Installation of Linux Mint went fine, in fact the only problem was that Suse refused to burn the ISO, so I had to boot into windows for a brief period.

There were no hassles installing the 3D drivers, which was a good start, and getting the network running was a breeze (in fact, the same method in Ubuntu, Suse and Mint, just that there was an alternative in Suse that confused me initially). Everything looks good so far!

I found an issue with Slime + Emacs, but I'm almost certain that this is to do with using the latest CVS version of Slime.

However, I have to say that this experiment has shown me that OpenSuse 11.1 is not as good as Ubuntu - for me. No 3D, very slow package downloading, and default applications not working are the main reasons.

On the plus side, the default theme is a little nicer, yast is pretty good and it's not actually bad. It's just not as easy to get up and running. I like to use the system, not play around with it forever. It also lacks a 'why?' answer, as in why the hell should I change?

But I'm not going to stop here, oh no. Next up is to try another big distro - Linux Mint. Once again, same as before, 3D must work, codecs must work. Downloading right now.

One of the things that Suse seems to lack is the offer to help when you are missing something. When you don't have a codec, Ubuntu offers to go away and find it; if you need hardware 3d turned on, it'll try and grab the drivers for you. Suse definitely misses out on this trick.

Next up, and it's a big one: *NO 3D*. Ouch! There's nothing to grab from the repo's, and apparently ATI don't seem to know my gfx card exists on their website (well, kind of; they'll sell me one but don't list it in their drivers section!). Bummer 'cos this worked out of the box on Ubuntu.

Finally, download speeds when grabbing software are all over the place. They can be really slow, slow or just not fast. Today I got 3.3KB/s for a 80MB download.

I am now officially missing Ubuntu. No 3D, smaller and much slower repos, default software that has failed to work out of the box and nothing to show for the extra pain....

Have to say that Monsoon, the default torrent is not good at all. It crashed a few times and was very slow at downloading. I really don't know why. I was grabbing a torrent at about 60k/s. I tried with transmission and got 400k/s!

So that's both the default music player (Banshee) and the default Torrent client failing to work on my system. Not a great start for a newcomer!

So far, so good.... got all the codecs down I need. No xmms in the repositories, but thats true for Ubuntu as well. But everything seems to 'just work' pretty much. A program called Monsoon is used for torrents, but I think Transmission is a touch better (primarily because it looks less cluttered).

At this point, I'm happy, but there's nothing extra that would make want to switch, no real selling point I could give to Ubuntu users. Then again, there are no turn-offs either. The next few days will reveal more. I suppose the only issue I have is the slow download speed when adding software, and there is less software in the repo's. On the plus side, I added some new repo's and all the codec stuff by clicking on a link via the web - nothing earth shattering but a nice touch anyhow.

Next step is to get 3d working, install xmms and then setup Slime, Lisp and Emacs.

Now I'm hitting the 'annoyances' part. Nothing major, I just have to work out what I have to do to get things just right.

The biggest annoyance right now is updating over the Internet. I'm getting 40k/s, which when the first update is a whopping 300 MB is a tad annoying. And that's just security updates and a few recommended packages. Haven't even started adding software I want yet!

Whilst waiting, I fires up the external hard-drive and tried to play some music. The standard player is Banshee, which promptly hung up on me. No problem, I just switched to using Totem instead, but not a great start. Sound works fine but seems a little quiet.

I don't like the 'start' button either. It defaults to showing you 8 applications. There's a 'more applications' button so you can see the rest but this opens in a seperate window! Very annoying. Luckily it was pretty easy to revert to something that I'm more used to.

Well, one installer later, and I'm posting from Suse. Installation was *mainly* OK. When formatting the partitions, Yast mounted them and then complained that they were mounted :-( . So needed to play around a bit. To be fair, I didn't just use auto since I had 2 windows partitions and was wanting to use the old ext3 partitions I had (just format / and /home).

Network setup was pretty easy, although I cursed for a few minutes because of a simple typo I made (for the technically minded: I need an mtu of 1452 because of my wierd Chinese pppoe connection; I set this up on eth0 instead of ppp0 which killed my connection).

Now I'm going to have a look around the desktop.

The first steps.....

Something inside of me decided to move away from Ubuntu yesterday. Not because I dislike it, but I've been using it for so long now on my main machine (October 2004!) that I'd thought I'd give another distro a chance.

After a quick search, I decided on Suse. I wanted to go with a fairly main-stream choice (for reasons you'll see later), and mainly chose Suse because it was my first distro back in 1999 (I think version 6.1).

So, this blog is going to detail the results. I'm going to completely wipe my Ubuntu install to force me to work with Suse, and I'm going to try and get everything I can to work as I like it.

I typically use the computer for programming and internet use, and I'm also not keen on playing with lots of options. I rather the default settings 'just work'. My priorities are the following:

The internet must work (there is small annoyance on Ubunutu I'll detail later).
It must play my media files, which are a whole mixture on the video front but mainly mp3, shn and flac on the audio side.
3D graphics needs to work.
I program in Lisp, and I need SBCL + Emacs + Slime setup.
It needs to work with my video camera - a Panasonic SDR-H288, and my camera, a Kodak C743.

So I've just downloaded the Suse 11.1 Gnome Live CD. I'm now going to back up my data to an external hard drive, and then install it. Hopefully, the next blog post will be from Suse. If I blog from Ubuntu, then that's a fail; if I end up blogging from Windows then it'll be an epic fail (this laptop dual boots to keep the wife happy).