Got the notebook, but had to go with openSUSE

I got my new Lenovo 3000 N100 on Friday. I have been playing a little with different distributions, and have settled with openSUSE 10.2. Here is a quick summary of my experiences with all the different KDE distributions, and why I had to let Fedora go for now:

Trying on different distributions

Five minutes after installing Fedora I understood that this distribution would give me trouble. So I decided to try some alternate distributions before settling:

Arch Linux
Difficult to install, and configure. I liked the desktop, and the package manager (pacman.) But overall it was too hard to do basic configurations other distributions figures out by their own. To difficult to use, sadly
Fedora Core + Extra 6
I where determined to go for Fedora, but after trying it I lost the respect for it. Why does it use Gnome applications as default in KDE (even when they have not been installed!), and why does it always hang when I install packages? It where visually the best desktop.
Kubuntu
I do not want to use Kubuntu as it is (yet another) derivative of Ubuntu. Prejudices aside; Kubuntu has the largest package repository, and package handling goes smooth. However it did not impress with two crashes during initial installation. Kuubntu where also the most noisiest (my cooling fan, and hard drive made a lot of noise.)
openSUSE
It takes much longer than any of the others to boot. I do not like the system/package manager (YaST,) and I did not like having some configurations in YaST and others in the KDE configuration. The only distribution I got my wireless network card working.

Working hardware

openSUSE proved to be the best distribution for me. It where able to identify the fingerprint scanner, and the built-in Web camera as a fingerprint scanner, and a Web camera. All other distributions identified them as unconfigurable, or unrecognised hardware.

The choise where easy, and I am no running openSUSE. It was the distribution that gave me the least hardware problems, and with some configuration it was a good KDE desktop as well.

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6 comments

Congratulations. I think I have to try open Suse now since you said it recognized the built in webcam. My laptop has built in webcam and neither Kubuntu nor Ubuntu recognized it.

Comment by Arun (Subscribed) at 2007-02-26 @979.

It recognised that it was a camera. I never said that it got it to work.

openSUSE have been giving me other issues thoug. Like Vorbis encoding, and MP3 decoding.

Comment by Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-02-27 @168.

Oh! Tell me if you get it to work.

Comment by Arun (Subscribed) at 2007-02-27 @178.

OpenSUSE just works, one of the reasons I've stuck with it. But it is slow, booting takes forever; not really a problem for me; had it running for close to 50 days before a power failure forced me to restart.

I just cant believe you have had problems with vorbis encoding. Never had such a problem myself.

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen at 2007-02-27 @434.

My Vorbis encoding problems comes from issues with installing (and obtaining the right version of) vorbis-tools. I have yet not been able to fix it.

Comment by Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-02-28 @015.

[…] to Kubuntu recently. Both Ubuntu and Kubuntu didn't recognize my built in web camera. After I read that OpenSuSe recognized the webcam for Daniel Aleksandersen, I thought I would give that a try […]

Comment by Arun’s Blog » (K)Ubuntu to OpenSuSe - My Experience at 2007-03-07 @946.