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Operating Systems SuSE Upgrades Linux

OpenSUSE 12.2 Is Out 96

First time accepted submitter jospoortvliet writes with news of a new openSUSE release. From the release announcement: "Two months of extra stabilization work have resulted into a stellar release, chock-full of goodies, yet stable as you all like it. The latest release of the world's most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in newly matured technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools. KDE has improved its stability, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder. Download openSUSE 12.2 from any of our mirrors."
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OpenSUSE 12.2 Is Out

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  • by MetalliQaZ ( 539913 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @12:53PM (#41237143)

    Also, has the Yast GUI been fixed to make some kind of sense?

    • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      TFS says it runs different desktops; take your pick. The last time I tried Suse was ten years ago. I would have liked it if half of my hardware would have worked (especially the video card). I think I'll give it another try, I have to downgrade kubuntu anyway since the latest upgrade broke Flash, and Amarok now freezes the PC if I leave it running for more than a few days. If Suse gives me trouble I'll just reinstall the earlier kubuntu (I shouldn't have upgraded, it was working fine).

      Yeah, I know, I need m

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, KNetworkManager has connected to wireless networks without root privileges since forever.

      GUI - "some kind of sense" is subjective and vague. Here's a current screenshot from YaST 2.21.24 in openSUSE 12.1: http://i.imgur.com/06QLC.png [imgur.com] Point out what you don't like or what you think needs to be improved.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by denvergeek ( 1184943 )
        I don't speak German you insensitive clod!
        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I don't speak German you insensitive clod!

          You could also read in silence.

    • I haven't had to use a root password to change WiFi networks in... ever?

      The latest software updates on my 12.1 (finally) removed the need to provide root password for VPN access.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @02:42PM (#41238399)

      I think you misunderstand what Yast is these days. It's for the quickening of the tasks you might want to do as a sysadmin. Need to enable X forwarding for SSH? You can dig up the location of the config file, find the appropriate line, and type in the appropriate word to enable it (yes, enable, y, or on?) or you can go to Yast, hit SSH, check X forwarding and be done with it.
      Need to run VNC like an X session? Yast can do it in about 3 seconds. The GUI makes more sense than googling around, editing a config file, cutting/pasting something you found on a forum, and crossing your fingers.
      TV card not automatically detected? Easy with yast, no sudo modprobing blues.

      But that's not the reason to use openSUSE. The reason to use openSUSE is you can go to http://www.susestudio.com and spin your own distro in about 10 minutes running every piece of software you want and no software you don't.

    • Also, has the Yast GUI been fixed to make some kind of sense?

      It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.

      YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows

      • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        I also like that YAST is consistent with GUI or console. I haven't tried the webyast tet.
        • I also like that YAST is consistent with GUI or console. I haven't tried the webyast tet.

          Good points! You reminded me of the console YaST. I use that often to do some admin on a server through ssh, without starting the GUI. It's a brilliant tool.

          I didn't know about webyast. Thanks for the tip.

  • FOOD FIGHT!

    • But they fixed GNOME3, it's working fine now
      • by f16c ( 13581 )

        I thought Gnome was permanently broken... Which is why we use KDE or LXDE at my house. Which Gnome anyway? Didn't Ubuntu kill the current one off?

        I have three GUI setups on this system: KDE, LXDE and Enlightenment. The wife and kids use KDE. I use LXDE and Enlightenment.

  • Snapper looks like a nifty tool, but does using it still open up the user to constant ENOSPC denial of services? Still have to constantly rebalance your BTRFS when using RAID?
  • by garglblaster ( 459708 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @01:06PM (#41237307) Journal
    haven't tried 12.2 yet and guess I won't:

    DID try 12.1 quite a lot and was terribly disappointed.

    Reformated harddrive and reinstalled 11.4 - and HAPPY!

    WHY?

    11.4 has GNOME 2 - Now THAT's a GREAT UI.

    (At least when seeing the alternatives)

    • by icebike ( 68054 ) *

      Yes the 11.2 and 11.4 were very good releases. But that is pretty normal for OpenSuse. Really good releases interspersed with an occasional not so good developmental release.

      I suspect 12.2 will be pretty good based on all the fixes applied and lessons learned from the early 12.x versions.

    • DID try 12.1 quite a lot and was terribly disappointed.

      Reformated harddrive and reinstalled 11.4 - and HAPPY!

      WHY?

      11.4 has GNOME 2 - Now THAT's a GREAT UI.

      If you hate Gnome 3, it is better to switch to XFCE, or LXDE, or KDE than to cling to an obsolete OS.

      • by ssam ( 2723487 )

        > If you hate Gnome 3, it is better to switch to XFCE, or LXDE, or KDE than to cling to an obsolete OS.

        i respectfully disagree, GNOME2 (or MATE) has a lot of features that are missing in XFCE and LXDE. Its also had millions of man hours more testing, and so is very stable and works deep into corner cases. In a few years time XFCE or LXDE may catch up with GNOME2 in terms of features (if thats what they want to do (i am not sure it is)), or GNOME3 might be customisable to please the grumpy old men^{tm}. U

  • Anecdotal works-well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Beleglin ( 88115 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @01:14PM (#41237405)

    It seems that it was worth it to delay the release with few weeks. This 12.2 release works really well on brand new Ultrabook (in this case Samsung Series 5). Recent hardware including Intel HD 4000, and new chipset - I guess it is thanks to Intel's open source drivers (and of course hard work of packagers) that experience is this good.

    Maybe Year of Desktop Linux is near?

    • by f16c ( 13581 )

      That's good to hear. I've skipped every other release and only done the upgrade after the system was getting real crusty. I have a nice backup setup now and upgrading every other year or so seems pretty reasonable as long as the system still makes sense. I've stuck with Suse since 1998 or so. Back then it was the distribution that was the most complete out of the box.

      I'll wait for the core to stabilize for a few months and then do the update during the winter break. Setting up openSuse 12.1only took a few h

  • Geico (Score:5, Funny)

    by puddingebola ( 2036796 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @01:38PM (#41237665) Journal
    Why does Geico have a Linux distro?
  • by TheNinjaroach ( 878876 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @01:46PM (#41237757)
    OpenSUSE is my favorite distro by quite a bit. I look forward to using 12.2 the next time I install Linux.
  • by shadowrat ( 1069614 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @02:11PM (#41238043)
    I've been using ubuntu because their silly alphabet animal names were entertaining. I don't know why i never really thought about opensuse before though. Their little chameleon logo is CUTE AS A BUTTON! I'm a convert!
  • by GrumpyOldMan ( 140072 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @02:39PM (#41238353)

    Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but all of this fancy new crap that obfuscates the boot process really ticks me off. If a machine has trouble booting, the last thing I want is some fancy gui with a pretty stop-watch ticking endlessly at me, rather than seeing "NFS server foo not responding" in black and white. So now rather than having just the actual problem to fix, I've got to use a second machine to figure out how to shut off the god damned gui (or how to get into the grub menu) before I can even get a hint what the actual problem might be.

    Now get off my lawn.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Press esc.
      Now get out of the way of progress

    • Or you could hit the escape key.
    • by syntap ( 242090 )

      Agreed, I preferred it when my hosed system just froze on bootup, stopping at "L I ".

    • by jonadab ( 583620 )
      I can understand the objection to Plymouth. (Animations on the boot-up screen? Seriously? Are we making a distro for nine-year-old girls now, or what?) Hopefully that's optional.

      Grub2, however, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It's been in the distro I use (Debian stable) for seven months now, and I've got it on my main workstations at home and at work, two desktops I maintain that are used by other people (*numerous* other people), six special-purpose kiosks (used by the general public), a web serve
    • I tend to agree and disable plymouth on my systems. I also use Dracut (from factory, to test it) which makes that easy and makes booting even faster :D
    • Both are optional. Grub1 is still available. In fact Grub is not touched at all when upgrading.

  • by stan_qaz ( 2482542 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @02:47PM (#41238461)
    Check the bug tracker here: https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?&query_format=advanced&order=Importance&field0-0-0=op_sys&type0-0-0=substring&value0-0-0=openSUSE&resolution=---&product=openSUSE%2012.2&classification=openSUSE [novell.com] - Lots of critical and major bugs left that can leave you with an unusable system until you figure out the poblem and find the work-around for it.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I installed the Release Candidate for 12.2 about 3 weeks ago on a new machine. Been really smooth so far. KDE with sandybridge graphics is a really good, glitch free desktop. One amusing issue its the notification applet producing a popup to announce that konsole has rung the bell.

      Last Friday I got caught out though. I had created an LVM snapshot of the root file system and it seems the dm_snapshot module has been omitted from initramfs. The kernel won't mount a volume from which a snapshot is derived

  • I read "revized filesystem heirarchy" and recoiled, this is code word for "Lets change all of the layout to confuse everyone for no good reason becasue we are trying to be cute, using directory names like /OpenSuse System/My Wonderful Applications/Mozilla Firefox/Mozilla Firefox.exe, and /All of My Application Configuration Files/Mozilla Firefox, and all sorts of long names, that are a pain to type, and as well, perhaps confusing things and making things hard to find by failing to keep things well categoriz

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I believe this means they're implementing the draft version of FHS 3.0, which hadn't been changed since 2004.

      http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb/fhs-30-draft-1

  • I Guess I'll Have To (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and perform this gut wrenching upgrade. I'm presently running 11.3 and they've dropped support for a while now. I just hate the upgrade process.

    1. Oh, you should really install from scratch. We wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your upgrade.(and it will)
    2. Everything you spent days getting to work last time will be broken again. Audio, video, fonts, Plymouth(what the fuck for?)...
    3. You'll love the way that KDE and Gnome have changed absolutely everything so the de

    • by fnj ( 64210 )

      Gee. Isn't life tough. As I remember from eons ago, Windows is AT LEAST as wrenching. If you're REALLY serious about stability, reliability and freedom from bloat a la systemd, udev, plymouth, la de da, and are willing to invest time up front in return for that continuing stability, allow me to suggest trying out FreeBSD [freebsd.org] or its desktop friendly derivative, PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. This would require some real dedication to learn the idiosyncracies. Just to clear one thing up, FreeBSD isn't rocket science to install a DE on.

      • with good old GNOME 2.32 to at least 2017

        2020 according to this:
        http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-fe8a0be91ee3e7dea812e8694491e1dde5b75e6d [centos.org]

        • by fnj ( 64210 )

          Upstream (the hat that is red) drops software enhancements and some of the new hardware enablement in the middle of year 6, drops minor releases and all new hardware enablement in the middle of year 7, and drops essentially (but not QUITE) everything at the beginning of year 10 - notable security fixes and bug fixes. It is unlikely in the extreme that any downstream guy is going to step up to fill in the voids. They never have so far with RHEL 6.

          So it depends on what you are relying on. I chose the middle-

  • This is one distro I've not followed. What's the difference b/w SUSE & OpenSUSE?
    • This is one distro I've not followed. What's the difference b/w SUSE & OpenSUSE?

      The same as Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) and Fedora.

  • It took a long time to finish the version...

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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