From: douglas.r.aker@verizon.com Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:33:42 -0400 OK, did so more research. Looks like it's called OpenSuse 10.2. Read some reviews. Some good, some not so good. Short answer: after a rocky start, this release is really, really good. I found the *initial* upgrade from 10.0 to 10.2 to be very painful -- the upgrade process was actually the most painful I've had, and I've been using SUSE distributions since ~6.0 (usually I take every second or third release). The problem was that the RPM consistency checker was finding a problem, but gave an empty list of inconsistencies, so I couldn't resolve it except by cut and try. The YAST online update is also ugly -- it only wants to upgrade from a site that it picks, and doesn't let you easily upgrade from your own mirror. The one major other problem I had, when upgrading my server, is that I had to rebuild my cyrus imapd databases, and this took a bunch of web searching. The other major annoyance is that 10.2 doesn't support apt. That's the bad. When I eventually got past this, I've found it to be really good. Laptop support is particularly improved; suspend to disk is considerably faster, suspend to RAM even sometimes works (it's actually the resume that's the problem, and it's the usual graphics thing), power management in general works well, and Network Manager does a really good job of managing network interfaces on a laptop (you don't have to use it -- you can use the traditional if-up tool if you like, but once you try Network Manager on a laptop you won't want to go back). I think they've finally stabilized their software installation -- 10.1 was reputed to be a real horror story. There are a lot of smart (Novell's apt-like tool -- why they couldn't just use apt is beyond me, but smart can handle a lot of different repository types) repositories around. The packman and guru repositories have a lot of good stuff; I also use this to do my upgrades. KDE 3.5.6 finally fixes a raft of problems, and if you sync to a hand held make certain to upgrade to 3.5.6 before trying to sync, or you'll basically lose all of your calendar appointments. I'm finding I'm having to build a lot fewer things myself than I did with 9.1 and 10.0. I've largely depopulated my /usr/local. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton