Bought a new toy lately, a small Atom-based laptop and took an oportiunity to experiment with a platform different from what would you expect from a Fedora enthusiast. Grabbed a fresh new installation of openSUSE 11.2 and gave it a try.
The toy looks rather appealing. One can't overlook similarity with another thin laptop by a hardware vendor best known for being a notoric winner in the vendor-lock in paralympics. Compared to that one, this one is smaller and lighter, which is paid for with a rather small battery life (around 2 hours). If you ever used a MacBook Air you'd probably be disappointed that unlike Air, you can't iron your clothes with Inspiron Mini. For a fraction of price, the engineers obviously could not affort putting a fan inside, nor have a reason to do so. Wasn't it for the moving-head 1.8" hard drive, there wouldn't be any moving parts there. Unfortunatelly, I could not find a model with a solid state one.
Upgradability of the machine is virtually none. You can't even replace upgrade the humble 1G of RAM memory. You know, the RAM chips never go bad, or do they? Dell no longer sells these machines; makes one think if the users didn't appreciate not being able to stick in more RAM -- something that can be done even with smaller 10" and 9" models. The RAM's soldered on the same board with dual-core 1.3 GHz CPU. Definitely not a miracle, performance-wise. Apart from three times the amount of USB ports of what Air has, you'd be probably surprised to find an SD card reader built in. Just for semi-completeness, the display's resolution is 1280x800 and there's a VGA port for external display.
You can have a look at the innards here: http://ravicblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/dell-mini-12-dissected.html
This is the most poorly supported machine by Linux that I've touched in ages. A complete sucker. Which is good, since with a little effort mostly each piece of its hardware is usable.
So I copied the Gnome flavour of live openSUSE live media to an USB flash memory stick and booted it. It booted up a lot faster than I expect it to and what I immediately found out was that the display resolution was rather exotic and I could not connect to wireless (more about those later). Honestly, the really first thought was "wow, the artwork is beautiful." So much for the first impression, I rebooted it into installer and started installing. It went pretty smoothly, no surprises apart from the disk partitioning.
No idea why is that so hard to get it right, but the partitioner in yast2-based installer sucked nearly as much as Debian's one. Personally, I like how does Fedora do that, but every other installer I saw would do a better job if it just launched fdisk. No matter how much I tried, I could not convince it to use all disk's free space and not just 14G. I ended up running an "expert" mode where I could not do anything at all, since the device was "busy". "Probably confused by existing partitioning," I thought, it contained a NT partition and some service dell stuff. Wiped it away, created and empty partition table. This time the installer looked a lot nicer, allowed me to create a big partition that spans the whole disk and LVM on it. Installation finished. Result? One 14G partition. FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-, single user mode, fdisk, pvresize, lvresize, e2resize...
A lot has been writted about the gigantic suckage the Poulsbo GPU is. More-or-less good news is that at http://v3.sk/~lkundrak/psb-opensuse-11.2/ you can find packages I've ported over from RPM Fusion that can be used. Bad news is that the drivers are (who'd think that for a closed blob) rather limited. Can't help thinking this must have been a winner of this year's hate-your-user competition.
Sound not work out of box. Fortunatelly, it worked with sound-2.6 and as I later discovered, Takashi Iwai commited a fix just two days ago. This is not the first time he was found guilty of commiting exactly the fix I needed. He's a SUSE developer as well, therefore I'd expect openSUSE audio stack to be generally in a decent state, it was probably just me picking the wrong piece of hardware this time. Oh, and here's that fix:
Despite this fix, you get horrible sound dissorts with PulseAudio. As far as I'm concerned it's a known bug and being worked on. Not being anything that would even remotely resemble anyone thet would be familiar with the audio stack, a quick fix for me would be to configure gstreamer to bypass Pulse with gstreamer-preferences.
Did not get that to work yet. Broadcom. Not looked into that much, but I'd not be surprised if there was a LP PHY. If I'm right, I'm lucky, since some time ago I've seen Gábor Stefanik commit some bits that could make it work into wireless-testing (though they seem to have been reverted since):
In worst case, the MiniPCI-E network adapter is replaceable.
As I've said, I've chosen the GNOME flavour (most openSUSE users seem to prefer KDE). The distro feels very polished, from the bootup procedure to the Desktop itself. They replaced the GNOME menu with their own version, and I'd say it could use some improvement (found it hard to launch terminal :). It does only offer a couple of most used applications, it uses a separate dialog to find and run some other application. You can't search for an application from the menu. Probably needless to add, this is just a matter of taste, not a technical barier. The standard GNOME menu is offered as Panel applet, you can replace the openSUSE menu with it, or even use both if you like.
When it comes to applications, openSUSE tends to use Mono-base tools. Looking both at the performance and the memory consumption I couldn't help thinking it feels pre-production. Having said the machine has humble techincal parameters one can't blame me for not using Tomboy, Banshee or F-Spot. (Tried to actually use the latter and would definitely advise my friends to do so. If not memory and CPU, I could probably at least use more battery life.)
For package management a tool called zypper is used. With command-line interface similar to yum it's rather easy to grasp. I appreciated that it searches rather quickly compared to yum, didn't care much enough to research why. The repositories can be added and removed without editing the configuration file. A nice detail, but openSUSE seems to rely on custom repositories heavily so it's rather important there. What I did not like is that it by default refreshes the repository metadata on each run and installs packages right after downloading. The latter may be an advantage if you are disk-space constrained, though it might have been nice if they parallelized it (not that yum would do that).
What's unhappy is how openSUSE decentralizes repositories. It might be useful in some specific use-cases, but think of the poor user who just wants to install a package... I needed Rhythmbox. Took me some time to learn about Contrib repository (shame on me for not reading documentation). Why on earth isn't it present by default? It could be disabled or something. Needed another package (synergy), not present in contrib, but managed to find it in someone's collection (or how is it called) in Build Service. I wish I could just zypper in synergy.
Time to get some real work done. What I do for Fedora is package development; why not package stuff I needed? Started with psb kernel module. What I need to note now, this is the time I encountered the first bug (with git config color.ui set to auto, the pager didn't let the escape sequences pass through like less -R does). Everything else worked flawlessly so far, I'm not used to that :) Another thing worth noting is that anyone who drives the kernel module packaging infrastructure for openSUSE did not do a proper research, otherwise he could have delivered more for smaller price resuing what's already been done.
This is where I started to think that openSUSE must just hate packagers. Having my tiny RPM done, I had no way to ensure it's buildable reproducibly (its BuildRequires are correct). Fedora engineers are familiar with mock tool -- for openSUSE I was told that I need a Build Service account. For a local build. And I need a "Build Service checkout" to build from. If a Novell engineer happens to read this, surprised why you have so little community contributors? They don't feel welcome. They feel that your tooling is a medieval torture device.
Overally -- not bad. I'm going to use this for my desktop work and will attempt to do some Fedora development from it ;)
Update: A in rather informative thread spinned off at opensuse-buildservice list: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2009-11/msg00077.html Obviously openSUSE has a local build tool and with osc build I just picked up a wrong tool. It has some glitches though, apparently apart from not working at all (#553880) it is not designed around zypper and does not fetch packages from remote repositories. I find it odd that the developers don't lack the functionality -- mock proved to be a really useful tool greatly helpful for lot of stuff ranging from building the packages in the build system, to QA-ing them locally and even creating chroots of other distribution releases to reproduce and fix bugs.
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