TQM [Total Quality MIS-Management]

openSUSE 10.1 is a good release with a showstopper bug. The package manager bug is not resolved in a satisfactory manner, and woe be on the poor soul who tries to follow the instructions on the opensuse site. S/he will very likely find her/him/self in the position of the hapless washerperson in the story of the donkey, the village washerman, and the villagers.After sucking in almost a 100 MB worth of data, the recommended procedure doesn’t yield any results whatsoever. You’re much better off following the instructions here and here too

To their credit, the openSUSE download page contains a BEFORE YOU INSTALL READ THIS: set of instructions. But it’s more like a try this or that or maybe that or … wait… try something else kind of adventure. What the good doctor ordered was a lucid explanation, not a plethora of experiences.

However, what would have been exemplary was an add-on download to rectify the package installer problem to accompany new installs. If there’s not too little documentation, then there’s too much noise. Either is not a good thing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It’s Not Ready if it’s Broke

24+ hours into using SUSE, and you realize there's something fundamentally wrong with the Gold Master (persisting all the way since the RC)!

• Hardware detection: check
• System performance and responsivity: check
• Package installation: … uh, what's the opposite of check?

The default package manager in SUSE linux 10.1 is broken and eminently unusable, and that's putting it in a genteel person's vocabulary. Of course, there exists a workable alternate, detailed here, but it's incredible that such a major defect was left unattended in a final release.

The moral: if you're going to introduce a spanking new program which has had perfunctory testing at the most, do not get rid of the old tool which works.

If nothing else, chalk it up to bad software management policies.

Experience: Open SUSE 10.1

4 hours into the install of Open SUSE 10.1, it's a Work In Progress. Nothing much to say about the install. It couldn't get any simpler or robust than this (except for maybe the Live CD approach, but that's a different paradigm altogether).

Trying to use Yast to manage packages, one becomes painfully aware that it's slow! Definitely faster than Yum though (shudder), but absolutely no contest to the zippiness of using Synaptic.

First order of business is to set up additional repositories following the excellent documentation presented here

Talk about priorities! Amarok's the first application to be updated!

There's more to try out yet, but I've been pampered a bit too much by PCLinuxOS !