A closer look at OpenSUSE 10.3

Like Fedora and Mint before, this post is about the trials and tribulations of using OpenSUSE 10.3 as a full time Linux desktop in a corporate environment. That means among other things that I won't really be paying much attention to things like whether or not it can play MP3's, but more interested in whether or not it can read and write to standard document formats, as well as non-standard but prevalent formats such as MS's .doc. (I call it standard if it is open, and non-standard if it is not. Just because it is everywhere does not map to it is a good idea to use them. Many things are everywhere.)

Evolution 2.12.0!

Let there be no doubt that SUSE is the company that owns Evolution. This is the newest freshest revision of Evolution in my large and very current stable of Linux desktops:

rpm -qa | grep -i evolution:

evolution-exchange-lang-2.12.0-5
evolution-exchange-debuginfo-2.12.0-5
evolution-data-server-devel-1.12.0-5
evolution-exchange-2.12.0-5
evolution-data-server-1.12.0-5
evolution-pilot-2.12.0-5
evolution-data-server-debuginfo-1.12.0-5
evolution-exchange-doc-2.12.0-5
evolution-2.12.0-5
evolution-devel-2.12.0-5
evolution-webcal-lang-2.12.0-5
evolution-data-server-doc-1.12.0-5
evolution-sharp-0.14.0.1-5
evolution-webcal-2.12.0-5
evolution-debuginfo-2.12.0-5

I have on all the debugging versions, and this is the only distro that I have that ships out of the box a debugging version for Connector itself (see second line of above list)!. In four days of hard use, I have had one crash, and bug buddy said something new: New to me anyway. It said it did not have any useful diagnostic information in the dump, and so it was not going to do anything. Interesting that with all these debuginfo's on, there was nothing useful!

Evolution appears to be fast and mostly stable. The crash was on day one. Has not happened again. Recent changelog activity in the bugs I reported recently now has my reports as dups of closed problems, so I may be chasing a ghost now.

Every now and then Evolution goes off into la-la land. I have no idea why. I tried cleaning out all the .gconf and .evolution file in case it was cruft left over from the previous Evolution, but that appeared to make no difference.

The only other issue I have had is minor but annoying. I have my Mint 3.0 desktop, running Evolution 2.10, filtering my inbox. All my rules for mail handling run from there, all my archiving. I lopped out 500 messages yesterday, and suddenly 2.12 could not see *anything* in the inbox, until new messages appeared. It still can only see only those message that have arrived after that "lopping" (technical term for email erasure) from the other machine. Being read or unread makes no difference. Looks like I'll have to not delete so many emails at the same time, or be logged out from the OpenSUSE box when I do it.

As an experiment, I defined a second inbox, this time using IMAP. IMAP can see everything in the Inbox, even when WebDAV can't. In fact, I have moved to using IMAP to read and send, and only use WebDAV (Connector is WebDAV based) to read and accept meetings and access the address book. A little clunky but workable and IMAP is faster.  When I travel and access my inbox from the road, IMAP is always better on a high-latency line, so this is not such a bad thing.

OpenSUSE is smarter than me, therefore it does not obey me.

When I received the Dell D620, I was informed by someone that already had one that it was a 1280x800 screen. I never questioned that. Mint and Fedora set it up that way by default. So did MS Windows XP. OpenSUSE 10.3 insisted it was in fact a 1440x900 screen, and would not set it up any other way. It left off the Intel "915resolution" video bios patch in /etc/sysconfig/videobios. It had tiny little pixelated fonts in both Gnome and KDE that my eyes just could not read. I decided OpenSUSE was wrong, and fought it. I forced the videobios patch on, set it to 1280x800, and the Gnome and KDE fonts looked much nicer. Very smooth and round, though with occasionally odd hinting.

Laughing in triumph, I proceeded on to other things. SUSE laughed back: Gnome started crashing every other minute. I switched to KDE. It looked nice, and was stable. But every now and then it would, for no apparent reason, switch resolutions on me... To a really weird 1396 x something-or-the-other. OpenSUSE was not minding me. Not one little bit. It would not stay in 1280x800.

Light began to dawn. I research the D620, found the 1440x900 option, took back out the videobios patch, and instead overrode the default font sizes and default DPI. Font were now bigger, smoother and less pixelated. Not great, but better.

Funny thing is that the fonts looked better at 1280x800, like the hardware was doing some very nice interpolation. The fonts don't look too bad now, and the crashes have stopped so I'll leave it this way.

OpenSUSE is the first distro that appeared to know what the screen hardware really was, but it may be that Mint and Fedora just behaved better when I told them a wrong screen resolution, hiding the reality of the hardware from the loose nut at the keyboard. (Update: Future me has now installed Mint 3.1 of the D620, which knew exactly what the hardware was and configured it out of the box correctly. Oh well.)

KDE versus Gnome

I have no real deep seated preference these days for either GUI. I like them both, and I use them both. SUSE used to be a KDE-first Distro, but with the purchase of Ximian, it started to lean towards Gnome. In fact there was a real firestorm a while back when it looked like SUSE was going to go Gnome only, but that turned out to not be the case.

My preferences have very little to do with my Dell D620's. Gnome is just not stable on it even with the resolution sorted, with all sorts of hangs and xorg crashes. Better, but not great. Bug Buddy never gets invoked for any of it, so I have nothing to submit. I suppose it is possible that the resolution issues have left bad bits laying about for Gnome to trip over, but I do not have time right now to figure that out.

Now that I have the default screen resolution and DPI sorted out, KDE not only looks nice, but is very stable. Evolution looks better under KDE than Gnome.

KDE did flake out when I added the screen brightness widget to the panel. Crash city. A trip back to Gnome (to have a GUI), deleted the .kde* files, switch back to KDE, re-set up everything, and totally avoid the brightness app, and now everything is OK again.

Long Live OpenSUSE, but not on the D620

There is much to like about OpenSUSE 10.3. Yast is far faster than it was. Alternate repositories are much easier to get going. I like the currency of Evolution even if it is going to skew my attempts to report the Connector issues I have been having. That may be no big deal though: recent comments have the stuff I have submitted so far as both duplicates of other issues, and those base issues closed as resolved. I might be wasting Gnome project folks valuable time (although it appears that they did not know it also happened on PCLOS: Gnome Project had the Evo crashes as as Ubuntu and Fedora in the parts I read more closely).

For all its spicy OpenSUSE goodness, Mint is better on the D620 hardware. Better than OpenSUSE, better than Fedora 7, better than PCLOS. I think when I get back from Pune India and Vancouver, Canada, I'll put OpenSUSE on the IBM T41 (Where SUSE has worked very well in the past), and Ubuntu 7.10 or the next version of Mint on the D620. If I find a travel power cord, I may do the D620 to Mint conversion on the flight across the Atlantic. 24 hours on an airplane: Gotta have something geeky to do! Besides, I have to check into the screen resolution thing to be sure I am not just mis-remembering what Mint was doing. (Update: Future me again. Yeah. I could not wait. I installed Mint late in the night. Mint got it right the first time.)

Travel plans

I'll be on the road for most of the rest of October. First I am going to Pune, India. I have been out of the US before, but never this far away. We have a BMC office there, and I will be going there to meet more of the global R&D support team. After that I will be headed over to Vancouver to attend BMC's UserWorld! I am interested in this because I have never attended a BMC user conference, despite having been at BMC for over 18 years. All this travel means schlepping both my Apple and my D620: My backpack looks like I am headed to give a lab at Linuxworld or something. I'll post from the road as I can.