A quick glance at opensuse 13.1 Milestone 1
Milestone 1 was released today (or late yesterday). For the full tentative timetable of planned 13.1 releases, see the roadmap. For the announcement, check here:
On looking at the announcement, there is not much that I regularly use among the list of new items. I see that “systemd”, “wpa_supplicant” and “xorg-x11-server” have all been updated, and I do use those. But I use them indirectly. I directly use KDE, but that is not listed as updated.
Notes on UEFI, Windows and linux
This isn’t really a tutorial, but I’ll categorize it that way.
UEFI firmware, as a replacement to the traditional BIOS, is relatively new on the scene. And people have been having problems finding ways to adapt to it. The biggest problems have been with running both Windows 8 and linux on the same UEFI box.
My own experience is with a Dell Inspiron 660. I have seen reports on the net of a variety of problems, some of which might depend on the BIOS/UEFI firmware version (that is, they might depend on the particular computer).
A quick overview
I’ll start with a quick overview of how UEFI works.
A quick review of openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e-12.3-1
I saw the announcement of opensuse 12.3 as packaged for education, and decided to take a look. I only intended to look for online information, so I clicked the download link and expected that to give me some information. It did. But it also started a download. So I allowed the download to continue. And a while later (I didn’t time it), I had the iso for the 32-bit version. I checked the md5sum for safety, and then copied the iso to a flash drive for testing.
The iso file itself is around 3.4 G in size. It is intended for either DVD or a USB. Since I prefer using a USB, I wrote the iso to a drive that I had available. I used “dd_rescue” for the copy.
Tumbleweed, kernels and UEFI
It turns out that if you are use a UEFI system with secure-boot enabled, then some of the recent Tumbleweed kernels cannot be booted. You would have to disable secure boot to use those kernels.
For more details, see my post at the opensuse forums blog:
The NVIDIA driver the hard way
I recently installed the Nvidia driver on one of my systems. Because it is running opensuse Tumbleweed, I had to install it the hard way.
It actually was not very hard at all. So I thought I would describe what I did.
The Wiki page
I started with the relevant opensuse Wiki page:
That pointed me in the right direction. So let’s go through the various steps. Read More…
Notes on KDE and Gnome
A few days ago, KDE was updated to version 4.10.2 on opensuse 12.3. And yesterday, Tumbleweed (which I have on one computer) updated Gnome to version 3.8. So here are a few notes on those desktop environments.
KDE 4.10.2
I’ll start with KDE. This is the desktop that I mainly use.
Not much has changed. With a few minor exceptions, everything seems to be as before (when I was running 4.10.00).
32-bit computing – the end of an era
We appear to be approaching the end of 32-bit computing. Much of the newer hardware uses 64-bit processors, with a 32-bit compatibility mode. However, support for 32-bit computing is on the wane.
I was reminded of this change this morning, when I updated my opensuse 12.3 systems. The update brought KDE to version 4.10.2. And on my one 32-bit system, I discovered that KDE activities have been crippled. The full activity capability is still there for 64-bit systems.
Plymouth begone
As mentioned in a recent post, I have uninstalled plymouth from some of my system. It is still there on my main desktop, but I’ll remove it there, too, before I next reboot.
What is plymouth
Plymouth is the software that provides the graphic splash screen during startup and shutdown. For opensuse 12.3, it slowly fades in the opensuse wallpaper background. It also handles the prompting for the encryption key for any encrypted partition. Plymouth is also activated during shutdown, where it presents a gradual fadeout of the opensuse background.
If you have a separate “/boot” partition …
Check the size of “/boot”. This is particularly for opensuse users.
I have a 100M “/boot” partition on some older computers, and I recently ran into problems. I had configured one such system for tumbleweed. And when tumbleweed wanted to install a new kernel, I ran out of space in “/boot”. For a fuller discussion, see the opensuse forum thread “My first tumbleweed mishap“.
This turned out to be due to the combination of two factors:
- opensuse 12.3 is now configured for multiple kernels;
- the size of the “initrd” file required for each kernel has grown a lot due to the use of plymouth.
I chose to uninstall plymouth. Other possibilities would be to repartition the disk or to disable the multiple kernel support.
The UEFI scene, and linux
Someone recently posted this link at opensuse forums:
It is a tale of woes and partial successes. If you google for “UEFI linux” (without the quotes), you will run into quite a few tales of woe.
My own experience is one of success. In all honesty, I did run into some of the same problems. I reported on those in an earlier post. Today, I want to describe what I have working.
