the kde and the gnome and stick with the kde only to differ from Mint) and here not see any difference regarding speeds.