Hi all,
I have a brand new laptop and am extremely interested in installing OpenSUSE on it. Unfortunately the kernel used in 11.2 does not include the device drivers required by the machine, so I’m thinking about installing 11.3 RC1 on it. Waiting two weeks for the final release is not really an option as I need the machine now.
Is it reasonably stable? Are the 11.3 repositories already up and in use or is everything still using factory repos? Any other advice? I’d prefer not to switch distributions.
Is installing 11.3 RC1 now, followed by installing 11.3 GM later an option?
That is what I did with my Dell Studio 1537 laptop with 11.1 RC1 and then later 11.1 GM. I needed to do that at the time, as I needed the kernel in 11.1 in order for my wireless to work.
Even though it is possible to update from 11.3 RC1 to 11.3 GM via the Internet with a zypper command, I prefer a fresh install.
Note the 11.3 repositories are NOT available. One needs to use the ‘snapshot’ repositories, until the 11.3 repositories are setup. Also , all the 3rd party repositories for 11.3 are NOT yet fully populated and they will NOT be fully populated until MONTHS after 11.3 GM is out.
Stability is really a relative question. No OS is perfectly stable. 11.3 RC1 is not bad, but there are things in it I would like to see fixed, although I suspect most of the things I would like won’t be fixed for 11.3 GM. Note if using the KDE desktop, one needs to install hal manually in 11.3 RC1.
What hardware is on your laptop? There are no proprietary ATI graphic drivers for the 2.6.34 kernel. And the legacy nVidia drivers are a bit problematic with the 2.6.34 kernel, although I was able to get my FX5200 nvidia card to work with the 2.6.34 by using the “startx – -ignoreABI” command.
Thanks for the response. The drivers missing from earlier versions are for both the wireless and ethernet cards. It has an nVidia card (not legacy) and I prefer the binary drivers to Nouveau, but I can live for a while without that if the community nVidia repo isn’t ready.
I might do as you suggest and install now and then when the GM comes out I’ll just tar up /home and reinstall.
On 06/29/2010 01:16 AM, karljs wrote:
>
> Thanks for the response. The drivers missing from earlier versions are
> for both the wireless and ethernet cards. It has an nVidia card (not
> legacy) and I prefer the binary drivers to Nouveau, but I can live for a
> while without that if the community nVidia repo isn’t ready.
>
> I might do as you suggest and install now and then when the GM comes
> out I’ll just tar up /home and reinstall.
If you install RC1 (or RC2 due out in 2 days), then the update to GM will
be accomplished by a simple “sudo zypper dup”. There is no need to
reinstall. I have one system that I have been upgrading this way since
11.3 M4 with no ill effects. As it is still 11.3, there are no left-over
configuration files.
I also recommend putting /home in a separate partition as it greatly
simplifies reinstalling if that ever is necessary.
BTW, I have been running 11.3 on my production machine since M5.
Well, I’ve taken this advice and installed build 0694 which, so far, has been running like a dream. Once the Packman repo and the nVidia drivers are available I’ll be very happy.
It looks like it even defaults to the 11.3 repositories and not to Factory, so I won’t even need to worry about that provided I keep my packages up to date, right?
Packman have started populating the 11.3 repositories, but this will take time. My experience is one is looking at months before all the same packages as the previous version end up being populated in the Packman repos. If you look here: Additional package repositories - openSUSE you can see you can add:
