jdd wrote:
Richard Creighton wrote:
Balderdash! Are you saying that because he is experienced and that he has other distros or OS's on his system that he can't write an objective review
he can't say "I don't recommand this for a beginner, because a beginner won't have 4 linuxes on his machine.
jdd, I just thought I'd enclose a direct E-Mail from the person that wrote the review. I think it explains or addresses the issues you raised fairly well. At least, I think it amplifies some of the points you questioned in some of your earlier posts. Quote:
Dear Richard, you don't know me, but you've read my work at: http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/opensuse10.3.review.html
I've found your comments in this thread: http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2007-11/msg02200.html If those are not your comments, please forgive me; it's not easy to retrieve the proper email address... but please do let me know if I messed up!
Since the opensuse list mentions over 100 mails per day, I don't feel inclined to subscribe, so I'll just mention the following to you directly, mostly related to the tangle of words in that thread with jdd, who jumps to conclusions several times, even though I thought my review was actually clear enough to the contrary. Guess not. Neither he nor I am native English speakers though. So this kind of misunderstanding can happen.
First: thanks for the positive feedback. I'm quite used to getting flamed after mentioning negative points, and it's more rare to get praise.
Now on to the points I'd like to make:
1) the installation was definitely fully fresh. The subsection named 'installation' mentions the word 'installation' about 10 times explicitly, and nowhere is the word update or upgrade used in that section, and where used elsewhere it's clear from the context that it's only related to software packages for the openSUSE 10.3 This explains why I was seriously delighted that openSUSE could actually pick up the users from my other systems, including passwords! and also the systems in the bootloader. If it were an upgrade, I would have expected no less. BTW it seems the user data and boot info is taken from the partition on which one installs (from the comments in the above thread), which held a Mandriva 2007.0 installation before with LILO. Colour me even more impressed that openSUSE can manage that!
2) the problems with booting and rebooting were to do with a faulty grub in the root partition, and with my ignorance about whether I should relaunch the installation from dvd or start the half installed and unconfigured system. My only point there was that I would have liked to have some more information than just "now it's time to reboot". I do not blame the faulty grub in the root partition on SUSE, and I'm not sure if this is repeatable, and or a problem with the partitioning of my drive. Note that I intended to use chainloading from the GRUB in the MBR, which I also use to start 2 of the other systems - the GRUB in the mbr is the one from the latest Mandriva 2008.0 installation.
3) the reason my other system is not mentioned is that from the 3 other partitions, all are Mandriva: 64 and 32 bit 2007.1 and 64 bit 2008.0. I tried and managed to keep the whole name Mandriva out of the text of the review. It's not a comparative review, it's a review that looks at things in their own right. The comparative review is still coming. Otherwise, I have two swap partitions and a /home partition - which I didn't use in the openSUSE installation, it was truly and completely _fresh_ and standalone. I count on wiping it. And yes, I do count on giving openSUSE 11 a try in about 5 months.
4) sax2 clearly used settings for the i810 driver for the setup with the default intel graphics driver; I've found out this causes problems only with laptop screens, and maybe only those of 1280x800 resolution - so quite a few less systems than one could think when Intel GMA950 / 945GM is mentioned. Essentially, the modeline of sax2 works with i810 and not with intel - where it's actually perfectly fine (at least in my case) to omit any timing and modelines.
5) the locking of the system is caused by issues with the TSST drive in my system, with the older ata driver there's no problem, with the new libata driver there is this issue - also seen on gentoo, ubuntu and other systems. My Mandriva 2008.0 is fine since they stuck with the old driver, because they _knew_ the new one was problematic. My guess: they knew from: gentoo, ubuntu and openSUSE 10.3...
6) by the way, the hardware I used and which I bought as 'Novell Certified' is a transtec branded MSI Megabook s262 Intel Core 2 Duo Intel GMA950/945GM 3945ABG 12" laptop. The main points: Intel Core 2 Duo, gma950 and ipw3945 are mentioned. I didn't know that the drive was a TSST at all at that point - never cared to check, only came upon this due to the replies in the discussion thread of my article (on some suse forums at http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=62988) (My hardware info is on my site as well, forgot to link it from the opensuse review page. Sorry.)
7) Interesting that a lot of assuming seems to be preferable to some to the simple questions one could ask to get cleared up - either via that forum link for discussion or via email - via the contact link on my site. Such as: did you do a clean install, did you mess around with x, y, z, etc. It's not like I wouldn't answer those...
8) the one problem I 'caused' which can clearly be considered uncommon is the installation in the root partition to be chainloaded from the grub in the mbr. The following problem are, I believe, totally repeatable: - intel driver not working with sax2 modelines - unusable graphics - lockups, admittedly due to faulty firmware in TSST optical drives _BUT_ this was never seen before because the problem only raises it's head with the new libata driver - video playback problems - i586 package installed instead of a x86-64 package using the one-click installer
9) I did have a look at filing a bug for the graphics problems, but I found enough that were matches for my issues that I didn't. Same for the problem with the lockups and video playback.
Feel free to post this if it's useful and appropriate,
with kind regard, Rob Teng a.k.a. aRTee
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org