Abhishek Mahanty's Weblog

openSUSE 10.2 and Xgl

Last week I installed openSUSE 10.2 on my laptop and I'm very impressed with this linux distro. I have been planning to install linux on my laptop (along with Windows and Solaris) so that I could check the user experience of a Swing application project that I've been involved with.

I have been using Red Hat/Fedora for few years now but the recent buzz around other linux distros viz. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva etc. piqued my interest to try them out. The difficult part in a linux installation is deciding which linux to install. I discussed with few friends of mine - each one recommending the one they use. I did some reading on the web.. distrowatch is a very good resource. Finally I zeroed on openSUSE 10.2 .

The installation was very smooth.. a bit time consuming though. I really liked the admin/setup tool - yast (Yet Another Setup Tool).

openSUSE provides most of the applications one needs out of the box.

• OpenOffice for office applications
• Firefox as browser
• Evolution as email client (which I replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Gimp for graphics
• Real Player and Totem for playing movies. I prefer VLC media player, so I installed it later.
• Helix Banshee for playing MP3s and syncing with IPod. It's an excellent player although I'm struggling with the iPod syncing part due to the iPod Raid bug. Will look for the openSUSE fix later.

Configured Compiz/Xgl for the jazzy stuff

openSUSE has a very active community presence and have good documentation online viz. articles, blogs etc. Getting XGL to run required installing NVIDIA drivers and some tweaks here and there. I found the following resources very useful:

Using Xgl on SUSE Linux - http://en.opensuse.org/Using_Xgl_on_SUSE_Linux
Xgl Troubleshooting - http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl_Troubleshooting
Linux Display Driver - x86 - http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-9755.html
Nvidia Installer HOWTO for SUSE LINUX users - http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html

Posted at 12:00AM Mar 01, 2007 by Abhishek Mahanty in Technical  |  Comments[1]