OpenSuse again (13.1/13.2)

[viking60]

As the observant reader may have noticed I have tested OpenSuse before and I keep falling on my nose with it.
So it has been a while...
Time to do it again so I downloaded the Netinstall and ran it. There I get good information of Gnome and KDE that are the obvious choices in the installer. I clearly do not want all that bloat so I went for the smaller print and chose Xfce4.

This is a sensible way of doing it though - the newbies will only get confused by all the other options - having just learned about the existence of KDE and Gnome.
So no complaints there.

OpenSuse does clearly aspire to an "working out of the box" distro. And even with the netinstall I simply went for the "Enter strategy" - I kept pressing enter until the download started!

I provided my name and password and let OpenSUse do the rest.
That worked just fine.

The Netinstall downloaded a lot of stuff needed to give newbies a good first experience - nothing wrong with that, you do not pick OpenSuse if you want a minimalistic distro.
(Or you could alter it to be slim and even fit on rescueCD's as we have done in Susestudio )

So the Netinstall takes its time but all goes well - and after a while it was time to reboot.

Opensuse is still the "Looker" it has always been. My "enter" setup made me log in automatically so I was ready to go.
The Font rendering in Firefox was crisp and clear and the Xfce4 panel was nicely placed at the bottom.

The menu was simple and just fine but I decided to also install the whisker menu that has more options and search function.

To my surprise the Whisker meny was in the repos so I could simply install it from the program manager

One nice thing about Yast is that the Groups on the left get narrowed down as you type your search - makes things clean.
OpenSuse has always been a nightmare to me because I have often felt that every program has its own repo, so this was a pleasant surprise.

Bubbling with optimism I went for Inxi ... and .. nothing. So time to do the mandatory Suse Googling again:
I found this site:
http://software.opensuse.org/download.h ... ckage=inxi
and here I could click the Suse icon and it provided me with a file that made Yast auto-install it and add the utilities repo. Lots of warnings and accepting of keys later; I had inxi installed.

This is what I do not like about Opensuse! If you get a lot of Windows like warnings then you will start ignoring them or check "alway accept".
The warnings do serve the purpose of keeping Suses back free, more than they do help me.

And I still am no fan of the Opensuse repo policy - it defies the Opensuse aspiration to be useful to newbies.

Here is the repo overview

To find out in what repo Inxi is you should be able to find it here:
http://software.opensuse.org/package/in ... _term=inxi
But I did not find anything for Opensuse 13.1 there. So Googling it is...

I decided to test Zypper the equivalent to Pacman, Yum, and Apt-Get

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sudo zypper dup

... and to my surprise there were lots and lots of updates - after a Netinstall!

Oh well; the good thing was that sudo was installed and working after my newbie "enter" install.

Opensuse does present a fully fledged and usable desktop right after install - that is Newbie friendly. The Xfce desktop I chose is beautiful and fully functional.
Libreoffice,Thunderbird and Gimp are there and so are some proprietary drivers to make the experience good. Flash was not installed but was easily found and installed with the program manager.

OpenSuse does have a control panel that will help you in controlling the system.


But.....
I think others have better control panels and I kind of find OpenSUSE..boring. This may well be because I never have taken the time to use it over a longer period of time.
Opensuse does have a great catch because it looks so good, but from there I still find that it does not quite "keep what it promises".

So once again I could not resist that great looking distro ... and once again... I am not all that thrilled.

Suse has some exiting things going on with IBM and MariaDB so it is a distro that cannot be ignored.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sus ... e-big-data

As such Novell/Suse are clearly a main competitor for RedHat.

If I should choose between Centos and OpenSuse It would be close but I prefer Centos simply because Yum understands me better than Zypper, but I guess Opensuse is better than Centos for a newbie.

[Snorkasaurus]

This is a sensible way of doing it though - the newbies will only get confused by all the other options - having just learned about the existence of KDE and Gnome.
So no complaints there.

Is the option for xfce buried, or is it pretty easy to select? I think it is not only a perfectly good DE, but also an excellent choice for users who are forced to give up XP and who do not want to shell out for a new computer that can run newer versions of Windows.

S.

[viking60]

No Xfce is "hidden" under more options together with lxde and many others. So it is only one extra click.
I do agree that Xfce is a very good option for people who have to give up XP. If you put the windows button as an icon on the menu and pick the right wallpaper they will feel at home.
....
I installed the lamp server - OpenSUSE has a meta package for it. That went just fine and you can set it up with the control panel. Phpmyadmin did not work out of the box so I replaced it with Adminer - that always works.

[viking60]

Ok The 13.2 RC beta was released directly after I had installed 13.1 and I am not about do download the entire enchilada again - so I decided to test how the upgrade works in OpenSUSE.

That does matter because who wants to make a new install every six months? Or every year in OpenSuses case?

So here we go:
I checked my repos with

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zypper lr

and removed the one that did not come with the OpenSUSE install - Utilities.

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sudo zypper rr utilities

Next it was time to make a backup of the 13.1 repos

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sudo cp -Rv /etc/zypp/repos.d /etc/zypp/repos.d.Old

(I know - only for chikens; true Berserks simply drop this )

Now we need to bring the new repo names in there:

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sudo sed -i 's/13\.1/13.2/g' /etc/zypp/repos.d/*

If you watch carefully you can see 13.1 and 13.2 in there, so this is what we need to enter to update from Opensuse 13.1 to 13.2
You can do this with lower versions of Suse but only from one version to the next - it will not work if you jump over a couple of versions

then it is time to refresh the repos

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sudo zypper ref

That went fine and my repos show that they are in the 13.2 version now.

Since I have a long tradition of falling on my nose with OpenSUSE the next command will surely fubar my install:

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sudo zypper dup

It will upgrade the entire enchilada based on what I have installed. On a simple Xfce install that is about 1800 packages.
So if I get an interruption on the internet line here or an power outage - then I am thoroughly fubared
I could download everything in advance before I install it with

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zypper dup --download "in-advance"

But that is for chickens and it probably takes more space than I care to use for it.

So those 1800 packages are upgrading now - installing no 308 - so there is still plenty of time to fall on the nose.....

While you are sitting on the edge of your chairs in absolute excitement boarding to shear fear. I will let it run and report back.
I will either report about OpenSUSE 13.2 RC or (traditionally) about a colossal fiasco...


.....

....


Uh..What happened?

It worked
The update went through and had some messages about files that needed to be restarted - so I simply rebooted and did another

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sudo zypper dup

This removed a load of packages and after that there were no more upgrades.
This is what OpenSuse 13.2 looks like

[Snorkasaurus]

The anticipation is killing me. :-)
S.

[viking60]

Yeah I edited above -
OpenSUSE came through - it worked. Being able to upgrade like that is important IMHO.

There are some minor issues:
The Plymouth splash screen does still say Opensuse 13.1 even if the layout is altered - but I have 13,2 and the Whisker menu is updated with more functionality (I have translated that one so that is one place where I easily can see it).

[Snorkasaurus]

Thanks man... I just might have a look at that one myself.


S.

[viking60]

It will be out in November.
Meanwhile my conversion is not 100% since I had EXT4 and OpenSUSE 13.2 comes with btrfs as default. So I have to use our tool cd and switch file-system...
Nothing wrong with 13.2 on EXT4 so far though.

[viking60]

I installed the Salt-minion in OpenSUSE today. It worked perfectly fine so I updated Opensuse from my Manjaro box (The Salt-master).

I have noticed that only the "Big" distros can be updated this way. Debian Centos Arch and OpenSUSE are all updated with one command from My Manjaro salt-master.

Manjaro cannot be updated remotely with the standard command

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sudo salt '*' pkg.upgrade

The "Originals" seem to take it - the forks don't.

[viking60]

Updated Opensuse today for the first time in a long time.

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sudo zypper dup

Lots and lots of updates but all went through and everything works. Looks like the OpenSuse quality has improved....

[viking60]

OpenSuse an I do not always get along.
Today I removed libreoffice to get some more space:

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zypper rm libreoffice

That worked fine and office was removed.

After that I wanted an upgrade:

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zypper dup

And that upgrades the system and re-installs LibreOffice

Why won't OpenSuse listen to me

I guess zypper dup does an upgrade to Suses official system where libreOffice is included.
A simple

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 zypper update

does respect my wishes

[dedanna1029]

hhmmm... I know this is dated, but I wonder.. I think I should check out OpenSuse again...
I'm wondering how updated their hardware is... if they might have the cure for the wifi issues...
It seems Leap was released three days ago:

New versions in the milestone release include Firefox 40, ThunderBird 38.2, digiKam photo management program 4.11 and the YaST stack of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1.

The latest stable Linux Kernel 4.1.6 is in Milestone 2 and git is updated to version 2.5.0. The kernel-firmware update is 20150715. Apache updates to 2.4.16 and btrfs to 4.1.2.

KDE Plasma has update 15.04.3, which include Long Term Support versions of Plasma Workspaces 4.11.21. GNOME 3.16 has a refresh and Libreoffice 4.3 based on SLE 12 is pending an upgrade to Libreoffice 5. Most versions in Milestone 2 are expected to be the versions in Leap 42.1 when it’s released Nov. 4 at at SUSECon in Amsterdam, which will no doubt be celebrated with openSUSE Beer during the release party.

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Enterprise class database PostgreSQL 9.3.8 and database management system MariaDB 10.0.20 are both in the milestone. Samba 4.1.12 and LVM2 1.02.97 round off the highlighted packages for Milestone 2.

Aligned with SLE 12 SP 1, Leap version 42.1 will provide the best of both worlds in terms of enterprise packages and stability topped with community innovations from openSUSE’s tested and integrated development architecture.

Leap shares source code from SP1 and a common core SLE. Future minor releases of Leap will align with future SUSE service packs while future major versions of Leap will align with future major versions of SLE.