On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

As a change from my recent posts about music and photography I have finally decided to sit down and get together my thoughts about using OpenSUSE 11 on my ThinkPad T40.

A couple of points to note:

The first is that prior to OpenSUSE 11, I was still using Ubuntu 7.10 (and I would have preferred to stay on 7.04 to some respect) with the Gnome desktop environment. I had upgraded OpenOffice.org to 2.3, and Firefox 3.0 by the end. However I skipped 8.04 with the noises about the beta version of Firefox (which was a bizarre inclusion on a Long Term Support release) and PulseAudio (whatever it really is) being somewhat unstable. With 8.10 out soon, I will reveal whether I will be moving to that by the end of this review.

The second is that those of you with good memories will recall the ThinkPad T40, it’s about a 5 1/2 year old laptop now, unbelievably, that was one of the very first from Intel’s ‘Centrino’ revolution that rocked the world in early 2003. Since then the platform that the Pentium M debuted has taken over as the numero uno platform in today’s dual core, Core2Duo etc. systems. So I have an old notebook by some people’s standards. This however has yet to have bugged me as I still find it more than good enough. But the point I am making is my perceptions have been formed on a laptop that has a single core first generation Pentium M at 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM and the ATI Radeon 7500 GPU that was already dated quite badly when it was included in the basic T40 series in 2003. A lot has changed since then.

So to start…

In case you haven’t read my blog before now, I own Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines. I get on pretty well with all of them with Windows/Linux being the main system and Mac OS X being there for my telly and media related shenanigans. Despite being something of a power-user and IT professional, I can largely narrow down what I do on a computer to the following:

• Web browsing: Not only browing pages but using Web 2.0 related apps
• Word processing: Speaks for itself, but varies between Word, OpenOffice.org Writer and LyX/LaTeX
• Text processing: Notepad/text editors are all I use for developing web pages and applications
• Image processing: Be that scanning negatives/slides and cropping or creating graphics from scratch, this features highly
• Music playing: I play music, a lot of music and this is important to me

And that is about it. Occassionally I will open a spreadsheet, and sometimes I will have a specialist piece of software. But that’s rare and so my needs are basic as they go. Apart from Photoshop, there is no actual application that I depend on to get by.

As such when you consider that the average Linux distribution comes with all of this software included by standard, and when your laptop like mine is a little long in the tooth for Windows Vista, Linux can for those people not tied down excessively to platform specific software could quite easily get by with Linux on their computers.

The main two preclusions to this have historically been patchy hardware support and poor usability.

OpenSUSE 11 is a breath of fresh air as it is simple to use and though it’s an old laptop, the hardware support has so far been impeccable.

I downloaded the installation DVD from www.opensuse.org and burnt it on my eMac as it’s the only computer I have with a DVD writer. Having done this I popped the disk in my ThinkPad T40 having backed up what I needed in case. The installation procedure was a complete breeze and without any event.

After a reboot I was presented with the login screen and dropped into KDE 4.0.4 which is what OpenSUSE 11 shipped with. This seemed to be fine and not having been a long-term KDE user beforehand (I was with Gnome) I didn’t have any issues with it. Considering the weak GPU in my notebook I was refreshingly surprised how well the machine performed with the extra graphics effects.

I then connected to the wireless network without hitch and also set up a crossover cable connection with my eMac and swapped over some files. This is something that under Ubuntu 7.10 I usually had great troubles with. The Gnome NetworkManager in its 0.6 incarnation at least is notoriously unreliable in my experience.

Upgrades were flagged up that I allowed to go ahead and after a reboot I was now running KDE 4.1 which I kept reading was somewhat better than 4.0. It ran fine. I am also pleased to say unlike Ubuntu after suspend to RAM or disk (hibernation in Windows) network connections were restored every single time, something I also could not guarantee in Ubuntu 7.10.

After this I dived straight into OpenOffice.org Writer and Firefox 3.0 and was happilly flitting along without any problems. Everything worked. The only aspect I have yet to test is external monitor support (dual screens, projector and SVideo output.) This should be fine as you can use xrandr on the command line but I am hoping I will not need to resort to that.

In other words, OpenSUSE 11 is easily the best Linux distribution I have used. Better still you can choose to use KDE 3.5.9, Gnome 2.22 and Xfce over KDE 4.1 if you choose when you install so if you are allergic to this new desktop, you have options.

Considering the stability, excellent hardware support and out of the box usefulness, I have found OpenSUSE to be an excellent choice. It has been very easy to use and installing software such as LyX/LaTeX and WINE has been excellent. Notably I have installed Photoshop through WINE as it’s the only application that I cannot live without in terms of Windows/Mac dependencies. I know Gimp and Krita are there but when you have been using little else other than Photoshop for 13 years, it’s hard to adapt to something else!

I will have screenshots to follow.

In terms of my experience, I have very little reason to even look at Ubuntu 8.10, as I can wholeheartedly recommend you look at OpenSUSE 11.0.