OpenSUSE 12.1 Released

MasterPatricko writes "The openSUSE project is proud to present the release of openSUSE 12.1! This release represents more than eight months of work by our international community and brings you the best Free Software has to offer. Improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, XFCE and LXDE; your ownCloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system on btrfs; and much, much more. Other notable changes include moving from sysvinit to systemd, improving the boot process, and being built on GCC 4.6.2 including link-time optimization. More packages than ever are available from the openSUSE instance of the Open Build Service, and soon you'll be able to create customized respins on SUSE Studio."

I may give this a go...

[IANAAC]

I've been on Ubuntu for some time now, but with 11.04 and 11.10, it's not been as stable as I'd like.

Plus, the last time I used JAD 1.0 (based on Suse) it was rock solid. Anybody know the specifics of what's installed besides desktop environs? That seems to be all they've listed at their site.

Re:choices are good

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you are a zealot and are no longer a reasonable person.

Have your pet spayed or neutered

[TommyGunnRX]

Is it me or has Gnome 3x neutered the desktop? When I first used Gnome 3 with F15 I really liked the clean and cutting edge look. But 15 minutes later I choked on the fact that Gnome 3 had me bent over and handcuffed... doing things the way they wanted.

I looked at the screenshot and couldn't really tell if I was looking at Fedora or openSUSE, save the open browser content.

I LOVE what Linux Mint has done. They've incorporated the best of Gnome 3 and greatly improve the experience.

Oh, and YEAH for openSUSE, high-five!

It works nicely!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using it on x86 and x86-64 systems for a month or so and it is working quite well.

The announcement above neglected to mention that its running the 3.1.0 kernel and that plus the new compiler/libraries will make life interesting for those of us that live and work in the IT world. Other updates like systemd will also have interesting consequences. Most apps seem fairly happy living and playing on 12.1 however those using CommVault may expect some real pain.

For those that use RHEL and SLES/SLED in their enterprise this is a good introduction of things to come. For some of us that will be sooner rather than later. SLES/SLED 11 SP2, slated to show up in the first quarter of 2012, will be running the 3.0.7 kernel so playing with 12.1 now will give you a taste of things to come.

Re:choices are good

[Grishnakh]

Once a company is tainted by working with the likes of Microsoft or say Oracle, that's it.

Oracle isn't even in the same ballpark as MS. MS has actively been trying to harm Linux and OSS with its patent extortion and racketeering, and only now has someone (Barnes & Noble) finally stood up to them and release the info on the patents in question (which of course have turned out to be totally bogus with tons of prior art not to mention total lack of non-obviousness). MS has been actively hostile to Linux and OSS ever since these became popular, and is only getting worse. What has Oracle done to OSS? Nothing I can think of. They even bought Sun and kept OpenOffice.org as an OSS product; of course, they handled it in a totally incompetent manner causing a fork, and are now throwing in the towel, but this doesn't come close to being a malicious action like those of MS. Oracle hasn't been much of a friend to OSS, but they haven't been much of an enemy of it either. They even have their own Linux distro that they try to push with their proprietary database software. They also bought MySQL and haven't killed that or taken it proprietary either. Honestly, I don't know what's with all the Oracle hatred. They have a few OSS products that they semi-competently (or incompetently for OO.o) handle, they haven't been suing Linux users over bogus patents, what's the problem?

Re:Have your pet spayed or neutered

[Grishnakh]

I looked at the screenshot and couldn't really tell if I was looking at Fedora or openSUSE, save the open browser content.

This is by design. The Gnome developers want all Gnome installations to look exactly the same. Jon McCan't even said in an interview that he doesn't want you using any themes or customizing your Gnome desktop in any way, because this diminishes Gnome's look, and other people watching you at your computer won't be able to tell it's Gnome. Basically, the Gnome devs are trying to copy Apple and their totally non-customizable UIs, thinking that if it works for Apple, then it'll work for them too.

Re:Woot!

[nzac]

I assume you have never actually used openSUSE.

Its a European distro so is never on the American "list" of distos that are recommend to try. Novel going with microsoft never helped though that's the excuse to troll it now rather than having any current justification that MS has effected openSUSE.

KDE 3 back as DE choice

[SharkByte]

Given the general negative reception of GNOME 3 (and Unity and to a lesser extend still also KDE 4), it surprises me that I haven't seen it much mentioned on the net that KDE 3 is back as a DE choice. Now if only the MATE (GNOME 2 continuation) was also included...

Nope, I tried SuSE

[HalAtWork]

That's silly. When Novell bought SuSE, they gave away kits at nearly every consumer electronics show, including those in america, that's how I got mine. They also offered to mail them out free if you couldn't find one in your local area. That was for SuSE 9. I've still got mine. Prior to that, a friend had been paying for SuSE since 7 (I'm not sure what the deal was, apparently it was hard to obtain free because of YaST, or update services, or something?). At the time though, I was getting into Fedora and had a much easier time with it. I didn't want to use SuSE because you did everything through their proprietary configuration interface (YaST), and I wanted to learn a more "standard" way of doing things that would apply to all distros. Since I was just testing the waters at that point, I didn't want to have to learn something I couldn't use elsewhere. Not only that, but many how-tos would refer to editing .conf files, and YaST would throw up errors and try to replace my manually configured file every time I wanted to do something like this. It also seemed much easier to find .rpms for RedHat, or .debs for Debian.

Ultimately I ended up using Ubuntu, because at one point there was a controversy over Fedora with regards to versions not being supported very long or at all, or being bleeding-edge-only, and I wanted something a little more stable. I also got bogged down in RPM hell because I did want to try certain packages that were not officially supported, and repositories that packaged them didn't have common dependencies, and although I tried compiling the software myself, there were compile issues I had trouble resolving for certain software.

Now I'm trying out Debian, to gain experience and progress in my knowledge of the GNU/Linux platform on something that's not too far off from what I'm using now.

Re:I may give this a go...

[recrudescence]

I find this comment interesting. Rosegarden was the first time I compiled something from source in years and thought "This is how compiling from source should be like!"
In particular, it was the first program that offered me a concise but inclusive list of all the commands that I would need on my system, and the packages that provide them, before going on to compile at all. No crappy 'configure, oops you're missing this, retry' business. If only this requirement had been made a gnu standard ages ago!

Re:Nope, I tried SuSE

[wintercolby]

Actually, all decent Linux distros come with some form of proprietary configuration tool. One can configure SuSE and OpenSuSE about as easily as RedHat, in fact most of the configuration files and log files are identical between the two. The big difference there is that SuSE has an excellent configuration tool where one can go to do all of their GUI administration. It's really well done, and makes RH tools remind me of Windows for Workgroups. Any good admin can configure their system quickly from the command line, I make many of my modifications with sed, awk or vi. You don't have to use the very well made config tool if you don't want to.

Microsoft Zealot Here...

[fiddley]

Right, MS Zealot here, love their stuff and earn a living from it, but always want to keep my options open, just in case (as well as increasing my nerd rating, of course!). After flirting with linux multiple times since slackware '96, last weekend I've given it yet another go and I'm posting right now from the previous version of SUSE. It's the first distro I've ever installed and EVERYTHING seems to work. I've tried Linux about 20 times, but had given up after a few hours of mucking around because my mouse, or my graphics card, or my sound or my network or SOMETHING wouldn't work. Finally I've found one where everything works! I've been on it a week, and apart from not knowing how to do anything, the only problem is my fans sound like they're about to take off.

So, I'm struggling with the basics, but learning a little every day. Does anyone know a decent Windows-Linux Conversion guide which explains the parallels between the two - such as how to install drivers, where the hell is 'Program Files', what do I do if I want to install software but it's not an rpm or whatever it is suse uses. (Damn, I miss MSIs & EXEs!)

Also, is there any mail client I can use to connect to my exchange server for work email? (using MAPI \ RPC over HTTPS)

This is quite a lot of fun, and I've noticed that it seems to render flash video nicer than windows, BBC iPlayer HD is a bit stuttery on windows, but is smooth as silk over here.

Any hints and tips gratefully received!

Re:choices are good

[shutdown -p now]

The reason why Windows fonts look ugly on FreeTypeis because they have embedded hints that are hand-tuned to look pixel-perfect on Windows font rasterizer (with or without ClearType). Unless your font renderer works exactly the same as ClearType, you won't have them looking as good.

I Started Using Tumbleweed A Week Ago...

[shuttah]

...(for desktop use) and am using OpenSUSE not out of preference, but just to get myself familiar with other systems. Alsa worked flawlessly (as opposed to Alsa having minor issues in my previous distro, Debian Testing/Wheezy). I haven't gotten the hang of YaST for package management just yet, but zypper... the command line front-end to YaST, is very powerful. You add a switch and a URL to the zypper command to add repositories, and there are a multitude of command shortcuts available for software installation. I've been using zypper a lot since installation, and as a Debian user for three years i can say it's certainly giving APT a run for it's money. The software available for OpenSUSE is great, but the whole PORTAL documentation way of organizing it has been a little difficult to get used to at times. Again, i've just been using this for a week so that may not be the most educated judgement. Anyway, default repositories are - SUSE Updates, debug, source, OSS Software, and non-OSS Software (OSS = Open Source Software). Additionally, the Packman repository for OpenSUSE makes available pre-built RPM's for another large assortment of software. They currently don't have a US mirror, but being in New York and using the UK mirror... the speeds are fine. What's interesting to me is OpenSUSE is using systemd (by Lennart Poettering who also did Pulseaudio and avahi). Anyway, have a lot of fun. Hope i don't sound like too much of a salesman here.