Mike McMullin wrote:

Does it rock loud enough, and hard enough to do a straight upgrade over a (my still) problematic 9.3?

I don't know if 10.0 rocks, but I wanted to try it on my second hard disk (I run 9.3), and when I booted from the first cd, I jumped the gun and clicked "upgrade". I then held my breath... I got the same irritating message about video frequency being out of range, that I've had since 9.2 (I have a dead-standard Samsung 172v tft monitor) . So you have to add grub parameters (I guess this is the kind of defining moment when 99% of Windows would-be converts give up on Linux ....) Installation / upgrade went without a hitch besides that. There are however 3 things that you should know: 1. You have to install java yourself, it is not on the disk, but the opensuse.org website tells you all there is to know about it. 2. You can't play mp3 files unless you install lame, mad and quite a few other packages (but it was the same on 9.3) 3. The same goes for Mplayer and Xine if you want to play windows video formats or watch DVD's. (see above for 9.3) 4. You can't burn an audio CD from mp3 files (there was a long discussion on this list about it a while ago, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong for the "victim" of that mp3-malfunction - things had always worked fine for me in k3b on 9.3, and suddenly I was finding myself in the very same dire straits). The solution was easy, though: you have to install the required k3b-plugin, which is anything but obvious: you check that you have the right software installed in k3b setup, but it just won't burn mp3's. 4. Audacity (sound recorder), which I really need (I'm a language teacher and I capture quite a lot of audio to use as listening comprehension material) does not work because it depends on a previous version of wxGTK. I've tried installing the previous version, but I still can't get audacity to work. I've tried compiling, but the comilation fails at the end with otherworldly error messages). I would advise installing apt-get, which makes upgrading the modified packages really much easier. Finally, what I noticed is that the pre-2.0 Openoffice that is included has solved an annoying bug (insert>image>from disk -- and you could not see the graphic file names until you typed the first letter). That my my experience of updating from 9.3 to 10.0 rc1. Nothing quite dramatic, as you can see. FX