I was anxious to try this distribution since I'd already been quite impressed with its predecessors, in terms of content, ease of use, stability, and pre-installed server and non-server based services. To say this version is the true perfection of that is almost an understatement and I don't say it lightly.
Remember, openSUSE 11.2 - Educational Edition is avilable here: http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live
As has always been the case, almost all features are controlled through yast2, which has been optimised, revamped and perfected to the point where most users would not really know how it could be any better than it is. Beginning at the top, we have Hardware based controls, such as hardware information which gives you a complete hardware audit of your system, Fingerprint reader, infrared devices, TV cards and other usual suspects, all of which seemed to work great, though most of my setup didn't require tinkering with that of any kind, since openSUSE 11.2's auto detection is pretty accurate. Network settings can be either controlled via Network Manager (the default, which I did not have to tinker with, as I had in previous versions, or Yast2's own network manager which has tighter integration with some of SUSE's other network services such as LDAP or NIS.
As in previous versions an LDAP server and Client are part of Yast's control domain and are deceptively simple to setup. Even adding the computer to a windows domain is a click of a button. Many additions to apparmor have been included with profiling reports, audits, and wizards to make the process much easier to implement. A new setting, or at least one that didn't catch my eye previously was the local security button, which allows you to control which services will run in a chroot or not, as well as various other items, I the software management section there is a link to the package searcher (webpin) which is a highly used tool by developers, but can be useful to anybody.
If there is something you are searching for that isn't immediately visible, you can use that service to find the application or service. Integrated visual backup and restoration have been simplified even further, as have kernel settings, boot loader parameters and profile managers. Visualization has been further integrated into the system with a create virtual machine applet as well as a virtual machine manager, along with the already well known hypervisor tools.
The overall look and feel of the system have been optimised to feel and look more professional, and other than my graphics card, which ati no longer supports (though the free radeonhd driver does a perfect job at detecting and setting) all services and applications were there upon start. I had to download skype, but there was no more fiddling with codecs and optimizing sound. All of that just worked out of the box. It is going to be hard for other distributions to get things running as smoothly as this runs.
A quick glance at the application list shows there are an astounding 200+ educational applications, and I'd be surprised to see any other linux distributions come even close to the quantity or quality of the offerings. All in all this is the educational distro by which all others will be measured I'm sure.
Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)
