Dan's comments about SuSe

[Tsuroerusu]

Now that I'm an official member of the Mandriva Club, I've noticed that my KDE desktop now sports an MDKOnline icon (a little applet in my KDE toolbar) that is a visual indicator that either I have all of the latest updates applied to my system or that updates exist that I haven't installed yet.

I was just curious if SuSE had such a thing as part of their desktop environment. If so, I thought of all the people here, you'd be able to satisfy my curiosity on this subject.

A good question indeed. Since SUSE, do I smell Ximian guys having the leadership badge?, has scrapped their good old trusty YaST package manager in favor of a combination of YaST and Ximian Red Carpet, ZENworks, there are a lot of new tools. Sadly, ZENworks is still quite buggy and sluggish, it does have something called zenupdater which is the GTK app you'll see running in the system tray, even under KDE, but Pat and I both agree that it's a piece of steaming elephant-sized shit, so what I would recommend you do is go to the Guru repository and download the SMART Package Manager, which is an additional package manager that works really really well, works with apt4rpm, yum and yast repositories on RPM distros, and is very fast, unlike ZENworks.

Make sure to get Smart (smart, smart-addons, smart-gui and smart-ksmarttray) from the Guru repository, because it includes a KDE tray feature.

When you get Smart installed, add these repositories to it:

Code: Select all

Type: YaST2
Alias: suse
Name: SUSE 10.1 OpenSource Repository
Base URL: ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source


Type: YaST2
Alias: suse-non_oss
Name: SUSE 10.1 non-oss Repository
Base URL: ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/non-oss-inst_source


Type: RPM MetaData (YUM)
Alias: suse-update
Name: SUSE Linux Online Updates
Base URL: ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/suse/update/10.1



Type: YaST2
Alias: guru
Name: Guru 3rd party package repository
Base URL:  ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.1


Type: YaST2
Alias: packman
Name: Packman 3rd party package repository
Base URL: ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/10.1

Then open KDE's Run Command dialog, type in ksmarttray and you have a KDE tray icon for SMART, just leave that running, disable zenupdater and you have what you're looking for.

[Judland]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to post all of that. I was expecting a "Yes" / "No" kind of response!

[jsusanka]

Hey, Tsuro, I have a question for you...

Now that I'm an official member of the Mandriva Club, I've noticed that my KDE desktop now sports an MDKOnline icon (a little applet in my KDE toolbar) that is a visual indicator that either I have all of the latest updates applied to my system or that updates exist that I haven't installed yet.

I was just curious if SuSE had such a thing as part of their desktop environment. If so, I thought of all the people here, you'd be able to satisfy my curiosity on this subject.
_________________

yes they do - and it sits on the system tray on both gnome and kde.

[oneeyedelf1]

Problems I have with Suse 10.1 is smoothscrolling is on all applications by default. It makes scrolling on my unaccelerated card unbarebly slow and unresponsive. Something I hate. To fix this edit your kdeglobals (usually in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals file to have 'SmoothScrolling=false' under [KDE] (of course without the quotes). Also I turn of redrawing of windows when dragging them around. kcontrol->Desktop->windows behavior->Moving->display content when moving. To off. But other than smooth scrolling I really really like Suse 10.1.

[Tsuroerusu]

Hey, Tsuro, I have a question for you...

Now that I'm an official member of the Mandriva Club, I've noticed that my KDE desktop now sports an MDKOnline icon (a little applet in my KDE toolbar) that is a visual indicator that either I have all of the latest updates applied to my system or that updates exist that I haven't installed yet.

I was just curious if SuSE had such a thing as part of their desktop environment. If so, I thought of all the people here, you'd be able to satisfy my curiosity on this subject.

yes they do - and it sits on the system tray on both gnome and kde.

The problem with what you get ouf of the box, zenupdater in this case, is a piece of crap because Novell forced it into the codebase late in the development process.

Problems I have with Suse 10.1 is smoothscrolling is on all applications by default. It makes scrolling on my unaccelerated card unbarebly slow and unresponsive. Something I hate. To fix this edit your kdeglobals (usually in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals file to have 'SmoothScrolling=false' under [KDE] (of course without the quotes). Also I turn of redrawing of windows when dragging them around. kcontrol->Desktop->windows behavior->Moving->display content when moving. To off. But other than smooth scrolling I really really like Suse 10.1.

That's great input man, you should post this on the openSUSE mailinglists or file a bug for it or something, could be useful since the development of 10.2 starts next months with the release of Alpha1.

[oneeyedelf1]

That's great input man, you should post this on the openSUSE mailinglists or file a bug for it or something, could be useful since the development of 10.2 starts next months with the release of Alpha1.

Well its suse and not opensuse I think. I am a bit confused about the naming conventions. I just hope everyone that said that the suse desktop was slow try these two things and give it another shot. It increases the speed by leaps and bounds. Of course this only applies to KDE, but still they should do it.
as for posts about this subject
heres a bug I filed
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175741

heres a post I added to on the suseforums (official I am not sure)
http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?sho ... +scrolling

[Tsuroerusu]

Well its suse and not opensuse I think. I am a bit confused about the naming conventions.

Oh my god, here I go again!

OK, here's the deal. There is NO distribution called "openSUSE", the distribution we're talking about is called "SUSE Linux", which is being developed by the "openSUSE project". In the past, SUSE was developed behind closed doors, and while it's code, except for stuff like YaST which was GPLed after Novell bought SUSE, was open, the development process was not. So the "open" in "openSUSE" refers to the development model being open, not the distribution or the code. A lot of people will say that you can get a distro called openSUSE that only contains open source software, and you can get SUSE which has some proprietary plugins and so forth. This is not true, you can go to opensuse.org, and download SUSE Linux which consists of five CDs, those five CDs contain only open source software, although you can also download a special sixth CD, which contains stuff like Flash, Sun Java, RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, and firmware for wireless cards. This was done to improve the media layout, this way, the proprietary stuff is not mixed in with the open source packages, and makes it eaisier for users who don't want any proprietary stuff at all, and also users who want it because they can clearly know where to get it. Some people also say that the version you can download is called openSUSE and the version you can buy at places like Fry's Electronics is called SUSE, that is not true either, because there is NO different between what you can download and the software you get in the retail box, in the retail box you get all the six CDs, plus an 8.5 GB DVD-9 disc which contains both the 32-bit version- and 64-bit version of SUSE, plus all the proprietary applications on one disc. On opensuse.org you can download a 32-bit DVD or a 64-bit DVD, because I seriously doubt any mirror could handle the mirroring of a single 8.5 GB ISO!
Also in the retail box, you get a very very nice manual and 90-days of installation support.

Hopefully that cleared up your confusion about the SUSE and openSUSE naming.

I just hope everyone that said that the suse desktop was slow try these two things and give it another shot. It increases the speed by leaps and bounds. Of course this only applies to KDE, but still they should do it.

as for posts about this subject
heres a bug I filed
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175741

Wonderful, if you look at the comments, you'll notice that one of SUSE's KDE developers, Stephan Binner said this: "Added patch to done/STABLE and done/10.1 (for SLE).", "I think we will later review SLE-patches which to backport for a 10.1 update.".

heres a post I added to on the suseforums (official I am not sure) http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?sho ... +scrolling

Those are user contributed forums, if you're wondering if SUSE has any official forums, they sort of do, Novell hosts a bunch of newsgroups for the openSUSE project, so those are official, but they don't have any official web-based forums, because that need is already being fulfilled by the community.
You can find info on the newsgroups and other resources here: http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate

[oneeyedelf1]

as for posts about this subject
heres a bug I filed
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175741

Wonderful, if you look at the comments, you'll notice that one of SUSE's KDE developers, Stephan Binner said this: "Added patch to done/STABLE and done/10.1 (for SLE).", "I think we will later review SLE-patches which to backport for a 10.1 update.".

Well there is still the problem of turning off Smooth Scrolling, they decided to improve the performance of smooth scrolling instead of adding options to turn it off.

[Tsuroerusu]

as for posts about this subject
heres a bug I filed
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175741

Wonderful, if you look at the comments, you'll notice that one of SUSE's KDE developers, Stephan Binner said this: "Added patch to done/STABLE and done/10.1 (for SLE).", "I think we will later review SLE-patches which to backport for a 10.1 update.".

Well there is still the problem of turning off Smooth Scrolling, they decided to improve the performance of smooth scrolling instead of adding options to turn it off.

LOL, well since adding options to KDE is really not their job, you need to talk to the upstream developers at KDE.

[oneeyedelf1]

Wonderful, if you look at the comments, you'll notice that one of SUSE's KDE developers, Stephan Binner said this: "Added patch to done/STABLE and done/10.1 (for SLE).", "I think we will later review SLE-patches which to backport for a 10.1 update.".

Well there is still the problem of turning off Smooth Scrolling, they decided to improve the performance of smooth scrolling instead of adding options to turn it off.

LOL, well since adding options to KDE is really not their job, you need to talk to the upstream developers at KDE.

Why not, its really not their job to throw in annoying features. If someone hacks smooth scrolling into kde, they should add a way to turn it off easily, and simply put if they don't I wont recommend suse to anyone.

[Tsuroerusu]

Well there is still the problem of turning off Smooth Scrolling, they decided to improve the performance of smooth scrolling instead of adding options to turn it off.

LOL, well since adding options to KDE is really not their job, you need to talk to the upstream developers at KDE.

Why not, its really not their job to throw in annoying features. If someone hacks smooth scrolling into kde, they should add a way to turn it off easily, and simply put if they don't I wont recommend suse to anyone.

It's not SUSE's job to add features to KDE, their job is to just redistribute it, you you want features into KDE, you need to talk to the upstream KDE developers. SUSE don't have the resources to maintain their own version of KDE, and in the end that would just be a mini-fork because you're taking the KDE sources, and more or less, creating your own version, so that wouldn't benefit anybody.

[CptnObvious999]

It's not SUSE's job to add features to KDE, their job is to just redistribute it, you you want features into KDE, you need to talk to the upstream KDE developers. SUSE don't have the resources to maintain their own version of KDE, and in the end that would just be a mini-fork because you're taking the KDE sources, and more or less, creating your own version, so that wouldn't benefit anybody.

Well they have made some changes to the code or config files and added YaST to the KDE control center, they could always put in another patch. Distributions typically include patches for various packages such as security patches so I see no reason why they would not.

[Tsuroerusu]

Well they have made some changes to the code or config files and added YaST to the KDE control center, they could always put in another patch.

Dude, that's just a matter of putting the right files in the right directory!

Distributions typically include patches for various packages such as security patches so I see no reason why they would not.

That is correct, SUSE does patch things for security, but they don't patch the crap out of anything, they patch things where they see it needed.

[oneeyedelf1]

That is correct, SUSE does patch things for security, but they don't patch the crap out of anything, they patch things where they see it needed.

So adding smooth scrolling to kdelibs is a needed patch?

[Tsuroerusu]

That is correct, SUSE does patch things for security, but they don't patch the crap out of anything, they patch things where they see it needed.

So adding smooth scrolling to kdelibs is a needed patch?

I don't know if it's a patch, and I don't know why they added it. And since they do offer a way for you to disable it, why don't you just do that? I don't get what the big deal is? I never noticed scrolling being slow, and I was usng the open source nv driver for a while because I wanted to see how well it worked.