SUSE 10.1 and a journey to (k)Ubuntu

I write this with a bit of a heavy heart (not sure why, it's only software!).

I have been an advocate of Novell software my entire working life. I worked with Netware from 3.12 right up to 6.5. I have setup remote access with iChain, installed eDirectory into Windows environments, and, most recently, when I decided to use Linux as my main OS, I chose SUSE 9.2 as they had just been bought by Novell.

I used 9.2 successfully as a dual boot system with XP, and after a successful upgrade to 9.3 I finally put XP onto a VM within Linux and changed to use 100% Linux as my OS. I spent many a happy hour configuring 9.3 and KDE to be exactly the way I wanted it to be, and had the system setup to play music to fit the mood, surf the web the way I wanted, seamlessly switch between all my systems, access my remote file systems as part of the OS. In short, the system worked, and worked well!

I awaited the release of 10.0 with great expectations. I had recently discovered the fun of additional repositories and had updated my system to use the latest toys, but the underlying system was causing me a few problems (USB, networking) and I hoped these would be fixed in 10.0. On the day of release I downloaded the system CD, booted selected network install and upgrade and let it go. I hit the problem that has plagued SUSE (and, from reading around, all distributions including the great Debian which tests and tests until it's right), upgrading doesn't work! Things get left behind, dependencies are problematic. It's not just with the stuff you've installed from source (Although that really doesn't help), even things that have been installed as rpm via yast don't work. Problems really become apparent when you have something newer on your system than is in the distro you are upgrading to. Long story short, my /home is on a separate partition (by design) and a could do a new install without blowing that partition away, but formatting everything else.

10.0 was great! Not perfect, but pretty close. Over the months, I upgraded it to KDE 3.5.2, got the latest amarok, sorted out playing every media format that the web threw at me. In fact, the only problem remaining (which can't be fixed) was flash on the Internet. Maybe, one day, macromedia will finally release a decent flash player for Linux. Until then 7 is what we get, and therefore some things don't work.

As 10.1 approached I was interested in the changed package system. Yast is good, but a bit clunky, other updates were also enough to get me to upgrade again. Surprise surprise, same problem on upgrading as last time! It was expected this time, so one clean install later and here we are.

My experience of 10.1 is not all great! Some things work well. Dependencies with openGL were fixed, changes in the kernel fixed a few niggling hardware problems. Updates to core components fixed some problems I had been having. Updating on the other hand died a death.

As far as I can tell. Novell wanted their Zen suite installed into the OS, but left it late in the day. Zen has been around for years, I've used it from version 2 onwards in one form or another. It's fairly good as a package management system and desktop management tool. What they have put in to SUSE 10.1 is not the Zen I know! There is a botched merger of Yast and Zen that in theory allows you to use the old Yast tools, and the new Zen package system to configure your updates. At first it seemed quite good. A guide I found on configuring it allowed me to add my main repositories and the updates for KDE and Gnome, the system informed me of the updates, and installed them. Rebooting brought them into play, and also removed the update icon. I can't find it now, it's gone! If I head into Yast I get numerous messages about unsigned updates (I'm sure that will change as the repositories get signed and certified), updates are then selected as they used to be. However, if something goes wrong (a package isn't in a repository that reported it had it (something that happens far too often)) Yast dies. Immediately. If you use 'rug in' from the command line, then things fair a little better, and installs work. So far, 'rug up' reports there are no updates, but I live in hope. Every so often though, a rug command results in 'Waking up ZMD...' and that's it. Good night Vienna.

The other show stopper for me is the install of ffmpeg on the packman repositories (although the bug is also in the latest CVS). I have a script that generates DVDs for me, and uses 'ffmpeg -t 5' (and some other switches) to create an empty audio track for the menu. -t is now ignored and defaults to 10000000000 seconds! Not much use!

The main problem is the lack of interest and information from Novell / SUSE. The update problem is a HUGE issue, and it doesn't work anything like as described. An update system that doesn't update is no good to me. Never mind installing new packages, what about security updates. Will it notice them, will it install them. I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. This is not what I want from an OS, so where do I go?

Ubuntu is the distro of the moment, huge amounts of publicity, huge amounts of investment. It's Debian based. My server runs Debian stable. I like it, it works! The update mechanism is one of the most tried and tested systems around. The latest version ( 6.06) has been released, and I'm going to try it. It is available on a 'Live' CD which I'm downloading now, and there are well established updates to take it to kubuntu so I can keep my KDE desktop.

Expect an update soon!