Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Suse 10.1 alpha3 Report

Filed under
Reviews
SUSE
-s

SUSE 10.1 alpha 3 was released this week and I thought I'd see if there was much new and exciting. As we look at the guis and applications, it appears as if most of the work must have taken place under the hood. When we examine the changelog, we find that's the case.

The installer was pretty much the same as encountered in SUSE 10.0 with the possible addition of MONO in the package selection. I perhaps suffered a few hardware detection/setup glitches, but they could almost be user error or related.

The first little glitch was due to my having added an extra tulip ethernet card to my machine a few weeks back for a specific reason, but I still use the on-board via-rhine fulltime. YAST wanted to use the add-in as primary. I preceded to set up the on-board as default, and then ended up deleting the extraneous card. It shouldn't have been an issue, and I'm not sure it was. However, during boot dhcpcd runs, but my eth0 wasn't functional upon login. I had to kill dhcpcd and re-run it. And then, it kept losing the connection. Sometimes it'd come back after trying to connect to the same site more than a coupla times, in gnome I used the net connection panel applet to reconnect, and I restarted dhcpcd a time or two. So, I think this issue wouldn't have cropped up if that other card had not been installed.

Then another ooops was with the video setup. I failed (read: forgot) to adjust for my preferences during install and booted into a 800x600 resolution desktop. This won't do and I fired up yast to adjust. I changed the settings to vesa 1280x1024x60 16-bit and saved. When I restarted (or attempted to) I got a "no screens found" error. Looking at the xorg.conf file, the syncs were badly underrated, but that's almost normal as my latest monitor is never detected correctly. "nv" was still showing as the driver but the showstopper was the 4 bit depth. Where did that come from? Anyway, manaully editing that file for my horizonal and vertical refresh rates and that bit depth got me back into X pretty fast. Now, one of the thing most people might like to do is adjust their video settings. This should work, but it didn't in my case. Good news, however, is I stuck with the "nv" driver as I noticed 10.1 alpha3 was using 6.9/7.0 rc2 of Xorg and that part worked out pretty good for my nvidia 6800 graphics chip.

KDE is at 3.5 rc1 in SUSE 10.1a3 and it was looking good. I covered most of it in my first look at the 10.1 series and my source install of 3.5r1 on my gentoo system. So, it's been pretty much covered. It was quite stable and performed admirably.

        

Gnome on the other hand was a buggy excruciating experience. The file manager worked, but that's about it. Just about everything else I tried to open or launch crashed. I'm not sure why suse has such a hard time getting gnome to play nice. It was quite buggy throughout the 10.0 developmental cycle, but did work well in the final. I suppose this is the recipe to expect this time as well.

        

We're still looking at that SUSE Lizard wallpaper. ho-hum, come on guys, give us a new wallpaper! Big Grin Actually, they did make the SUSE logo a bit more opaque.

About the only thing new I spied in YAST2 was the UML. "User Mode Linux installation allows you to start independent Linux virtual machines in the host system." As it only supported network sources at this time, testing didn't get too far here. But it looks promising.

    

Some package highlights include:

  • kernel-default-2.6.14.2-2
  • xorg-x11-6.9rc2-3
  • kdebase3-3.5.0-2
  • gnome-desktop-2.12.1-3
  • gcc-4.1.0_20051110-3
  • mozilla-1.7.12-6
  • MozillaFirefox-1.4.99-3
  • gaim-1.5.0-10
  • OpenOffice_org-1.99.3-2
  • qt3-3.3.5-17
  • gtk2-2.8.6-7
  • glibc-2.3.5-46
  • perl-5.8.7-6
  • python-2.4.2-3
  • mysql-shared-4.1.13-5
  • mono-core-1.1.10-3
  • cdrecord-2.01-9
  • gimp-2.2.9-7
  • evolution-2.4.1-7
  • beagle-0.1.2-5
  • alsa-1.0.10-4
  • Full RPMlist

        

Some recent changelog highlights are:

  • autofs: Bugfix: bad example ldif.
  • beagle: Fixed lib64 patch & Remove upstreamed patch.
  • gnome-session: Updated autostart patch to support per user's autostart directory and to remove duplicated entries.
  • icewm: updated to 1.2.23.
  • nautilus: Add patch to hide the zoom and "view as" controls from the location bar.
  • sax2: added domain information to BusID setup.
  • xorg-x11: updated to X.Org 6.9 RC2 & mouse driver fix from CVS.
  • jack: Fix use of atomic builtins.
  • kdelibs3: link with -O1
  • digikamimageplugins: fix filelist.
  • kernel: update to 2.6.14.2, prism54 : Fix frame length, ipvs: fix connection leak if expire_nodest_conn=1, Fix ptrace self-attach rule, & fix signal->live leak in copy_process()
  • mkinitrd: Fix mount --move to really have /dev on tmpfs.
  • powersave: added runtime powermanagement.
  • wine: Upgraded to 0.9.1 release & Lots of bug fixes.
  • gcc: Update to current SVN head & Check if we accidentially end up with make -j0 and fix it.
  • Full Changelog since about alpha1

If you look at the changelog and/or compare the rpmlist to the last one you can clearly see that the developers having been toiling away, probably in some dark dungeon somewhere with only food and water to sustain them while some ogre cracks a leather whip. Most changes are under the hood as always, so it's not so easy to show in screenshots.

This is an alpha release and in the thick of major version upgrades and new feature introductions. We understand and even expect issues. Next month brings alpha 4. In January we can expect the first beta and things will really start to get exciting. The release schedule will get bumped up to highway speeds and we can expect the first release candidate on or about Feb. 16, 2006. We hope to bring you updated reports as developments happen.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.