openSUSE 11 x86_64

I have had bad experience with the x86_64 bit versions of distro's in the past, too many packages were only made for x86. Well, time has past, so I am going for it again, and putting openSUSE 11 x86_64 on my box. I had a heck of a time burning the ISO for x86_64 I downloaded using a torrent in my x86 openSUSE... eventually I had to use a command line to make it because of errors trying to burn an ISO in the graphical tool. Once burned the disc installed with one error about the source media not found or something.

I even installed it with KDE 4... used it for about 10 minutes and then reinstalled with GNome because the KDE fonts are horrible to read on my LCD and I am too dumb to figure out how to fix it. I know that KDE is beloved by many Linux power users, and I remember the outcry at Novell when it was announced that future SUSE distro's would be Gnome only. Novell had to quickly backtrack and support both in the face of flaming nerd wrath.

Having used Ubuntu and openSUSE, I prefer Ubuntu, but it just won't work with my box now for some strange reason. I really dislike RPM packages and the debian style was pretty slick almost as cool as Gentoo emerge.

openSUSE installed

I upgraded my RAM from 1.5 GB to 3 GB and Ubuntu would not boot up...
So I downloaded the latest install of Ubuntu, I could not get the upgrade to work anyway, and tried to install it over the top of the old install. Ubuntu install failed to start :-( and gave me a command prompt with isoramfs or something cryptic like that. First I thought it was the memory, I ran memtest and the RAM passed no errors.

I then made a openSUSE iso disk and tried to install it. That worked, but many sites would not come up in browsers, lost my data too which sucks. After installing openSUSE, I was getting connection timeout, network unavailable messages even with ping commands. I found a post on a SUSE forum that said to disable IPv6 and Beagle. I did disable IPv6 and now it seems to work just fine. I have not found where to disable Beagle, but I think it works well enough not to need to disable it.

To disable IPv6 in openSUSE 11.0 open YaST and click network settings, global options tab, IPv6 Protocol Settings, uncheck Enable IPv6, reboot the OS.

I am not sure why I had to disable IPv6 to get the internet connection working. I connect to a Linksys5 port network hub which is connected to a Qwest actiontec DSL modem. The other computer on the network is Windows XP Professional. Does IPv6 require special hardware or DSL settings? I would like to use the best technology but with IPv6 enabled my connections to many sites like mail.google.com , would not work. Strange.