OpenSuSE 11.2 M4 was released to the public on Monday (July 27th) morning. This is the forth milestone of 8 milestones, 2 Release Candidates and the Final Release.

Thu, Apr 23 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 1 release

Thu, May 28 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 2 release

Tue, Jun 30 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 3 release

Fri, Jul 24 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 4 release

Thu, Aug 06 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 Release

Thu, Aug 20 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 Release

Thu, Sep 10 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7 Release

Thu, Oct 01 openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 8 Release

Thu, Oct 15 openSUSE 11.2 RC1 Release

Thu, Oct 29 openSUSE 11.2 RC2 Release

Thu, Nov 12 openSUSE 11.2 Release

That was taken off the Official OpenSuSE 11.2 Roadmap.

That is all for now. Until next time,

Ryan Orser.

OpenSuSE 10.2 Review:

I know its’ a little late for this now because 10.3 is out, but I am going to review OpenSuSE Linux 10.2 anyways.

Here are the pros:

• Uses Gnome, KDE, or any other Window Manager that you can select from a list.
• Works on my laptop, though I did need to put in the commands for the installation, after the installation the boot loader didn’t need to have the commands put into the xorg.conf file. 
• Installation was 32 minutes long (NEW RECORD for installation time!)
• Has the old version of Pidgin (Gaim (An instant messaging client) which is always good to have)
• Has the 2.6.18.2 kernel.
• Has Xorg 7.2.

Here are the cons:

·         Is now out of date.

·         I should upgrade

Things I should find out are:

·         How to install Broadcom wireless driver

·         How to install Nvidia Graphics

That is all for now, Mandriva 2008 is coming up next for review,

                        Ryan Orser.

CentOS 5.0 Review

First off, this review isn’t the easiest to do since I have tried so many other distributions before this one: Vector, Xubuntu 6.06 – 6.06.1, Ubuntu 6.06 – 7.10, Fedora 7, OpenSuSE 10.1 – 10.3, and now CentOS. Which if you count all of them up they add up to eleven!

Though I have used so many distributions I have been able to see the good and the bad in all of them. (good, bad)

CentOS was an easy install (1,0). However, I needed to add some kernel options (like noapic, pci=routeirq) to get the system to boot on my laptop (1,1). There were a few nice things that I noticed in this Linux distribution, including: ease of use (2,1), good graphics (3,1), and very good themes (4,1).

One weak point in CentOS is installing Nvidia drivers. I did the manual install from Nvidia and it took a while to find out how to stop X.org (4,2). Booting CentOS is a very slow process without the extra kernel options for my particular computer (4,3).

So far the score is 4 good and 3 bad.

Next on my list of things to talk about is the interface. The interface of CentOS is not unlike any other GNOME desktop. It is always customizable (5,3), easy to look at(6,3), and easy to use(7,3). I mean easy to look at since it doesn’t look boring at all (8,3). Customizable is always a good thing (9,3) and since it’s easy to use, it will be able to bring you the preferred feeling that you have customized it (10,3). The only thing is that the interface if you have used it for a long time without configuring it so that you like can become a little bit boring, (10,4) though if you look at it for a little while you can see that its really almost like the Ubuntu panels (11,4).

Now the score is 11 for good 4 for not so good. I will now rate the ease of use, customizability, and ease to look at: overall a 5/5 on ease of use, 5/5 on customizability, and **3/5** for how the desktop is on the eyes.

Over all the final score on the CentOS is a 24/30. This is exactly 80%.

** Please leave a comment if you wish to comment on the ease of use to look at it. I only gave it a 3/5 because I have used this structure before and I am going to have to change it. **

Well I downgraded my OpenSuSE installation to an earlier release…. 10.1. I started using the OpenSuSE 10.3 but found it a tad on the slow side because of the games that it has installed, as most of them needed 3-D graphics for which I did not have installed. Anyways I will post up some pics soon.

Ryan Orser