OpenSuSE 11.0 blues (or why I was an idiot to install it)

Rootboy

The last few days I've been fixing my PC which overheated after I put OpenSuSE 11.0 on it (serves me right since I've have always said that you should always avoid a .0 release of *SuSE).

It appears that OS 11.0 wants to run the CPU fan a bit slower than either OS 10.3 or Windows does, and my fan was a bit dodgy and wouldn't start up at the lower speed (I would have to flip it with my finger). Add to this that the heatsink was really dirty and I'm surprised that it didn't mess up before.

After it overheated in OS 11.0, it would then overheat in Windows (OS 11.0 managed to mess up my old grub config so I wasn't able to try it out in OS 10.3).

It eventually got to the point where it wouldn't even get past the boot screen.

I took the heatsink off, and it appears that the heatsink paste sort of boiled and was no longer coating the CPU evenly.

Okay, so this is where I had a brain fart and almost screwed things up royally. I pulled the CPU out to clean it up, and then, like a dolt, I used the CPU to clean up the heatsink (by way of using the CPU as a scraper to get the old heatsink gunk off of the heatsink).

This would have been fine except I managed to get some of the gunk on the pin side of the CPU. The interesting thing about heatsink paste is that it is not only conductive to heat, but electrically as well. Smile

Doh!

So then I take one of those magazine subscription card that I had laying about and tried using it to clean up the pins. In the process, I bent about half a dozen pins over.

My pocket knife ended up being the perfect tool to get the pins straightened out. I got lucky.

Because the fan was bad, I took the box into my favorite local PC shop and bought a new CPU cooler that was quite a bit better than the stock one that came with my eMachine.

I also had them replace the case fan that appeared to have never run before. I replaced it with a unit that I could connect directly to one of the power supply cables so that the fan would run whenever the PC was on.

Okay, so things are keeping much cooler now.

So back home I fire up OS 11.0 and go about using it. Before long, the PC locks up and I have to cycle power to reboot it. And then again, and again, and, you get the idea.

I try it out in Windows, no problems there. I then install Ubuntu (which is what I'm currently using) and have been using it for hours without any problems whatsoever.

I've got no idea what is going on with OpenSuSE, but I won't try it again until version .1 (or better) comes out.

JP · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 1:25 pm Post subject:

Wow, I didn't think that computer geniuses ever had computer problems Laughing

j/k

Glad you didn't fry the whole computer, that would have been terrible!

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Rootboy · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 4:34 pm Post subject:

masinick · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 4:34 pm Post subject:

I had some issues with openSUSE 11.0 that no matter which window manager or desktop I chose, I could not sustain mouse movements long enough to select any applications. After about four separate tries, some of which I gave the system plenty of time to "rest" in case it was running some startup or cleanup procedures, I gave up on it completely. I could not even use any applications, so what is the point? I got tired of researching what could be wrong, particularly when four other distributions run flawlessly on the very same system. Ironically enough openSUSE 11.0 works on my old Dell Dimension 4100 desktop better than it does on my new Lenovo laptop. It was not a case of the mouse not being detected - it was - it was that the mouse would move an inch, stop, wait ten seconds, move an inch, etc. Totally flustering and frustrating, so good bye. Mandriva One Spring 2025 took its place and did a great job.

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Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

masinick · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 4:50 pm Post subject:

Well, I just logged on to the Dell and tried openSUSE 11.0 and it works OK. It has a number of updates and I am applying them now.

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Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

Rootboy · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 4:59 pm Post subject:

What I will probably do is hold off until 11.1 comes out. By then they should have the rough edges pretty much smoothed out.

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OpenSuSE 10.3

masinick · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 5:03 pm Post subject:

I think that is a good course of action to take. There have definitely been some improvements in packaging, but as far as I am concerned, much more work needs to be done.

_________________
Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

bdquick · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2025 11:28 pm Post subject:

I'm guessing problems like those are because it was decided beagle and compiz should be installed by default. Both are terrible resource hogs. And the idea of installing compiz with the standard xorg drivers is just dumb imho. I personally like 11 and am running at my main system now without any problems, but I unchecked those two things at install time.

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Arch Linux

masinick · Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 12:42 am Post subject:

I did not have any serious problems with openSUSE 11.0 on the old Dell and it even had those search tools installed. Once I saw that, I disabled them. Still, on that old box, openSUSE just is not that nimble. Stuff like SimplyMEPIS, antiX, sidux, and Xubuntu work OK, but other stuff, like Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, and things of that nature run poorly. PCLinuxOS runs well, but the package updates take too long. Even a few packages take a couple of minutes, whereas a couple of dozen Arch packages will update in that same time and the Debian based systems do nearly as well. I revamped one of my MEPIS instances on that box, for instance, scrapping the base MEPIS packages and converted it to Lenny with sidux and smxi support. Even doing that, I was able to change around 600 packages in just over an hour, and in a couple hours, completely revamp the thing. Changing five or six packages at a time took just a few minutes in that scenario, and that is why I continue to stick with Debian based systems. I can get them to fly on my high end stuff (high end for me, that is) and work acceptably well on eight year old hardware.

_________________
Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

melloe · Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 6:58 pm Post subject:

I have SuSE11 on a couple of boxes with no issues, but like bdquick, I unchecked those boxes also. One fairly new INTEL, and one older AMD ( as in 32 bit 2.8+ ) box

My motto, if in doubt, say no. ( or uncheck as the case may be ).

I am impressed with SuSE11. KDE4 at this stage I am still not sure about <G><
Not that I had any issues with it problem wise. Just not sure I like the way icons are handled ( or not handled actually ). I don't like a lot of crap on the desktop.

For what it is worth, SuSE has moved up to #2 at distrowatch.

Must be doing something right

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mell0: 1. Kubuntu, XP, Sabayon 2. Mandriva,Mint, Mephis
Thor: 1. VISTA, Fedora 2. Chakra, Debian
Sam:XP, SuSE Zues: win7, SuSE testing

melloe · Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 7:13 pm Post subject:

rootboy

You might have been lucky

Probably not news to anyone who has been around puters for a while, but at the shop, the two biggest causes of hardware failures other than I/O devices were
#1. Power supply catastrophic failure, often taking out MB and or CPU, or taken out by CPU or MB. Who can say for sure.

#2 CPU failure from overheating. Usually from fan failure.
Probably 90% of the time ( statistics are made up do-cha-no ), the fan was full of gunk, and cat or dog hair, and failure happened under some heavy use. Some of #1 may be from fan failure as the start of a chain of events

Bottom line. SuSE may have saved your CPU, maybe the box, for you .

Say thanks SuSE <G><

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mell0: 1. Kubuntu, XP, Sabayon 2. Mandriva,Mint, Mephis
Thor: 1. VISTA, Fedora 2. Chakra, Debian
Sam:XP, SuSE Zues: win7, SuSE testing

masinick · Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 9:32 pm Post subject:

I think that SUSE is worth a move up to #2 in DistroWatch. They came late to the ball park as far as the Community led versions. SUSE was always a good distribution, but it had that thorough German engineering. It also came off as stand offish - it did to me. I figured why buy something that I can get free elsewhere. Though I bought Mandrake and others several times, I also got to check them out first to make sure they had good stuff. The ones I liked I would buy, even when I had a CD already. I've done this with MEPIS several times - I like to support the small guys that are good.

When Novell got into SUSE I figured that Novell ought to have learned its lesson from messing up UNIX more than a decade earlier. Novell sold source code for UNIX to SCO after Novell had bought it from UNIX System Laboratories (former AT&T Bell Labs for the software systems). Novell wanted UNIXware to go with Netware.

Think about it. They still do. But now after years of messing up, they came back slowly. First they grabbed Ximian GNOME, which just happened to have started the Mono project. Great strategic grab. That way, they could keep a hand on the C Sharp (C#) work and the .NET stuff from Microsoft.

Linux seemed to be a good play, too. So when Mandrake and SUSE were struggling, SUSE looked like a better deal to Novell, given that SUSE already had business working relationships with IBM and others. So Novell bought SUSE. Things have been better for SUSE ever since. The enterprise grade stuff has been better than ever.

The community stuff has struggled at times, but remember, there was no such thing before. Now Novell can leverage the interests of their community, get them the stuff that interests them, sort it out, get stuff stabilized, and provide the best of it in a very solid enterprise product.

To me, I see their SLED and SLES products as rock solid and their openSUSE products as generally usable, solid as they have been out a while and updated, but like Fedora, a bit erratic at times, especially when something is first released.

Conversely, I find when stuff like SimplyMEPIS and antiX are released, there are rarely many defects and neer anything serious, never anything that adversely affected me.

I truly want both the community and the corporate versions of SUSE to succeed. Red Hat has been a great company, but to keep them innovating at all times, good competition from SUSE and others is important.

For me personally, I tend to use consumer and hobbyist systems more, hence MEPIS and PCLinuxOS on the consumer end and antiX and sidux on the hobbyist end.

_________________
Brian Masinick
Distros: SimplyMEPIS
sidux - no CAPS!, antiX, Debian

VHockey86 · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2025 1:39 pm Post subject:

95% of the time the BIOS saves your CPU...there are emergency provisions when core temperature meets a certain level it kills power. I haven't seen a system in 6-7 years that didn't have this functionality (in an OEM system you don't see it in the stripped down BIOS interface but it's still there). Your system didn't necessarily crash as much as it was just a forced power down.

More modern CPUs will also shut themselves down when under really high thermal stress too.

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