OpenSUSE First Try on My First Laptop

Finally I have my own laptop. It's a cheap HP 520 laptop but it's OK. Equipped with Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83 667 FSB and 2MB L2 cache, this box is good enough for my daily job (and fun). Since OpenSUSE 11 already released, this is the perfect opportunity to test it out.

After a few minuets, OpenSUSE successfully installed, almost all hardware detected and working properly. It's not lightning fast, but it certainly fast and (comfortable) enough for daily usage. OpenSUSE 11 packed with KDE4 (the least stable) and KDE3 (the mature). There is option to install both version (or one of). Certainly KDE4 provide many fresh feature compare to KDE3 but apparently not all the feature is stable enough for daily usage. My experience using KDE4 is fun, but i'ts not the best desktop enviroment yet. So I'm gonna stick with KDE3 for a while :-) (sorry KDE4 team).

Now lets take alook at the software package. As usually OpenSUSE packed with a lot of wonderful software. My daily need is internet and office software, so it's not diffcult to get most of my needs fulfilled. Mp3 is supported out of box, wich is nice, consider that mp3 is the defacto of audio (music) format. But if you want to get full (almost) support of multimedia then consider to add packman repository. After installing mplayer and w32codec (perhaps almost) all multimedia format is playable in OpenSUSE. But we I have some problem playing high quality video. The image seems flicker and rough. I do a cross check by playing the same video on windows machine and they running really smooth. Well thats not a big problem, perhaps some tweak on mplayer could fix it.

The other fun stuff is the desktop effect and wine. Desktop effect seems work out of box onn most intel and ati chips. But still it break some game and video playback, so i suggest to turn off desktop effect while playing game or watching some video. The other fun stuff is wine. They already release the first version on June, so I expecting a better performance and compatibility. After download and install the latest wine and doing some tweaks I continue installing some windows program. Most program running smoothly (Dreamweaver, Navicat MySQL Lite, Microsoft Word Viewer) and some program run a bit rough (SPSS, Microsoft Excel Viewer). To bad Warcraft III seems broken on wine ver 1, I can play warcraft III on OpenSUSE 10.2 with wine ver 0.9 but why it's broken now? Well perhaps not the wine, perhaps i'ts the graphic card, who knows?

But for now, I beleieve that OpenSUSE is a wonderfull distro. I'll keep it on my laptop and use it as my primary OS. Thank you OpenSUSE team :-)