My distro hopping

If you have read my posts before, I like to experiment with distros too. Given the problems I am facing and considering the time I have put in, it becomes intimidating to try distros.

I try to stick to KDE, but most of the "live" versions come with xfce. I then install KDE.

Of late, I found Mandriva 2009 to be one of the best "work right away" distro on my Lenovo J15 AMD64, USB wireless machine (no wired connection). Everything basic worked right away, without having to do a thing after installation. I hate the 'urpmi' thing, as I am more used to aptitude/apt-get, but geting used to it slowly. The best versions of KDE4, I would say.

OpenSUSE is worth a shot. The display works, the wirless, I am unable to get to work. I reinstalled a 32 bit version, but still could not get the wireless to work.

Arch is good once it starts working, but takes some effort to get it to work. Again, I am unable to get the wireless working. I have a feeling, as my wireless dongle vendor (Dlink DWL-G122 rev D1) does not provide a 64bit version of the driver, it is not gonna work.

The two biggest problems with most of the distros is getting wireless and the xconfig working. With nvidia, the newer distros have are getting more and more complicated IMHO. In kubuntu, there are at least 3-4 versions of nvidia-glx. In older versions, I just had to do aptitude install nvidia-glx. Now I am not sure what to use (there is legacy, new, 96, 173, 177 etc).

Open SUSE 11, KDE First Day

Downloaded the 64bit, liveCD version of Open SUSE 11 via Bit torrent. Took more than 3 hours to download (first day!)

Installation went without much problems, very user friendly installation interface.

Only problem was after reboot, the system refused to boot via grub. Took a little while to figure out what was happening (as I was not expecting nothing to go wrong). Found that the grub menu.lst was misconfigured (got configured as (hd1,x), instead of (hd0,x)) on my two hard disk, multi-OS desktop. Cant blame, for not being able to set it up right for the complex configuration I have.

Here are some observations.

• Comes with perl 5.10, which is great.
• No problem with X on my nvidia (there was no problem in Open SUSE 10.2/3 either)
• KDE4... had a couple crashes already in my 1hour or so of usage! Had tried KDE4 on OpenSUSE 10.3, dint work well, had given up and backed up to KDE 3.5.x. Hoping that is not going to be the case again.
  
• Hate the width of the bottom panel, I reduced it to the minimum size (there is no customized size). Also the font size of the clock. Adding date with year, time with seconds helped.
  
• Not the latest released version of Firefox. I think it is some 3.0b5. At one point while accessing one of the website realized the flash needs to be installed. Just clicking on the buttons, took me to the adobe's website and got installed flawlessly.
  
• Try to install anything from the network using yast, din't work. Either because of the network congestion or because of the yast configuration.
• Haven't tried any 3D stuff, not sure if I can with the hardware I have.

kubuntu 8.04 X not working

After installing kubuntu 8.04, the screen resolution was too low.

apt-get install nvidia-glx
nvidia-xconfig
restart X to solve the problem