First look at openSUSE 11.2 (DistroWatch Weekly #329)

[ Thanks to Caitlyn Martin for this link. ]

"My initial attempts at running the live CD image on the netbook proved to be problematic. I tried both the dd command as described in the release announcement and the latest version of UNetbootin to create a live USB stick. The resulting image would start to boot but fail fairly early on in the process. I next used an external USB CD/DVD drive and that also failed. The failure was much deeper into the boot process and occurred when attempting to load the wireless drivers for the Broadcom 4312 chipset which HP uses in the Mini 110 netbook. I had seen something similar when I first attempted to install Pardus Linux 2009. This was caused by a wireless driver conflict and the fix is to pass "ssb.blacklist=1" to the kernel as an option when booting. I tried the same thing with the GNOME live CD and I was up and running.

"I had very little reason to expect that either of the live CDs would run acceptably on the old Toshiba laptop. Some lightweight live CDs do work well on that system despite its very slow DVD-ROM drive, including the Ubuntu-based Debris Linux and a number of Slackware-based distros. Both Ubuntu and Mandriva live CDs run incredibly slowly on that system, to the point of being really unusable. The openSUSE live CD was a truly pleasant surprise. Performance was crisp and was every bit as good as the smaller, lighter distributions. Kudos to the openSUSE developers for successfully optimizing their live CD for maximum performance."

Complete Story

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