It is broken
Don't get me wrong. I like SuSE, but they broke a media player that comes with KDE called Noatun. All media formats default to playing on this player. However, if I run it, it just hangs. It doesn't matter if I play an mp3 or an mpeg, a wav or an avi; nothing plays.
If I don't kill the process then the thing will start consuming all my system resources. It will occupy a huge chunk of memory and then start swapping. Then that fills. My whole system will start slowly grinding to a halt. If I leave it running overnight, the next morning I will have a system that takes up to 20 seconds just to register a mouse movement.
Starting Noatun will create three separate threads - the application, the object in the system tray, and one other I don't know what it does. All there have to be stopped for me to recover compute cycles.
Unfortunately, I cannot uninstall this one application as it is part of the KDE multimedia package.
In my review of SuSE 10.0 versus Mandriva 2006, I have to say they both have their good points. Officially, neither of my free downloads came with third party proprietary multimedia codecs (such as wmv, divx, DVD), but I think the purchased versions might. SuSE seems to be more user friendly and I highly reccomend it if you are new to Linux and want to start using it. Mandriva seems to be more flexible but requires slightly deeper knowledge and has a URPMI (their system update utility) repository called the Penguin Liberation Front (PLF is not an official division of Mandriva) where you can obtain codecs for popular media formats. I have not found something like this for SuSE's YaST system update tool. Maybe I am just looking in the wrong place.
Another thing I noticed about SuSE is that when I install a RPM (like a zip file but for Linux and has more utility than just compression), the system does not seem to recognize it and I have to add the icons to the start menu manually. RPMs are supposed to to this automatically. SuSE really wants everything to be loaded through YaST.
If I don't kill the process then the thing will start consuming all my system resources. It will occupy a huge chunk of memory and then start swapping. Then that fills. My whole system will start slowly grinding to a halt. If I leave it running overnight, the next morning I will have a system that takes up to 20 seconds just to register a mouse movement.
Starting Noatun will create three separate threads - the application, the object in the system tray, and one other I don't know what it does. All there have to be stopped for me to recover compute cycles.
Unfortunately, I cannot uninstall this one application as it is part of the KDE multimedia package.
In my review of SuSE 10.0 versus Mandriva 2006, I have to say they both have their good points. Officially, neither of my free downloads came with third party proprietary multimedia codecs (such as wmv, divx, DVD), but I think the purchased versions might. SuSE seems to be more user friendly and I highly reccomend it if you are new to Linux and want to start using it. Mandriva seems to be more flexible but requires slightly deeper knowledge and has a URPMI (their system update utility) repository called the Penguin Liberation Front (PLF is not an official division of Mandriva) where you can obtain codecs for popular media formats. I have not found something like this for SuSE's YaST system update tool. Maybe I am just looking in the wrong place.
Another thing I noticed about SuSE is that when I install a RPM (like a zip file but for Linux and has more utility than just compression), the system does not seem to recognize it and I have to add the icons to the start menu manually. RPMs are supposed to to this automatically. SuSE really wants everything to be loaded through YaST.