Speeding up OpenSUSE 10.2
I’ve been using OpenSUSE 10.X since it was released and it has been by far my favorite distribution. However, the one big strike against it has always been the sluggishness of its software management. Every time you do _anything_ related to software management Suse goes off on a wild tangent reading files, parsing, downloading and on and on.
For example, in Yast, if you click “Installation Source”, Suse goes out and refreshes all the download sources, re-parses everything for absolutely no good reason. Why does Suse need to refresh the list of files just to display the installation sources? It makes no sense and is horribly frustrating especially if the reason you are examining the installation sources is to get rid of one that is slow or broken. Unfortunately I’ve never found a solution for this. The best you can do is make sure you have really fast download sources and be sure to set “Refresh” off on all sources except the update source.
Lately I’ve encountered another very annoying problem with Suse. There are several programs that decide its a good idea to burn 100% CPU for long periods. Chiefly, beagle (the desktop search tool) and zen (the software management).
Fortunately there is an easy solution to this. UNINSTALL THEM In my experience, beagle is completely useless and so is zen and its related tools so it’s best just to get rid of them.
The packages to delete are as follows:
- rug
- zmd
- opensuse-updater
- zen-updater
- beagle
You can safely remove these packages and any dependencies. You will no longer get the update icon in the task bar so periodically you should go into Yast and click “Online Update” to get updates manually. This tool does in 30 seconds what the rug/zmd/zen/updater crap can’t do in hours of CPU time.
Clearly there are some serious bugs in the SUSE package management so heres hoping they fix them soon!
