As the launch for 15.1 approaches (sometime next month), this Forum thread is intended to note what is new for the Benefit of all Users.
Starting off this Forum thread,
The openSUSE Install (I’m cukrrently looking at the DVD upgrading a 42.3) has major changes, so far mostly for the better. I’ve posted before about the changes I’ve seen in a 15.0 install after “Configure Online Repositories,” it downloads and installs the new installer used in 15.1.
Additionally, when you look in the YaST Software Software Management, there are now a number of new features and ways to view Patterns, package groups, packages by status (eg Orphaned, more).
Take some time an dexplore, it’ll be worthwhile.
Curiously, I did not see the Enlightenment Desktop in the Patterns view at first, but after I did a search for Enlightenment to verify it still existed, it suddenly showed up in the Patterns View.
There is now an “Other Desktops” RPM group which lists not just full Desktops but also all available Windows Managers. Does that mean that you can now easily install “just” a Windows Manager besides IceWM in the initial install? That’s something to explore for machines with very limited hardware resources or even containers. You’ll also find Cinnamon listed along with other Desktops here which almost uniquely isn’t installed using a pattern.
IIRC from Leap 15.0 a lot of patterns package were only added shortly before the freeze. That would explain why you see missing patterns packages.
I’ve just updated my Leap 15.1 VM and everything seems to play nicely. The installer IMHO has hugely improved. One can easily see in which stage of the install one is, the partitioner has lots of new options ( though I miss the old option to import the partitioning from an existing install **incl. mount-points. **Not a big problem for me, I label all my partitions to be able to recognize them, but I’ve always loved that feature.
No, it imports the partitioning, but not the mountpoints. Sure I’ve seen that ( some friends noticed as well ), also on TW, but I’ll download again and fire up the installer later this evening.
Skimming through the YaST “Users and Groups” section,
One thing I noticed now (Will have to see if it existed before) in “Authentication Settings” tab (I didn’t notice that before, too but that might be me)
There’s a nice feature to view any kind of Authentication settings which can at a glance reveal what is controlling your machine’s access… NIS, SSSD and a curious “SAMBA” setting which when activated looks for an AD server. That’s all well and good considering current state of SAMBA 4 as a near drop-in replacement AD DC, but could be a bit confusing to the User who doesn’t know about the close integration. I also wonder if this could pick up on a LDAP server, or if configured as an LDAP client whether a new entry for that would appear…
I also don’t remember this tool mentioned in the LEAP documentation for each of these authentication methods, I haven’t looked in the online LEAP “Security and Hardening” book for this… but will do so later tonight…
Skimming through the YaST “Security and Hardening” section,
One thing I noticed now (Will have to see if it existed before) in “Miscellaneous Settings” tab (I didn’t notice that before, too but that might be me)
“Help” suggests there is a missing configurations to add the current working directory to the root or user paths making behavior “MSWindows” rather than true “Unix”
Since at the moment it’s a missing configuration, it’s only buried in the “Help” but if it’s exposed then it becomes a possibly new and important thing to know regarding paths…
First, it’d possibly become more important to close unnecessary consoles so that paths won’t unwittingly extend to assumed secure folders,
And, I wonder then if the “./” would not become necessary to execute a binary in the current folder.
When upgrading from 42.3 which of course wausing firewalld (was using SuSEFW2), it looks like the firewall firewalld isn’t enabled by default(firewall-config launched immediately without additional installation as expected).
I can’remember specifically what the setting was when I upgraded, but until now the default has always been to enable(and start) the firewall.
Until I do another 42.3 upgrade, I won’t know if this is simplya “feature” where the setting was disabled in the Install Summary or a real bug where it should be enabled as expected and somehow the setting wasn’t enabled properly.
All looks good to me - with a clean install using kde. The only two issues I have had are:
konqueror - the default engine ‘webengine’ causes an error message on closing but ‘webkit’ works fine
fstab - the default yast setting for an old fat32 drive (with some data) is ‘read only’. This is easily resolved by changing the settings in fstab from:
I used it for my last install. But it is not as natural to use as in the old installer, and I did have to look two or three times to be sure that it got the mount points right.
The installer will still use standard mount points, right? And I should have no problem telling it to not format /home in the expert partitioner, correct?
In the Expert mode of the Partitioner, you’ll be able to import the existing partitioning. It used to import the mountpoints as well, and by default to only format / . Now you have to add the mountpoints and tell it to format / (easy, it’s in the same screen where you set the mountpoint. Like said, I’ve labeled my partitions - Tumbleweed, Leap, Home, etcera -, so it’s easy to check.
I don’t know what the default will be, but a recent YaST announcement described <not> creating a separate partition for /home, instead deploying /home as a subvolume for the purposes of formatting as a BTRFS volume… So yes that would mean that both / and /home would be deployed as BTRFS but as separate volumes, which is slightly different than how some of my small virtual machines have been running /home as s directory in a single BTRFS volume.
I haven’t tested a new install yet to verify what is default.
Just tested the 448.1 DVD: once in the “Expert partitioner” I just selected “Import mounpoints”, chose the correct fstab to import (there are 3 linuxes in the test laptop) and the installer offered to import the relevant partitions and format the system partition ( / root ) only.
Maybe not as intuitive as in previous releases, but equally effective once you know to go the “Expert” way. Later on the system offered the option to copy users from the system to be replaced too, as usual.
Didn’t try a “clean and default” install yet, so cannot comment on whether a separate /home is used or not now.
A bit puzzling the initial “Network autoconfig” and “Update installer” steps that do nothing useful if you are using WiFi, since WiFi network config is done later down the way and apparently no installer update is done thereafter.
The NET install fails installing as a VMware 15 Workstation Guest,
The install begins by saying it needs to download an image (?? - I don’t remember seeing that before)
It looks like indeed, something very large is being downloaded from download.opensuse.org,
Then fails with the following error
Installation system does not match your boot medium
Sorry, this will not work
The DVD Install now defaults to suggesting “Configuring Online Repositories” which is good for the tail end lifetime of the release, but likely less desirable for maybe the first 7 months… ie perhaps until Dec 2019.
As I suggested in an above post, I can verify that if the disk is large enough (IIRC 50GB? for each), openSUSE creates 3 partitions, but now they are for Boot, / and swap… and /home now becomes a subvolume and not a separate partition. I also find it interesting that swap is now enumerated as the third partition, and will later verify its likely position at the end of the disk instead of at the beginning. Note the items encircled in **red **in the screenshot below.
In this demo disk layout, the disk is 160GB. Note how sda2 is nearly the entire disk, and /home has no defined size. I wonder if the layout is for example 80GB whether / will still be BTRFS and /home is not or some other layout.
DVD configured for Online Repositories just failed also…
I suspect the OSS for installs is offline, I will try installing using the DVD as the install source (NOTE - Using the DVD now does not default to using the DVD, default is to “Configure Online Repositories”)
My DVD install is proceeding now, by declining to “Configure Online Repositories”
Noticed that install now defaults to configuring Network Manager instead of Wicked.
Also noticed that despite recent XFCE announcement it will be a major “Server Role,” it does not show up as such yet either in the DVD (expected) or when Online Repositories" is enabled (surprising).
Also the “Server Role” “Other” is now replaced with “Generic Desktop” which enables the basic X Windows system by default but does not hint that further steps are needed to install a Desktop (or WM if that is all that is desired). In fact, I don’t know if it’s a mistake but now this selection does not invoke the Software Manager the way this now works in the recent “improved” version of the 15.0 install when Online Repositories are enabled.
Is this an oversight and error or is this intentional? The User is still given an opportunity to invoke the Software Manager when the Install Summary is displayed.
In any case, my current install is going to test what happens when no Desktop is selected and only the minimal X system is.
Update. Looks like IceWM is the result when only the X window system is installed, a welcome sight since it’s been many, many years and many openSUSE versions since IceWM was a major Desktop option (and one of my favorites).