Opensuse 12.3 is now available
Check the download site for the newly released 12.3. I’ll make this review short, so that you can get on with downloading and installing.
The final release of 12.3 is looking pretty good. It uses KDE 4.10 (for the KDE users), and Gnome 3.6 (for the Gnome users). See my earlier reviews from the beta stage, if you want something more detailed:
- Reviewing openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 2
- A first look at opensuse 12.3 Beta1
- Opensuse 12.3 RC1 is looking good
- opensuse 12.3 RC2 – first looks
- Installing opensuse 12.3 in UEFI mode
Here I’ll mostly comment on a few issues that have been troublesome in the past, or might be troublesome now.
Network
Most of the network problems seen in RC2 have been resolved. The one problem that I noticed, is that after the final install stages following reboot, there is no network. A simple reboot fixes this. Or, at the command line:
# systemctl start network.service
will get the network going again.
On a desktop install, the system came up set for “ifup” network configuration. On a laptop install, it came up set for using “NetworkManager”. Using Yast to switch from “ifup” to “NetworkManager” seems to work flawlessly. Switching the other way, from “NetworkManager” to “ifup” gave me a message about needing to install “smpppd”. I ignored the message, and it worked just fine.
UEFI install
I did not try with a DVD. I wrote the DVD iso file to a USB, using “dd_rescue”, and then used that USB for install. I first enable secure boot in my computer, mostly because I wanted to test that. I then booted from the USB. The USB booted in secure-boot mode without any problem.
There was one issue that concerned me during the install. The installer wanted to format the EFI partition. If Windows is booting from the EFI partition, that would be a very bad idea. So be sure to check that setting in the partitioner part of install, if you are doing a UEFI install. You should be able to tell it to not reformat the EFI partition (the partition mounted at “/boot/efi”). Of course, if this is an install on a new disk where the EFI partition is not yet formatted, then you will need it to format.
In the boot section of the installer, I checked the box for secure boot. After completing the install, opensuse 12.3 was able to boot in secure mode.
Unfortunately, when I selected Windows from the grub menu, that gave an error message. I suspect that is a peculiarity of my setup (a second physical hard drive for opensuse), so probably won’t affect others. And turning off secure boot (which I don’t really need) also solves this problem.
APCUPSD
On one of boxes, I am using APCUPSD to monitor an APC uninterruptible power supply. I had to add a symbolic link for this to work:
# cd /sbin # ln -s ../usr/sbin/apcupsd .
After configuring (in “/etc/apcupsd”), I started the daemon with:
# systemctl start apcupsd.service # systemctl enable apcupsd.service
and it has been running fine since then.
Summary
Thus far, I am quite happy with opensuse 12.3. On one box, I used “zypper dup” to update from 12.3 RC2. That allowed me to start using it a fews days ago, before the official release. On other boxes, I have installed from the DVD.
