This post is about complaining. If you don’t want to read it don’t. First I have to say i’m happy with openSUSE 11.0 (It’s best openSUSE ever). After that I have say then comes hardware problems on shiny new HP Proliant DL385GS (4 core AMD CPU).

Everything start on sunny day i’m happy installing openSUSE 11.0 from x84_86 DVD. Everything goes fine and smooth. Then I set up LTSP5 and it goes excelent (remember to remove pulseaudio from server to make it work wirth audio). Users starts to use LTSP5 and suddenly everything doesn’t go fine anymore. Machine crashes everytime they start to do something else than just login (open firefox crash, listen music crash or watch youtube guess what crash). Client keeps itself up but server goes down fast. No kernel panic nothing (Nothing on /var/log/message nor in dmesg)!

I called to HP just to hear awful news. openSUSE is not supported. Okay I understand they can’t support every distro on earth but Novell ain’t small player, openSUSE is quit popular. We can use SLES (this is not about money) but it’s too ancient for us. So we choose suffering!

After calling and mailing to HP I tried updated kernel (2.6.25.14 something) it didn’t help. Then I tried some HEAD 11. 0 kernel RPM and now this machine is working like a dream. Nothing in 2 days. I’ve been torturing it like a maniac and it just keeps going. Lesson learned if you have new server test it good before let anyone else try it.

My problems were not ended here. We have nice VIA based thinkclients and they have INTEL soundcard (snd-hda-intel). I liked to have pulseaudio on them because it just rocks! I tried and tried but could get it working. I debuged and debuged until I figured out there is no mixer device. That’s why I can’t get it working.

Easy task just a small patch. Then I popped on pulseaudio Trac and filed a ticket. To just find out it’s ALSA problem. How the heck this get like this? Should I always live on the edge? I just like that my audio device work out of the box. Not everyone have newest ALSA or event possibility/cabability to install/use it. Dark nerd side of me refuses this fact (Live fast, short and always on edge) but my sysadmin side says I just want everything work easy until the pitty end.

ps. I get very nice answer and even nicer reanswer to my complains in pulseaudio trac. Many thanks to you! Pulseaudio still rocks and hopefully they get 1.0.0 out of the door soon. Until then I listen my favourite tunes with it (Rebeloiusly with my patch on) and keep being happy.

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