I am continuing my quest for having a working Linux on my tablet PC here, and I decided to install RC1 and see if it fares better. So far I noticed quite a few interesting things and ran into several problems. I’ll keep everything in a list format for ease of reference. Note that I was using the net installer for this, and I also allocated a hefty 15GB for openSUSE.
- The installer crashes if you try to modify the installation packages, but it’s a known bug. I can confirm that the workaround - not changing anything - works, although it’s obviously very inefficient (especially when using the net installer). It’s reported to be fixed in the next RC, so it should be good in the future.
- Bootloader configuration works as expected and the package manager no longer stops with an RPM lock, very glad to see those issues fixed.
- Setting the suspend to disk location (boot option 'suspend=
') causes systemd to output this warning: “systemd[1]: Failed to read PID file /var/run/haveged.pid after start. The service might be broken.” After that, the boot either hangs, hangs but allows me to go to TTY1 to see the lines ‘Invoking userspace resume from /dev/sda5’, ‘resume: libgcrypt version: 1.5.0’ and still hangs or continues. (Note that in beta 1, I didn’t set a swap partition at all, so I’m not sure if this issue was present there or not.) - I still need to use 'nomodeset
’ in order to get through the USB detection process: if I don’t use it, the boot hangs on ‘usb 1-1.6.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0b97, idProduct=7772’ (that’s the smart card reader). This happened in the beta as well. - My external network card seems to have problems interfacing with NetworkManager. NM sometimes doesn’t recognise the device, sometimes does but can’t connect, and sometimes it freezes the whole system (and that even causes the /var/log/warn
file to be cut off). I don’t seem to have problems like that during the installation, although occasionally the installation system notes that the repository checksum doesn’t match. I’m not sure if this was present in the beta, since I didn’t use NetworkManager there. - At boot, I get a rather long and intimidating error: <to be copied, please wait a bit> However, it doesn’t seem to affect anything and the boot continues. This is probably caused by the poor implementation of Poulsbo drivers, as the error message itself notes. However, this didn’t appear in the beta version (could be due to the updated kernel version, since psb_gfx
is a kernel module). - There is a lot of log spam in /var/log/warn
(in the beta, I used to get a window that showed the same log spam): ‘udevd[346]: timeout: killing ‘/sbin/modprobe -bv pci:XXXXXX’ [392]’, which repeats every second. (XXXXXX is a string of numbers and letters and seems to be slightly different between boots.) - I seem to have a few local problems which are probably specific to my device and configuration:
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There is no sound, although ALSA and the XFCE mixer is running, plus the sound card is in the YaST soundcard list.
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Hibernation doesn’t work at all - nothing happens after I press the button. It doesn’t matter if I have the resume location set or not. Suspend to RAM does something - it brings me to a TTY and turns off the monitor, but the computer’s LEDs don’t indicate a sleep state and I can’t find a way to get it back from sleep other than rebooting. Additionally, xscreensaver
doesn’t seem to power down the screen, only display a black screensaver. -
Poulsbo graphics driver is overall poor, as it was already mentioned, in that I can’t set the native resolution of my device and the backlight brightness. I also still need to set the VGA mode to something the device accepts before booting.
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The power button and the virtual keyboard, rotate screen and Alt buttons on the tablet PC are not recognised.
Otherwise it works really well. The boot is fast, autologin works perfectly, the system is responsive, touchscreen support is there from the get-go, Xournal is a lot better than Windows Journal etc. So even despite the issues above, I can already use openSUSE as my primary work OS there.
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