Someone was missing an openSUSE 11.1 alpha2 announcement. Well, I must admit, that I was silent on purpose. One prefers to share good news, not the bad ones. Alpha2 and factory at the moment can't be installed due to an early YaST2 crash. If this was not enough, an upgrade from a previous snapshot breaks KDE4 completely.

On a side note: I updated the PPC PackMan packages for 10.3 and 11.0 last week and today, which brought speed and stability to WMV playback and bugfixes to some obscure codecs I never heard of :-)

Well, 11.1 is still broken.

I tried to bring the VLC package from Packman up to shape. The good news is, that I was able to play most of my test media files. The bad news is, that I could do that by disabling the traditional, full featured wxGTK user interface, and using it with the 'pda' UI. So



should work, but the UI is a lot more simple, most of the features are missing (or available from the command line).

The VLC package in Gentoo works fine, so it is most likely a problem with the wxGTK package, which I'll investigate next.

A new compile with some tweaks shows some improvements. The standard interface crashes a bit later now :-) The 'skin2' interface seems to work stable now, to use it one needs to use svlc command to get the program started. Many file formats still don't work, but DVD play back with correct menus only works with VLC, so it was worth the effort.

'vlc' was upgraded to the unofficial 0.9.1 release. This way vlc does not crash any more, not even with the default wxwidgets interface. It is still far from perfect, many codecs don't work, but at least DVD playback is perfect :-)

Isn't the Qt interface fairly mature (and pretty damn slick) right now anyway?

Why would anyone want to use ugly old wxWidgets?

Oops, you are right. The QT4 interface is now the default, wxwidgets is gone. Only the spec file is not cleaned up completely, so it is in the configure part (which I checked), but not in the buildrequires :-D

Update: beta1 of openSUSE 11.1 was skipped on PPC, as system building infrastructure changed completely, and they were late to fix it for PPC. Factory is being reorganized, the previous two download locations are gone, a new one will be available on http://powerpc.opensuse.org/ (hopefully soon).

I spent a lot of time to fix packman packages and bring them up to date, so if you use them, it is worth now updating them. Even VLC worked with the files I tested with the nice new QT interface. Packages are available at the usual location ( ftp://spike.fa.gau.hu/pub/ ).

Beta2 for PPC was released, but it is completely broken on PPC (and also very problematic on x86). I reported many bugs, hopefully they will be resolved before beta3...

With beta3 scheduled for this week, I have high hopes for a beta, which I could recommend others to test. Most of the bugs I reported are now resolved. See http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap

Last week and this morning brought some large Packman updates: more codecs, more stability, especially with my favorite VLC player.