Submitted by Long time fans of openSUSE Linux and its commercial big brother, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, will find a lot to like in this latest update.
Long time fans of openSUSE Linux and its commercial big brother, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, will find a lot to like in this latest update.
http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories#NVIDIA_drive…
(No, nouveau is not fast enough for me, at least yet).
Try this repo:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.3/
(It’s the official NVIDIA repo from Novell, the documentation just hasn’t been updated yet.)
Edited 2010-07-20 19:44 UTC
Thanks,
actually, it appears that the doc page was updated shortly after I posted that
ftp:// didn’t work but this does:
http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.3/
I compiled the NVIDIA driver manually because they’re so slow at releasing the NVIDIA binary. Novell should have the repos ready by release.
My guide here http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2288580&postcount=12
I love zypper already
ville@dhcppc2:~$ sudo zypper in spectacle
…
Problem: nothing provides PyYAML needed by spectacle-0.18-1.1.noarch
Solution 1: do not install spectacle-0.18-1.1.noarch
Solution 2: break spectacle by ignoring some of its dependencies
Choose from above solutions by number or cancel [1/2/c] (c): 2
I don’t think that’s possible with apt-get.
I have never had any problems with dependencies or conflicts with apt.
The only systems I ever hosed have been rpm based
That said, I stopped distro shopping when 11.2 came out
11.3 looks even better!
Though I would like conflict free package management debian style
I’ve had tons, not being able to install/download packages when dependencies are not available being a good example (you can –force-all dpkg, but not apt).
Ugh, don’t –force-all! You’re asking for trouble by hiding problems you haven’t seen yet. I know you meant –force-depends.
If you did in fact see a broken dependency problem you are either (1) tracking testing, (2) tracking sid, (3) performing an unsupported upgrade (e.g. skipping a major release), (4) using a third party repository, or (5) some combination. If encountered any of these scenarios I hope you filed a bug!
Edited 2010-07-21 16:35 UTC
Actually, I’m taking a liberty to add a new comment since it seems I can’t click “edit” anymore –
the problem with apt is indeed the difficulty with which you can hose your system (i.e. it’s more anal about the consistency requirements). This cultural difference might make rpm based systems more useful for distributions that are still in development – they are by default somewhat hosed all the time, and what you usually want is “give me all the new stuff, no questions asked”.
I may be talking out of my ass because it’s been a long time since I used an rpm based system – but on my time doing maemo development (apt/deb based system), I often longed for a slackware-like extract-tgz-here-and-shut-up functionality. RPM might be the good middle ground in that it tracks dependencies, but allows you to break the consistency of currently installed packages without giving you pain about it all the time.
i still prefer the package manager that Foresight Linux uses, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conary_(package_manager Conary.
Ah, that might be the case. As an end user I really like consistency… But when it comes to fast developed distros I found Pacman in Frugalware to be rather good. (I think it is Arch package management system).
OpenSuse has stood up quite well to my mismanagement of adding and removing repos. I will keep on using it and try to be happy about the semiautomatic conflict management.
This kind of friendly I don’t want.
Yes, you could write an apt front end that prompts you and asks “Would you like me to break your system?” The reason this hasn’t happened is because it’s a bad idea and nobody sane wants it. Breaking things *should be hard* and require much more deliberate action than just saying “yes” to a prompt you didn’t read anyway.
A better reaction to the above prompt would be to ask “Who released a distribution with broken dependencies?” What is spectacle and why did it get into a release repo without its required dependencies?
Actually, “yes” is not a valid answer, you have to choose 2) (which means you will read the prompt).
This is not a release repo, it’s a work-in-progress repository for MeeGo toolchain (for opensuse).
Spectacle generates rpm .spec files from yaml files, and PyYAML was apparently not packaged (but it was still listed as a dependency – a packaging bug, but something I can live with).
I’ve learned that in real life “this is unacceptable” is not a good approach when something is broken. Rather, I prefer “give me a 3 minute workaround and I’m good”. Therefore, zypper is a better realpolitik tool than apt-get, for me at least.
There exists a perfectly good “3 minute workaround” for apt, too, which I know you already know based on your other comment. The only difference is apt doesn’t tell you which command to run. That’s not a big deal to me and I like that it requires more advanced knowledge to get in to real trouble.
Incidentally, it’s aptitude these days. apt-get is unmaintained.
The problem with that workaround (download manually, install with dpkg) is that it prevents you from installing/updating new stuff until you return the repository to consistent state. Aptitude is not better about this.
Btw, apt-get doesn’t even allow you to *download* the deb (apt-get install –download-only) if dependencies are unsatisfied. I can understand some babysitting but that’s insane.
There is no “command to run”, but lots of manual steps. Unless you know better and have a command handy? –ignore-missing option doesn’t help, and there are no good –force flags.
That’s news to me. Aptitude is a much heavier tool (with a curses ui, even).
Edited 2010-07-21 18:54 UTC
If you get the error you have the deb already. It will be in /var/cache/apt/archives/packagename_version_arch.deb, so you can normally just say dpkg -i –force-depends /var/cache/apt/archives/packagename*deb since you are not likely to have more than one version (especially if you auto prune).
I agree that the breakage of –download-only makes no sense from a user perspective.
I always find this funny, since I have never used the aptitude UI. IMO aptitude is primarily command line and the curses part is just so it can serve as a replacement for people who like dselect, too. For most basic operations the command line syntax is the same: aptitude install foo, aptitude remove foo, aptitude update, etc.. The major differences are in the switches and various options.
It is a bit heavier but I think only on an embedded system would you need to worry about that. I can understand they maemo went with apt-get especially since at the moment the more-correct behavior of aptitude is not very noticable in the real world today.
If the dependencies are failing, the package isn’t downloaded to cache at all. Only errors in the packages themselves are solved by this approach.
Was I the only one who went WTF at this line which seems to imply SuSE had its roots in Slackware?
–bornagainpenguin
being a longtime linux user, I thought the same, but I looked it up on wikipedia and lookie what I found:
<blockquote>The company started its activities as a service company, which among other things regularly released software packages that included SLS and Slackware, printed UNIX/Linux manuals, and offered technical assistance. In mid-1992, Softlanding Linux System (SLS, now defunct) was founded by Peter MacDonald, and was the first comprehensive distribution to contain elements such as X and TCP/IP.[citation needed] The Slackware distribution (maintained by Patrick Volkerding) was initially based largely on SLS, and the SUSE Linux distribution was originally a German translation of Slackware Linux.</blockquote>
Learn something new every day.
No, you were NOT!
OpenSuSE is based on SuSE Linux, which (a long time ago) was forked from Redhat (RPM based).
Corrections welcome.
http://lwn.net/1998/0205/suse.html
Or better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions
Edited 2010-07-21 09:53 UTC
Well.. openSUSE is actually the successor to what was SuSE Linux Professional, but it’s really “different”. So you could really say that SuSE Linux Professional “died” and now we have openSUSE.. that’s probably more correct. Yes… openSUSE has evolved to become what it is today.
Neither SuSE Prof. nor openSUSE had ANYTHING to do with Red Hat with the exception of the adoption of the “Red Hat” Package Manger. Prior to that, afaik, it used the tar-ball format like Slackware (the earliest roots of SUSE Linux).
SuSE Linux Professional was known for including non-free elements which prevent it’s free distribution (unlike Red Hat which was freely and WIDELY distributed under the Red Hat trademark by hundreds if not THOUSANDS of would be money makers in a plethora of commercially available formats, stores, etc.). Some of the non-free elements included things like commercial trial prodcut ware and originally, YaST. YaST was eventually made totally free (Novell actually helped support many freedom moves after the acquisition). The 3rd party add-ons (anything with a non-OSS approved license) were moved to a separate repository so that it was possible to download a totally OSS version of openSUSE and distribute freely (as long as OSS license terms were met). Thus, like Fedora (for example), there could be a distributable distro protected by trademark (something that I think you argue that Red Hat lost back in the 90’s by NOT preventing the plethora of resellers using their name).
Anyway… history is interesting.
Even I’ve had some minor troubles here and there – great work, hope to spent some time to help the distro regarding the java development packages – there are some problems there….
NEWS FLASH: It’s no longer 1996 and Linux is not difficult to install. Documenting how easy the install process was is about as useful as commenting on how nice the wallpaper looked. Oh, gee? Really? Gosh I guess it must be a cutting edge distribution!
Are you writing reviews for Windows users? If not then don’t tell me what software came installed by default unless it actually, you know, matters. Comes with OpenOffice? Well shucks! I would have never guessed. Has it got an *media player*, too? Amazing what they can do these days! It’s almost as if *every distribution and every version of Windows I’ve installed in the last 15 years didn’t have one*!
Please, PLEASE write something useful about the distribution. Find *something* that is remarkable, or different, or worked well, or didn’t. Please don’t mention the installer unless it didn’t work. Don’t mention hardware support unless things were really broken out of the box, or worked *surprisingly* well. We’re long past the days when hardware detection was a distribution selling point; if it doesn’t mostly work today then something is wrong!
If today, right now, all you can say is “Well guys, I installed it and it looks like it runs,” then you have told me precisely *nothing* about how good it really works. We’re not competing with NT4 (“detecting CPU architecture…”) here! I’ll bet you that Mac OS X installs and seems to work, too. Hell, even QNX-on-a-floppy booted and looked good a decade ago! Care to tell me something I *can’t* assume? Care to try and actually *DO* something with it and report on how well it does that? No? THEN DON’T WRITE A ‘REVIEW’.
Please.
It seems it doesnt work with unetbootin so while I would really like to give it a try (and even have the kde livecd iso) I won’t be able to since my cd drive is busted and thus unetbootin is needed.
You might try isohybrid if the ISO uses isolinux
Then just do:
# isohybrid myiso.iso
…and if that works you can either burn it to a CD or dd/ddrescue it directly to a USB stick
Edited 2010-07-24 07:14 UTC
Unfortunately this laptop can’t boot from usb.