OpenSUSE 11.0 is out

Hotblack Desiato

Meant to post this yesterday afternoon.

Good download speeds available from Heanet:

ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/11.0/iso/

Installable live CD, DVD (more packages included and a more customisable installer) and torrents available.




the first person who mentions the MS-Novell deal is going to get banned

ethernet

I like! Took me 14 hours to download -- the torrent was pretty slow so went for a HTTP jobbie in the end.

Trying KDE 4. Doesn't look all that pretty (and one crash so far) but Compiz makes it a lot better.

I'm really impressed by the improved installer with option to read current configuration files from the existing install (such as fstab). Also, didn't need to reboot once during the entire install. Saw messages in the kernel saying kexec was being used to avoid a reboot (this was just a split second but I think that's what it was called). It's a time saver, considering previous versions required a reboot to finalise the install.

If you're on 10.3, upgrade. The package manager is super snappy. No longer envious of apt-get. Even adding repos is much easier and checking for updates is much faster. Happy bunny

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

If you're on 10.3, upgrade.

What's the best way to do this?

Currently running 10.3 on a dual boot with XP and relatively new to linux.

ethernet

DeepBlue wrote: »

What's the best way to do this?

Currently running 10.3 on a dual boot with XP and relatively new to linux.

You can do a upgrade but this can sometimes cause problems as programs shuffle around the innards of config files so your current configuration *might* cause odd behaviour.

I'd suggest a clean install. First, back up any files in your home directory that you'd like to restore. Download the CD (or DVD if you have the bandwidth). Boot from it and prepare yourself for the installer screen. Be sure to ignore whatever proposal it suggests (it gave me a very odd proposal anyway on a clean install).

You'll see your partitions listed. Your Windows partition will be there. Make sure the F box (format) isn't ticked and mount point should be /windows/C (or just '/windows' as this can save you have to change directory again in the terminal).

Select your root partition (should be formatted with ext3 or ReiserFS). Tick the box for F and set its mount point to / (root). The swap partition should be fine without any need to alter settings. It would be a good idea to create a separate /home partition at this stage. In this way, you can do clean upgrades without worrying about the installer touching your files.

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

I'd suggest a clean install. First, back up any files in your home directory that you'd like to restore. Download the CD (or DVD if you have the bandwidth). Boot from it and prepare yourself for the installer screen. Be sure to ignore whatever proposal it suggests (it gave me a very odd proposal anyway on a clean install).

Downloaded the KDE4 CD and booted from it. Clearly I'm doing something wrong as I wasn't presented with an install option. The options I got are in the screenshot.



I took the Opensuse 11 option which brought up the terminal boot-up sequence which ended looking for a login. It didn't accept my 10.3 login so I was stalled at that point.

Oh well, my system could do with a re-format anyway so maybe now's the time for that .

ethernet

DeepBlue wrote: »

Downloaded the KDE4 CD and booted from it. Clearly I'm doing something wrong as I wasn't presented with an install option. The options I got are in the screenshot.

I took the Opensuse 11 option which brought up the terminal boot-up sequence which ended looking for a login. It didn't accept my 10.3 login so I was stalled at that point.

Oh well, my system could do with a re-format anyway so maybe now's the time for that .

Did you download CD or DVD? The CD runs "live", i.e. you get a usable version of openSUSE and can run the installer from within this. The DVD only gives you the option to install. Your 10.3 details shouldn't work on the CD/DVD.

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

Did you download CD or DVD? The CD runs "live", i.e. you get a usable version of openSUSE and can run the installer from within this. The DVD only gives you the option to install. Your 10.3 details shouldn't work on the CD/DVD.

I downloaded the CD for obvious reasons (700Mb VS 4.3 Gb ).
I was expecting to be presented with options like this on booting it.

Btw don't the CD and DVD both give you the option to install? I thought the DVD just had more add-on programs that could be installed and the CD was the bare-bones option?
When I installed version 10.3 it was from a downloaded CD.

ethernet

Yip, both CD and DVD give you the option to install, but in different ways.

Did you manage to catch any info in the boot-up? The live CD should give you a desktop and not a prompt to log in from the terminal.

DeepBlue

I get this screen of info on boot up.
Apologies for crap pic btw.

It stops at the login prompt. It will accept "root" as login with no password.

I would have expected an "Install" option on the boot CD, No?

Not to worry - I'll probably try again after giving my PC its overdue re-format or I may download the DVD.

ethernet

Grrr! You shouldn't have this trouble. When you log in as root, execute the command

startx

and hope for the best!

DeepBlue

It would appear that the cause of the trouble is my video card.

Startx failed and gave the following output:

Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
	(++) from command line, (!!) notice), (IT) informational,
	(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.

(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Thu Jun 26 22:10:20 2008
(==) using config file: "etc/X11/xorg.conf"
(WW) RADEON: No matching device fro instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found
(**) RADEON(0): RADEONPreInit
(II) Module "ddc" already built in
(II) Module "i2c" already built in
(II) Module "ramdac" already built in
(**) RADEON(0): RADEONScreenInit e000000 0
(**) RADEON(0): Map: 0x0000000, 0x10000000

Fatal server error
xf86MapVidMem: Could not map framebuffer (0x0000000, 0x10000000) (Cannot allocate memory)

waiting for X Server to begin accepting connections
giving up.
xinit: Connection reset by peer (errno 104): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error
linux@linux:~>

It would seem that the openSuse 11 on the LiveCD cannot see my graphics card or can't work with it.

The good news is that I did install it on another PC I have here so at least I can play around with it on that while figuring out how to solve the RADEON problem.

Webmonkey

DeepBlue wrote: »

I get this screen of info on boot up.
Apologies for crap pic btw.

It stops at the login prompt. It will accept "root" as login with no password.

I would have expected an "Install" option on the boot CD, No?

Not to worry - I'll probably try again after giving my PC its overdue re-format or I may download the DVD.

Try typing init 5

ethernet

When the CD/DVD gives you the green screen after the BIOS boot from it, hit the appropriate F key for changing the graphics option and pick 'safe' or 'VGA' (can't recall exactly what options you're given).

This should be enough to give you a desktop environment. After an install, adding the proprietary driver for your card is a doddle.

An Fear Aniar

I've just set up a triple-boot with Vista, Ubuntu and openSUSE.

Nice to have options.

.

DeepBlue

I installed Ubuntu instead .

ethernet

DeepBlue wrote: »

I installed Ubuntu instead .

Drowning in my own tears ...

Ah well, as long as it's working for you! Enjoy the choice.

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

Ah well, as long as it's working for you!

Actually I've already uninstalled it .

It was:

1. Godawful ugly
2. *very* slow

I could have dealt with 1. but 2. was a deal breaker.

Going back to openSuse 10.3 and gonna look at Fedora next .

ethernet

DeepBlue wrote: »

Actually I've already uninstalled it .

It was:

1. Godawful ugly
2. *very* slow

I could have dealt with 1. but 2. was a deal breaker.

Going back to openSuse 10.3 and gonna look at Fedora next .

I put it on someone's machine to give them a taste of Linux. I can't believe how many updates are available each day. I didn't use my openSUSE desktop for a few days and only had two updates today.

Hmm, the brown/orange doesn't float everyone's boat!

I'm curious now -- what did you find slow? BTW, for your sanity, I'd avoid using KDE 4 with Fedora 9 -- super buggy. openSUSE had more time to polish and iron out niggles in it in comparison.

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

I'm curious now -- what did you find slow?

I found the responsiveness of the UI sluggish. openSuse 10.3 was far snappier in comparison whereas Ubuntu had a noticeable latency.
Boot up time also seemed longer than openSuse 10.3.

To be fair I didn't give it much of a chance but its first impressions didn't impress. Also to be doubly fair the system I'm running it on has just 256Mb RAM. (It's RAMBUS RAM and every time I get an inclination to upgrade I keep thinking it's better to invest the upgrade cost in a new PC rather than obsolete RAM so I keep putting it off ).

ethernet wrote: »

When the CD/DVD gives you the green screen after the BIOS boot from it, hit the appropriate F key for changing the graphics option and pick 'safe' or 'VGA' (can't recall exactly what options you're given).

Forgot to mention that I tried the video options. I think it had text mode, VESA (?), 800x600 and other higher resolutions.
The VESA and 800x600 options both had the same result as at the higher resolutions i.e. failed to connect to X server.

I'll download the install DVD and see if that works better.

Meanwhile - a final question (hopefully ): what's the best way to install openSuse 11 over openSuse 10.3?
In XP I was going to go Start->Run->Compmgmt.msc->Disk Management and then delete the logical drives which have linux on them and then do a fresh install of openSuse 11.
Do I need to reformat the deleted logical drives first before trying to install openSuse 11 on them?

ethernet

RAMBUS -- you have my sympathy

You could delete the logical partitions but the installer will detect them and will almost certainly suggest using them as they are (one for swap, root partition and so on) if you choose the 'new installation' option when you boot from the DVD. Do whatever you feel most comfortable with, be it in Windows or Linux -- with the free space from the extended partition, the installer will most likely propose a decent partition scheme involving logical partitions.

An Fear Aniar

DeepBlue wrote: »

Actually I've already uninstalled it .

It was:

1. Godawful ugly
2. *very* slow

I could have dealt with 1. but 2. was a deal breaker.

Going back to openSuse 10.3 and gonna look at Fedora next .

About the ugliness, you're given a plain brown system and then you can make it look like however you want... see some examples here:

http://images.google.ie/images?hl=en&q=gnome%20desktop&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://images.google.ie/images?um=1&hl=en&q=kde+desktop

Don't know why it's slow... might be hardware compatibility...



.

DeepBlue

I downloaded the install DVD, ran the installation option (which worked ) and got as far at the partitioning option.
The installer couldn't resize the windows partition and gave me this suggestion.

Delete Windows partition /dev/sda1/ (55.8GB). Resize impossible due to inconsistent fs. Try checking fs under windows.

Screenshot

A bit of googling suggested running chkdsk /f/r in windows would solve this.
After running chkdsk /f/r a couple of times and getting the all-clear the issue remained on re-running the openSUSE installer .

Some more googling suggested using QTParted from a Knoppix disk to resize the partitions prior to installing openSuse.
After downloading the Knoppix CD I ran that and while QTParted saw the partition it refused to resize it saying:

The software has detected that the disk has at least one bad sector.

Screenshot

Going into the Knoppix terminal and running fdisk had the following results:

fdisk /dev/hda
Unable to open /dev/hda

fdisk -l /dev/hda
Cannot open /dev/hda

Screenshot

It's a bit disappointing to be so near and yet so far .
From what I can see it appears that the harddrive has a bad sector that's causing the problem for linux but windows keeps saying everything's ok (according to chkdsk).

Attempting to install Fedora 9 also fails at the partitioning stage.

Are there any other options or alternatives to chkdsk that I could try?

I'd hate to have to format the harddrive and re-install XP again (already done twice over the weekend and that windows update process is such a pain and takes so effin' long :mad:).

ethernet

I pity you for the misfortune you're having. Try fdisking in Windows again, perhaps using the GUI this time. Had to boot into Windows to check this out -- it's been a while:

Open My Compooper
Right click your Windows partition
Change to Tools tab
Under Error Checking, click on Check Now. Tick box boxes to automatically fix FS errors and attempt to recover bad sectors.

Hopefully that will do the trick. If not, I suggest we pass around a hat and ask people to pay into the 'get DeepBlue a new hard drive' fund

Hobbes

I'd recommend installing into a VMWare image and playing with that for a while to see if you like it or not (what I plan to do in 50 minutes ).

VMWare Server is free now. mucho better then player.

DeepBlue

ethernet wrote: »

I pity you for the misfortune you're having.

Thanks, but it's not that bad. I reckon I'm learning loads more that if it had all been plain sailing .

ethernet wrote: »

Under Error Checking, click on Check Now. Tick box boxes to automatically fix FS errors and attempt to recover bad sectors.

Yep, done that about 4 or 5 times now. Windows is happy everything's ok but Linux is not. I guess what I really need is a Linux version of chkdsk.

ethernet wrote: »

Hopefully that will do the trick. If not, I suggest we pass around a hat and ask people to pay into the 'get DeepBlue a new hard drive' fund

It's grand. I've another PC to play with Linux on if this doesn't play ball and I reckon a re-format will probably get rid of that error. After all Ubuntu installed fine on Friday. The main danger is that I don't injure someone by throwing the PC out the window if it doesn't eventually work .

Hobbes wrote: »

I'd recommend installing into a VMWare image and playing with that for a while to see if you like it or not (what I plan to do in 50 minutes ).

VMWare Server is free now. mucho better then player.

Yep, learning how to get VM going is the second thing on my todo list - right after figuring out how to take an image of my PC. I'm determined this is the last time I have to re-install Windows the hard way.

ethernet

A "full" format (as opposed to 'quick') should fix it as a last resort. Regarding creating an image of your Windows install, Acronis True Image has gotten me out of a spot a few times. It's not free but there are free alternatives, such as PartImage but NTFS is still marked as experimental :eek: