openSUSE 11.2-- Incremental Updates, Plenty of Polish
By: Paul Ferrill
Friday, November 20, 2009 03:27:13 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6907/1/
New and Improved
Choosing a Linux distribution from the list of available options could be a daunting task for someone looking to try out Linux for the first time. Ubuntu seems to get the lion's share of the press coverage with new releases twice a year (hence the version numbers like 9.04 and 9.10 released in April and October, respectively). SUSE Linux has a long heritage in the Linux community and a heavy following in the European market due to its German roots.
figure 1
With the purchase of SUSE by Novell many feared that the brand would be subsumed into the corporate borg and contaminated with proprietary add-ons. Novell did take the core of SUSE Linux and use it as the basis for their SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and Server (SLES) offerings. These two products obviously targeted at desktop and server environments form the basis of Novell's supported operating system offerings. In fact, both are sold on a yearly subscription basis to include support and updates.
On the flip side, Novell recognized the need to continue a completely open source and free SUSE distribution. Out of that recognition came openSUSE Linux. Novell contributes heavily to the distribution and gets the benefits of continued community support and development of the core operating system and applications. They also take advantage of a much wider user base to test new releases and to provide feedback for future improvements.
What's New and Improved
One of the biggest items on the new list has to be switching to Ext4 as the primary file system. If you install openSUSE 11.2 on an unformatted partition, it will be set to Ext4. Support continues for Ext3 but the default now is Ext4. In a nutshell Ext4 is the next generation of the traditional Linux Ext file system. It provides a number of features and improvements over Ext3 to deal with large files, disks and all that goes with it. Check out the Ext4 wiki site at kernel.org for everything you ever wanted to know about Ext4 and its predecessors.
openSUSE 11.2 implements a dedicated partition for the /home directory tree. This has a number of advantages, not the least of which is the immunity from upgrades wiping out all your personal data. It also makes it easier to do backups or to encrypt only those files should you so choose. Another new item for this release is the use of different kernels for desktop and server versions. While this might not seem like a big deal, it should produce some noticeable improvements for graphic intensive applications.
On the improved side you'll find the latest and greatest of both the OS and popular applications. openSUSE 11.2 is based on version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel while GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3 are the two primary desktop environment options. For KDE users there are some new things like Firefox and OpenOffice integration to streamline your productivity. GNOME faithful get a new desktop theme, updates to applications like Gwibber and an improved software update tool.
CD, DVD, LiveCD, LiveUSB
The openSUSE download page provides a super clean way to pick your distribution and download it efficiently. Direct downloads over HTTP are support, but you can also choose to use a Bittorrent client should you choose. Both 32- and 64-bit offerings support the latest and greatest hardware along with the majority of legacy machines. Chances are you can pick the 64-bit option if you have an Intel or AMD based computer built within the last year or so.
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Downloading the full distribution will queue up a 4.7 GB transfer, so be sure you have enough free space on your hard drive. There are also two versions of openSUSE 11.2 available as a "Live-CD" so you can try it out before actually installing it to a hard drive. One version will present you with a GNOME desktop environment while the other uses KDE. Don't expect too much in the way of performance as you'll see a definite lag each time you start up a new application while it loads from the CD.
This release supports Hybrid ISOs allowing you to boot from a USB key to test drive or install the OS. This makes installation on a Netbook or small form factor laptop without a CD-ROM drive much easier. Applications load much quicker from a USB disk so it gives you a much better feel for how the OS will really work. You will have to enter a single command line instruction to create the USB key from an ISO file, but it shouldn't be a problem even for novice users. The command line is:
sudo dd if=<IS O FILENAME> of=<DEVICENAME> bs=4M
The only trick here is determining the device name of your USB key. We tested this out on a Dell XPS 1330 laptop by booting from the GNOME Live CD and then creating a bootable USB. On a side note, openSUSE 11.2 recognized the built-in Sprint Wifi card on this Dell laptop and connected the first time over EVDO. To find out the physical device name of the USB disk you can use the fdisk command as shown in Figure 3. In our case this turned out to be /dev/sdb.
figure 3
Next, you must provide the path to the ISO file. For us this file was on a Windows NTFS partition (/dev/sda3). openSUSE 11.2 had no problems accessing this partition and allowing us to create the bootable USB disk from a root prompt with this command:
# dd if=/media/OS/Users/Paul/Downloads/openSUSE-11.2-GNOME-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
Bottom Line
openSUSE 11.2 is a solid incremental update to a popular distribution. It has enough new and improved stuff in it to make it a definite upgrade for current users. For the curious it's definitely worth a hard look. On the flip, side this version is not without warts. Issues like proprietary wireless drivers (Broadcom) and some annoyances with Intel 845 graphics will cause newbies to cringe. If you cruise the openSUSE forums, you'll find workarounds for the most common issues. So go ahead and give it a spin. It might be just what you're looking for.