Installed openSUSE 12.1 (64-bit) on both my home PC and my Thinkpad W520. The best part was I did not have to burn any installation DVDs and speed of installation was at Gigabit speed on my home local network.

Here is what I did in a nutshell:

1. Download openSUSE 12.1 64-bit ISO and verified integrity with md5sum
2. Configured my Thinkpad, running openSUSE 11.4, as the network installation server.
3. Boot up my home PC in PXE-boot mode and installed openSUSE 12.1 from my Thinkpad.
4. Once my PC is installed and running openSUSE 12.1, I configured it as the network installation server and boot up my Thinkpad in PXE-boot mode and installed openSUSE 12.1 onto it.

Simple and sweet!

For more details, please refer to my older posts:

1. Network Installation of openSUSE [Link]
2. Using Apache2 to deploy and maintain SUSE [Link]
3. Install and configure TFTP server for PXE boot environment [Link]
4. Install and configure DHCP Server [Link]
   

Happy to report the steps I documented in the posts above worked for openSUSE 12.1. There were some minor differences, mainly to do with Systemd and how it changes the console output a little. The previously observed SuSEFirewall bug for TFTP server is still present, so remember to add port 69 to UDP as previously documented.

openSUSE 12.1 was released earlier this week. Although I had to wait more than 24 hours before I got my hands on the the ISO binaries (4.4Gb of both 32-bit and 64-bit), it was well worth it. The lesson learnt was to use more than one download method concurrently in the event something fails. More importantly, its imperative to verify (ie md5sum) the downloaded binaries or risks having to abort an installation when the integrity of the packages are in question.

For this release of openSUSE, everything has been incredibly smooth from installation to productive use of my home system. In fact, I have just completed another installation on my Thinkpad W520. I am sure there are some who have encountered challenges (no software is perfect); however, at least for me, this has been the smoothest experience ever since the days of SLES 8!

To all involved with openSUSE 12.1, please accept my congratulations on a job well done!

One little quirk, minor annoyance
From a usage scenario, I have to report something that made me panic on the first-boot of openSUSE 12.1, to the extent that I voluntarily hit the physical reset button on my PC.

The cause, as it turns out, is the new Systemd that replaces the old System-V init. Whenever I boot up a newly installed Linux for the first time, I always hit the ESC key on boot to see the boot messages. This helps me identify any problems early and gives me an indication of how quickly and smoothly Linux boots up. When I did the same with openSUSE 12.1 on first-boot, I observed some initial messages but suddenly everything seems to just stop. I panicked after 20 seconds and hit the physical reset button (thinking I may have messed up).

Apparently, the new Systemd is not very "chatty". I only had to wait 40 seconds more and the entire system booted up and I am automatically logged into KDE4.

If anyone could share how one might re-enable the same level of "chattiness" when the system boots up, appreciate if you could use the comments section below.

Gnome 3.2

Post-installation, I used YaST - Software Management and installed both the "Gnome Base System" and the "Gnome Desktop Environment" patterns. Finally, I got to try out Gnome 3 for the first time ever.

I have been a Gnome 2.x user for quite a number of years until I switched over to KDE4 when it became the default in openSUSE 11.2. KDE4 is great but I do miss the simplicity of Gnome 2.x from time to time.

Happy to report I'm using Gnome 3.2 rather productively on my home PC. However, I am not fully convinced it would be my default environment just yet. Gnome 3.2 is major re-design and it's as different to Gnome 2.32 as KDE4 is to KDE3. Here are some of my thoughts at this time:

• I liked the idea of integrating my online identity (Google & Twitter only at this time) into my desktop; but, this means I have to use Evolution... not something I liked due to past experiences (3 years ago).
• I really liked the concept of workspace on demand. I can drag an app & move it to the next available workspace & a new empty one is created. I am ready to move on from the 4-sided (or n-sided) cube paradigm.
• The font size and window title-bars takes up too much screen estate. It seems to run contrary to my initial impression that Gnome Shell gives me lots of screen estate since there is only one bar at the top.
• A good buddy of mine explained that its design was geared towards mobile devices (ie tablets with touchscreens) and I start to appreciate it more; however, I think this approach seems a tad too early at best? Given how mobile devices are dominated by Apple, Android & others, I don't see any hardware vendor officially supporting (hard-bundling) Gnome as the de-facto GUI. Feels more like a spill over from Meego & netbook UI era (only 2-3 years ago).

I will be blogging more on my experiences with openSUSE 12.1 ... looking back at my blog posts, I realized it was 3 years ago that I started a similar series of posts on my experiences with openSUSE 11... how time flies...

Hello everyone!

I am very pleased to announce the new issue (201) of openSUSE Weekly News in Greek.
In this issue you will read about:

* The Green Planet
* Geekos go on G+
* openSUSE Medical Calling for Leadership
* Klaas Freitag: Kraft 0.45 released
* Nelson Marques: Unknown Horizons – 2011.3 RC4 @ games:unknown-horizons

As well as many interesting news about openSUSE and useful advice, which can make our lives easier.

Enough said though... Read more at: http://own.opensuse.gr, http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news or www.os-el.gr

We are always looking forward to receiving your comments as well as suggestions regarding things you would like to read about in our next issue.

The openSUSE Weekly News is being translated in the Greek language from issue #150. You can read older translated issues here: http://el.opensuse.org/Κατηγορία:Weekly_news_issues

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

Βρίσκομαι στην πολύ ευχάριστη θέση να ανακοινώσω το νέο τεύχος (201) Weekly News του openSUSE εκ μέρους της ελληνικής ομάδας που δούλεψε για τη μετάφρασή του.
Σε αυτό το τεύχος θα διαβάσετε:

* The Green Planet
* Geekos στο G+
* Το openSUSE Medical καλεί για νέο ηγέτη
* Klaas Freitag: Το Kraft 0.45 διατέθηκε
* Nelson Marques: Unknown Horizons – 2011.3 RC4 @ games:unknown-horizons

Και φυσικά πολλά άλλα ενδιαφέροντα νέα σχετικά με το openSUSE καθώς επίσης και χρήσιμους οδηγούς που θα κάνουν τη ζωή σας πιο εύκολη

Πολλά λέω… Καλύτερα διαβάστε το από πρώτο χέρι:
Βρείτε το στις ακόλουθες ιστοσελίδες http://own.opensuse.gr, http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news και http://www.os-el.gr

Περιμένουμε τα σχόλιά σας καθώς και τι θα θέλατε να δείτε με περισσότερες λεπτομέρειες στο επόμενο τεύχος.

Το openSUSE Weekly News μεταφράζεται στα ελληνικά από το τεύχος #150. Μπορείτε να διαβάσετε όλα τα παλιότερα τεύχη στα ελληνικά εδώ:  http://el.opensuse.org/Κατηγορία:Weekly_news_issues

Απολαύστε το!
Ευστάθιος Αγραπίδης (efagra)

Chcete si stáhnout LibreOffice? Doporučím vám tedy stránky LibreOffice v češtině, abyste se k instalátoru nemuseli dostávat přes anglické stránky :-)

LibreOffice 3.4 má uživatelské rozhraní kompletně přeložené do češtiny, nápovědu z 90%. 3.5, příští verze, je na tom trochu hůře - uživatelské rozhraní 97%, nápověda 89%. Pokud chcete tato čísla zlepšit, není nic jednoduššího - zaregistrujte se na LibreOffice Pootle serveru, pošlete mi své uživatelské jméno na kendy @ suse cz a já vám zařídím potřebná oprávnění.

LibreOffice 3.5 toho má hodně co nabídnout, byla by škoda nemít všechno přeloženo!

I guess it’s time for another Evergreen status update.

I cannot tell much about 11.2 (but as far as I can see Stefan does an awesome job in maintaining it) but will share my thoughts about the 11.1 flavour of Evergreen.

When I started that project it was clearly an experiment as I haven’t had an idea how much work it would be and if people would use it or even help with it. Looking back at what we’ve created it finally is more than I expected. Compared to what I announced in the beginning it was almost possible to maintain every part of the distribution and not only server packages. There are things which turned out be quite hard (e.g. kernel) but overall most issues were covered for 11.1. I think what I was able to prove is that it’s possible to somehow maintain a distribution  with very few manpower.

Now as 11.1 is nearing its 3rd birthday on December, 18th and given the fact that it’s getting harder having stuff updated while still being more or less compatible and stable I found that I cannot keep the pace with my limited spare time and without neglecting my other volunteer projects (remember Mozilla’s rapid release cycle?). For that reason I’m announcing that I’ll step back from being the Evergreen/11.1 project leader by end of this year. As of now noone else has stepped up so I need to announce that 11.1 will most likely be unmaintained as of end of this year. This does not affect 11.2 and I’ll also try to keep my packages updated for maintained Evergreen projects in the future. I’ll also stay involved and help out with organizational and administrative stuff where needed.

It’s still possible to step up taking over the 11.1 maintenance but in the end I think 3 years is already a good timeframe for a community distribution.

I hope that I find a bit of time in december to post a (statistical) summary about Evergreen/11.1 to let you know about some details.

Thanks for your support during the last year!

I wasted several hours on two (mis)features of the native Android development toolchain:

• The tool that creates .apk packages, the one that "ant debug" invokes, silently skips shared objects in the libs/armeabi-v7a folder that don't end with ".so". In my case, one of the very first libraries involved when starting to do unit tests of LibreOffice code on Android had a name like this, libuno_sal.so.3. I had to look in the Android source code to see the reason why it wasn't present in the .apk.
• When creating a .apk, it works fine to put a shared object with a name that doesn't start with "lib" into the libs/armeabi-v7a folder. But then when you install such an .apk on the emulator (or device), the installer silently skips such shared objects, and doesn't copy them to the app's lib folder. Again, I had to look in the source code to find the reason for this.

Sigh...

now with openSUSE 12.1 out maybe some of you would like to try something new… that will be probably in the future versions of KDE.

A lot of interesting packages can be found in KDE:Unstable:Playground

for me one of the most expected feature would be the new telepathy IM component for kde.

I have created a simple one click install for 12.1 if you are curious to try. Please test and contribute.

During the SUSE Hackweek Vladislav Lewin (member of the YaST team) has had the nice idea writing a WebYaST plugin which provides a console terminal witch which the user has the opportunity to login on a console on the target machine. He sould be able to start any console based application there ( of course even YaST :-))

So the benefit is to login on a target linux machine from a computer which

• has not to be a unix machine and
• is without any VPN configuration stuff.

Just a simple Web browser is needed to get a login via the Web on another linux machine:

Mainly the architecture is based on shellinabox which we have packaged together with the WebYaST Terminal Plugin. These RPMs are now available for download.

BTW: You will be surprised that the source code of the WebYaST Terminal Plugin has about 100 lines only !!!

How to get:

• All needed packages can be downloaded from OBS
• The source code can be found in Github