Friday, July 24, 2009

SLED 11 on my HP 2140 - Part Deux

I finally removed SLED 11 from my HP 2140 Mininote. What happened was a case of itchy fingers. I added openSUSE OSS and Non-OSS repos and accidentally did a "zypper up" without looking.

Urggh, it updated alright just that after a shutdown it refused to boot cited some issues with the / (root) partition. Ah well, it worked well while it lasted.

No noticeable performance issue when I was doing SLED 11. It was getting kinda boring coz it just worked! But I was pleasantly surprised that it was bundled with OpenOffice.org 3.1; IIRC, OO.o 3.1 was not even released when SLED 11 was launched back in March.

Yeah I know it's quite sad to be so darn excited over a boring old office suite....

On the other hand, the same firewall issues from its openSUSE upstream is still present in SLED 11. It seems that when the firewall is up you can't connect to a SMB share or a CUPS server (though port 631 is explicitly opened for incoming, just like in Fedora).

I just pulled down the firewall and downloaded and installed Shorewall. Ahh..at last some sanity.

The multimedia support in SLED 11 is quite spotty at times. Well, the playback was superb with no issues of lagging or video artifacts but the available codecs available are just very limited.

While Moonshine was installed to allow playback of WMA and WMV files, I found that more esoteric file formats such as MKVs and RMVBs simply wont play nice with Totem or Xine. Heck even some xvid (or divx AVIs) files won't play. I have tons of AVIs and RMVBs, that won't do.

So I added Packman's repo:

#zypper ar http://ftp.skynet.be//pub/packman/suse/11.1 Packman
Added the "restricted bits" like gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad and libxine1-codecs.

And back to multimedia goodness.

But then a thought sank in; since each openSUSE version only has support for 24 months and SLED 11 could potentially be used for far longer than that, what will happen when Packman decides to dump the 11.1 repo?

I mean if I never format the netbook then perhaps I could live with it. But never is a big word and the techie in me will never hear of it, never formatting my Linux installation means I hardly do stuff to it. I cannot say for others but sometimes my frack ups are so huge it requires nothing less than a rebuild.

At least with a RHEL Desktop there is the RPMFusion repo. Hmm..unsure about going all Shadowman for my netbook since Fedora 11 absolutely hates the on-board Marvell LAN and decides to ignore my Broadcom wifi. At least with only one connection I can do a yum for wl-broadcom.

Ah well, back to the green embrace of the Geeko.

Well, bye bye SLED 11, it was a joy.

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