Last December, shortly after the release of openSUSE 11.1, I decided to update the OS of my computer at work, a Dell Precision. Reading lots of comments about the behaviour of KDE 4.0 and 4.1, I initially wanted to install openSUSE with the traditional KDE 3.5, which is in my opinion a great (and stable) desktop manager. However, when trying to install openSUSE with KDE 3.5 I ran into severe problems and at a certain point the installation just failed. Now that I have already formatted the hard drive I had the option of switching back to openSUSE 10.3, which I had before with KDE 3.5, or to install openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1. I decided for the latter option and after some hard times in the beginning I am now very pleased. Especially since I updated KDE to 4.2.1, which is a vast improvement compared to 4.1. Many bugs are fixed and the behavior and customization possibilities are much better.
So today I decided to update also my private notebook (Dell Latitude D820) to openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2. One of the reasons was that I often read that KDE4 would be extremly slow with Nvidia graphic cards, but I now heard somewhere that this problem should be solved. So now that I was so pleased with the latest update of KDE 4 nothing should stop me from installing. Nothing? Well, first of all I tried the new Suse Studio webservice, which I presented here. The problem was that I wanted to install openSUSE complete with several additional packages, but although no collisions were detected some packages did interfere with each other in the build process. Anyway, this service is still alpha and I am sure that once it has passed its teething problems it is a very nice feature. So I downloaded the installation DVD from the openSUSE homepage and started with the installation process. Unfortunatly I ran into problems here as well, because openSUSE would not install flawless from the DVD and several errors apeared. I finally installed openSUSE 11.1 via the network installation option, which seems to be running fine now. However, I am a little bit disappointed because of all the issues I had with the installation.
Update:
I might have done wrong because today I tried again with a newly burnt DVD and voila – the installation went without any troubles. That said, I tried doing a network installation using the internet at my university but there I could not access the repositories – strange, maybe some firewall problems.
