Actually I had downloaded the installer cd for 11.1-rc-x86_64 during my exams so, installed it right away. Almost everything was fine, except for the wifi. Dell inspiron 1525 comes with broadcom card and I had to install the 64bit driver for it. Thankfully I found this link with ease and hence got wifi working as well.
Very soon, I also compiled kdelibs, kdebase, kdesdk, kdepimlibs and kdeplasma-addons and was happy using the trunk kde as my main desktop environment. Desktop effects were descent though I was getting only 57 FPS in glxgears. However, I was running a mix and match kde4 apps from trunk and 4.1.3. Because of this there were some problems like
- Akregator's menu and icons were absent when run through trunk KDE environment.
- Setting the KDEHOME variable meant kde3 apps would also use kde4's home directory.
- Yakuake's prompt used to hang whenever I did tab completetion for the first time in the session
These annoyances drove me to go for stability and hence I switched back to KDE 4.1.3. I wasn't satisfied still as I wanted something which was "latest" and yet somewhat "stable". So I chose to use factory packages for KDE.
The annoyances aggravated once I started the update with KDE factory repos enabled..
First of all, the download was really slow (about 2 kbps!) And also the update required me to monitor it because, either download.opensuse.org or the mirror used to fail and zypper used to hang on stdin asking me to abort/retry every 10 minutes. I took some patience and completed the update.
After the update, I ran into one more problem. KDM won't authenticate me at all, no matter what!! I tried xdm, but I guess I had done an unclean update because of which kde 4.1 didn't work for me. I was forced to use trunk KDE compiled by me, but again there were too many crashes. I think I had by mistake, enabled/disabled repos in between update (when download had failed).
All these left me with no choice, but to reinstall a clean opensuse. I did that but I haven't installed packages nor updated it yet. This is because I am tired of 2 kbps. Also I can't download all time as I have already amassed quite a hefty download and will be paying more for internet usage. The only way I can update is to make use of 2am to 8am free download time by my ISP(BSNL).
I also tried using different mirrors for the repos, yet the speed wasn't impressive. Some research led me to the wonder called METALINKS
Continued here.
Update: I apologize for updations because of my confusions. To clear the things, here is a new post which describes the metalink and its adoption by openSuSE. I have removed those parts from this blog.
5 comments:
There is an alternative to compile trunk, and that's the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE repository.
More information at http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/KDE4
Hi, I'm in Bangalore for internship and in my experience the mirror.in.th opensuse mirror works quite well. At the office (8mbps) I get a steady 200KB/s download speed and at home (256kpbs) it always maxes out on 29KB/s (I'm on Hathway Cable)
@Einar: I know, but I do need some stability as kde4 is the only desktop environment I have installed. Hence, I feel factory suits me better.
@Casper: Cool! I'd give that a try. Thanks for the info.
Hi!
The Unstable repo is actually quite stable and those packages will be moved to the factory repo after 4.2 was released.
Regarding the slow download speed. opensuse uses a re-director, so if you find a slow mirror, report it and it will be deleted from the list. People in the US had that problem some months ago too.
Regarding kdm not authenticating, I think I remember a bug were it would stop working if the fingerprint auth module was loaded, but I am not sure whether this has something to do with your issue.
Oh - and #opensuse-kde always welcomes you. :)
@anon:
Thanks for your input :)
Great! I have downloaded most of unstable kde rpm's using the metalinks. So will go for unstable then.
I'll cross check the download speed. Unfortunately zypper with aria backend doesn't show the download speed. Anyways, I'll surely report it once I cross check it.
Even I am not sure of that kdm issue i faced. Anyways, I don't have that install anymore.
Didn't know about the #opensuse-kde channel. Will use it in future :)
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