Is RC1 good enough to install as my primary system? I don’t know if I should just wait for the general release and miss the opportunity of filing any bugs that could get fixed before the final release or just wait?
I’m currently running 11.1 on my Thinkpad and would like to give 11.2 RC1 a go.
I’ve installed 11.2RC1 in aVM but I can’t check if things like the Fn keys now work properly, the behaviour of S2ram and S2disk or the hard disk protection system. All things that should have improved with the new kernel.
I installed rc1 last weekend on my main laptop (after testing it on a spare hard disk!).
The only “bugs” I see so far are - 1. Keyboard selection not saved (I had to manually switch to German layout after install, VT still uses US!), 2. Could not get tork to run (I beleive because of the KDE3 requirements).
On the + side, I can now read SD cards properly, my logitech mouse sidescroll wheel is recognised and working by default, and I get no silly error messages when mounting a volume (internal or external!) through Dolphin, it boots faster, firefox loads/shutsdown faster, and the default kernel gives me a working suspend-to-ram on my HP laptop.
All in all, I’m very happy with it, even to the point of being a little bored because it’s running so well! :).
I upgraded on Sunday following release, from M8 which had been ok. No issues with the zypper upgrade. RC1 (i586) feels even better. The desktop kernel performs well, although KDE4 is not quite as snappy as KDE3 on my current modest hardware. Internet streaming video is still not quite good enough, but improved over earlier milestones although M1 was the smoothest playback overall. Internet, sound and Local video/DVD is very good. I haven’t found any problems or tested every application, but enough to know I could live with RC1 and I haven’t fealt that about any 11.2 milestone. Happy with progress to date.
Having said that, if you want to know about those kernel improvements you had better go for it now.
Thanks for the comments. They seem positive and so are the other comments I’ve read in other threads about RC1. If I were to upgrade to 11.2 RC1 from 11.1, am I right in thinking I’d be better off installing from scratch? If so what happens to all the apps and settings I have 11.1? I know I can preserve my home directory but some apps installed into other directories.
Also once RC1 is installed would I still need to reinstall RC2 and then again for the final release or would I be able to upgrade reliably by just adding the new repos?
I’m torn between testing RC1 and contributing to any bug reports and potentially causing a lot of headache for myself or just waiting for the final release. Unfortunately I don’t have another HDD or equivalent laptop to experiment with.
Updating does work, a clean install is better. Did an upgrade from 11.1 first, quite satisfying, clean install afterwards. Be careful in the partitioning during install. Best is to label all linux partitions through Yast’s partitioner ( fstab options ). to backup entire /etc, mysql databases etc.
Just a small 10 GB free space would do…
Over the years I’ve always had 2 linux installs. That way I can always perform a clean install, yet have the previous version available until everything we need works flawlessly. Takes just 60GB’s instead of the 30GB for a single one, and it always runs. The installs are on separate disks btw.
RC1 is way too late to file bugs, to get them fixed in 11.2 release, if they can pass QA they may get fixed in December or Jan, as an update. Or they may be fixed in the next release.
11.2-RC1 looks good, but I would hesitate to update a working ‘primary’ system using 11.1 until next year. There will be many updates, for a few months after release, as non-show stopping fixes percolate through QA. Most of the key package update, are available via OBS, and these upgrades have less risk than upgrading to a new release.
Updating is a key feature of the 11.2 release. At last in addition to YaST Upgrade option, openSUSE supports “zypper dup” as an equivalent to Debian’s “apt dist-updgrade”. It’d be great if those with 11.1 can copy across their current installations to test partition, get ot working and try update out. Whilst a “clean install” is slightly more optimal, that also means re-doing configuration work and re-installing applications afterwards, so is considerably more effort to the user base.
Having a second disk, and planning for tests & upgrades is an advantage. That extra space, also means you have a way to use new features like ext4, post-installation as you gain comfort with new release.
You might look for a faster disk, which would be intended eventually as replacement system disk, as a nice performance upgrade.
I’m using it on my Thinkpad. For me brightness is kinda borked, but I can control it with the Fn keys so not a big issue.
I did a complete fresh install because I wanted to change my partitions to ext4. Something you might want to consider.
Install was blazing fast and really it just works beautifully.
Ext4 is a good point, and I forgot to mention in my post that I will be doing a clean install on general release to switch to 64bit, and from ext3 to ext4. Maybe 11.3 will be a distribution upgrade from an installed 11.2.
I would say that RC1 is still not ready for primetime. I hope the final release will be, we’ll see.
Regarding the thinkpad specifics, I use R61 (which is probably similar to X60e) and s2ram and s2disk work without problems, Fn keys for brightness and volume also work, but not for suspend and so. I don’t know how to check the disk protection.
On 10/24/2009 02:56 PM, dcengija wrote:
>
> suse_tpx60s;2054199 Wrote:
>> Is RC1 good enough to install as my primary system? I don’t know if I
>> should just wait for the general release and miss the opportunity of
>> filing any bugs that could get fixed before the final release or just
>> wait?
>>
>> I’m currently running 11.1 on my Thinkpad and would like to give 11.2
>> RC1 a go.
>>
>> I’ve installed 11.2RC1 in aVM but I can’t check if things like the Fn
>> keys now work properly, the behaviour of S2ram and S2disk or the hard
>> disk protection system. All things that should have improved with the
>> new kernel.
>
> I would say that RC1 is still not ready for primetime. I hope the final
> release will be, we’ll see.
>
> Regarding the thinkpad specifics, I use R61 (which is probably similar
> to X60e) and s2ram and s2disk work without problems, Fn keys for
> brightness and volume also work, but not for suspend and so. I don’t
> know how to check the disk protection.
Of course, YMMV, but I have been running 11.2 RC1 as my main system
since it came out. There have been a few little problems, but the
majority of things are OK.
I agree that most of the things are really OK, but in my oppinion, RC1 has some serious issues to fix before it become really useful. I use it in parallel to my opensuse 10.3 and so far I have found that:
VMWare has some issues regarding mouse grab. It’s better than in M8, but still doesn’t work as good as in 10.3
Lotus Notes works really bad, unusable
Eclipse has that bug related to GTK, the workaround is easy, but still pretty annoying
OpenOffice has file exporting issues when KDE4 integration is installed
Pidgin doesn’t work at all (not pidgin’s fault, though)
Lenovo Thinkpad buttons don’t work, except for brightness and volume control
Desktop tends to get confused from time to time, not sure what’s the problem
Intermittent crashes: korganizer, amarok
However, s2ram and s2disk work out of the box, nvidia and compositing are great and the overall impression is more than positive.
Thanks for the comments. I’d be disappointed if the Thinkpad Fn keys still don’t work or the docking / undocking is still flakey.
If I decide to get another HDD (my current one is nearly full so maybe time for a larger one) then I’ll use the old disk for testing and playing with 11.2.
