I really want to love openSuSE. I really, truly do. Things were going so well between us... I was very happy with openSuSE 11.2, so much so that I installed 11.3 the same day it dropped. Things looked even more polished - no missing icons, no segfaults, everything operated cleanly and worked well. I went to install my favorite SuSE applications... and they simply weren't there anymore.First let's discuss SaX2. I love SaX2 and how it makes XOrg configuration so automagic. Yet SaX2 is no longer provided with SuSE distributions. The openSuSE team did announce that this was happening, supposedly because "automatic configuration and dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms have been developed such that today the tasks that SaX2 was able to do are done fully automatically on the fly and can be modified from within a desktop session." They might have a point... I do use nivida-settings more than SaX2 now. Oh well... I'm willing to let it go.
However one thing I wasn't able to let go of is SCPM. It went missing without so much as a trace and a profile management package can't be found in any repo for openSuSE 11.3. This was a major product differentiators for ALL SuSE distros, and for it to be missing is a huge shame. Now it is even harder for me to switch between configuration profiles for presentations/home/work, as they take wildly different network configurations, display configurations, peripheral configurations, printer configs, on and on and on... The omission of SCPM is pretty grave.
I went to find solace in my Really Slick Screensavers. I added my missing KDE4 screensaver entries and expected them to work as they always have. Then I ran across yet another omission - the KDE xscreensaver compatibility applications were missing as well. This omission was even more curious, as they are missing in the binary packages but are present in the source packages. I re-built the RPM from source, re-installed it and the xscreensaver compatibility layer appeared. Odd... and now I'll have to re-do that step with every patch & upgrade.
I don't know what to think of 11.3 yet. On one had it works extremely well and the longer release cycle appears to have served them well. Still, I can't help but feel that some things were omitted to simplify the packaging of the distribution... and that could be a bad omen of things to come.
When you make a clean install opensuse 11.3, there is no xorg.conf to be seen, and no use for Sax2. The X-server configures things in a special map now, with much more automation (so I heard). So I'll guess it is not so much opensuse 11.3, but the progress in the development in X-server.
ReplyDeleteI miss xorg.conf more then I miss sax2, but I will get used to it.
I don't care what Opensuse's reasons are for not having a graphical tool to configure X in 11.3 - not having sax2 or something like that in 11.3 is sheer stupidity of opensuse management. My simple dual-monitor setup that worked in 11.1 does not work after upgrading to 11.3.
ReplyDeleteHere's yet another fun 11.3 problem:
ReplyDeleteBug 552862 - networkmanager became disabled when suspending to disk and don't want to be enabled after resume
If you suspend your laptop, NetworkManager never wakes up again. There are work-arounds by poking NetworkManager via the command line, but it took me a while to find what they were. It was completely frustrating since a reboot doesn't even resolve the problem.
The issue evidently existed in RC2 and even as way back as Milestone 7. That seems like a big thing... surprised 11.3 still shipped without a fix.
Looks like today's updates fix both:
ReplyDeletehttps://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585433
and
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=624288
Good to see the SuSE team pushed updates for both of my gripes!
You are not alone in the upset over SCPM being removed in OpenSuse 11.3
ReplyDeletepost your vote on the OpenFate Suse site, to get them to put it back into 11.3, and to include it in 11.4.
They apparently lost their maintainer and could use someone with experience to step up and maintain it again too.
https://features.opensuse.org/310623#
Until, you can add the 11.2 repo, and install SCPM from 11.2, I have done this, and it works as a workaround. meanwhile, VOTE to get SCPM back!