I downloaded the KDE4 LiveCD torrent of openSUSE 11.0 this morning, and these are some initial views. The LiveCD works very well, although it took a long time at the "Creating X11 config" stage - I'm using an old IBM R31 laptop, with an i830 chip. I went on to install, which incidentally might be flagged better. You have to go to Computer, and then choose Install from there - it should actually say what you're installing. The final stage of the first part of the install dropped to a console with a login prompt for a couple of minutes. I thought I was supposed to log in, and so would a new user, but in fact it wouldn't accept my username (of which more later), and went back to doing its own thing. It would have been a good idea to flash up a message here, as the second stage did ("Don't panic! We are just trying to detect your card!") - very clever. I thought the install was noticeably quicker than the old 10.2 install - perhaps 20% quicker. It had commendably fewer requirements to click/agree to than older openSUSE versions. The first login presented a major problem, however. It would not accept the user I had added during install. I was able to log in as root, and saw that there were no users. I don't think I misclicked anything in the install, so if not this is a pretty major bug. When I re-added my user using YaST, and clicked OK, the screen hung at 37% for about 4 minutes - so much so I thought it had crashed. But eventually it did get itself going again - I have no idea what it was doing. KDE4. Hmmm. Compared to the sveltness of Plastik, Ozone seems a bit ... plump, but that may have been because the laptop resolution is a lot lower than my normal screen, so my eyes may have been bamboozled. But unfortunately I decided to change Ozone to Plastik in the Control Center - bad idea - the whole thing locked up, for real this time, and when I rebooted, the Launch (Geeko) button was missing. Yup. I have no idea how to get it back. I thought this was maybe down to the general flakiness of 4.0, so I decided to take Stephan Binner's advice to upgrade to 4.1. The new package manager is like greased lightning, no doubt about it. I enabled the community repos, and it refreshed them all in a fraction of the time it takes Smart on 10.2. However, it seems you have to be connected to the network in order to run the package manager. I think I complained about this with 10.3, which I never used afterwards, but obviously no-one at openSUSE ever thinks of running the package manager without being connected. Ah well. I looked for 4.1, but couldn't find it. The closest thing to it is 4.0.82. OK, click on kdebase4 to upgrade it, and I get the message: "ktorrent requires kdebase4-runtime < 4.0.60, but this requirement cannot be provided". Uninstalling ktorrent leads to another similar message about dolphin, and I suspect ad infinitum. Perhaps I was doing this wrong, and I should have been installing a pattern or something, but who cares? I installed some KDE3 stuff and started using a sane desktop again. Unfortunately, though, you start getting a mix of themes, because the KDE4 versions of some apps come up, even with the /opt/kde3/bin/startkde lines. I'm sure people at openSUSE have put a lot of work into making KDE4 useable, but it's actually pretty awful in spite of that. It really shouldn't have been the default desktop on 11. So .. the good points are that the install is great, and the package manager is fast. The bad points are that pieces of the default desktop seem to be badly broken. Hopefully others will have better news to report. I may try 11 in a couple of days on another machine, if I can spare 4-5 hours. -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.klebran.org.uk - Gwirydd gramadeg rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org