OpenSUSE 12.2 released

[fblais]

http://www.opensuse.org

Anyone had the opportunity to try it yet?

[Trooper]

No, but I certainly would like to. Its been far too long since I have messed with Linux. Will try to look into this sometime this week.

[wat0114]

Not yet, but probably within the next few days. I was disappointed with their previus release.

[fblais]

Thanks.
I'm not attracted by either the Gnome 3 and KDE desktops though.
The latest XFCE release is 11.3, from already two years ago.

[wilbertnl]

Originally Posted by fblais

I'm not attracted by either the Gnome 3 and KDE desktops though.

Cinnamon on top of Gnome 3 is actually quite nice.
Available in OpenSUSE and other mainstream distro's.

And XFCE 4.10 is also available.

[ComputerSaysNo]

Thanks, will take a look!

[mack_guy911]

i just tried it from live cd look good so far its pretty much better faster no kde 4.9 but best part is stability so problem so far but that i testsed from live cd media so i guess check and see your self


also you can try it in virtualbox without installing or writing a cd i tested that as well its smooth run

just give path to iso and run

[NormanF]

Originally Posted by Trooper

No, but I certainly would like to. Its been far too long since I have messed with Linux. Will try to look into this sometime this week.

Good system. But the morons at SUSE emptied the Tumbleweed repository so I wasn't able to test Cinnamon with software rendering. GNOME 3.4 has eliminated the fall back mode and using even simple applications can be an exercise in frustration. I'm awaiting til the repositories are repopulated so I can finally be productive.

[NormanF]

Originally Posted by wilbertnl

Cinnamon on top of Gnome 3 is actually quite nice.
Available in OpenSUSE and other mainstream distro's.

And XFCE 4.10 is also available.

Cinnamon is currently available only for 12.1. With new software rendering technology, it will run even on low powered machines, eliminating the need to maintain two separate forms of shell software. So this all too good even if you don't have a high powered computer!

[s23]

Strange.. I installed cinnamon in openSUSE in the 2-3 day after release.. and its already available before.

Information and how to install:
http://www.marques.so/

[wilbertnl]

Originally Posted by s23

Strange.. I installed cinnamon in openSUSE in the 2-3 day after release.. and its already available before.

Information and how to install:
http://www.marques.so/

"Users who are relying on GNOME:Cinnamon should migrate to 
X11:Cinnamon:GNOME34 as soon as possible"

I fail to find information on how to do this?

[s23]

Originally Posted by wilbertnl

I fail to find information on how to do this?

I will talk to Nelson Marques to see if he can put more detailed steps in his site.

Normally these repositories are all here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/

There is a "X11" folder there.

Just open YAST and add the repository, informing this URL:
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../GNOME34/12.2/
Install cinnamon and that's it.

[NormanF]

Originally Posted by s23

I will talk to Nelson Marques to see if he can put more detailed steps in his site.

Normally these repositories are all here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/

There is a "X11" folder there.

Just open YAST and add the repository, informing this URL:
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit.../GNOME34/12.2/
Install cinnamon and that's it.

Thanks - I downloaded and installed it from that repository and Cinnamon is now compiled in 2D to work with a low powered computer. One previously needed CPU hardware acceleration to enable the menu and it works just beautifully on GNOME 3.4. And if Mrkvonic is reading this and has a computer without oomph - no need to dispair - Cinnamon is now available even for very old computers and mine has a very weak VIA C-7 chip - a dog that that can't handle accelerated graphics at all and this is amazing!

[nmarques]

A few words: GNOME:Cinnamon has been disabled and the project moved to X11:Cinnamon. This layout will provide several repositories according to the supported versions of GNOME. Repository layout is quite simple:

* X11:Cinnamon:GNOME34 - Cinnamon releases based on GNOME 3.4
* X11:Cinnamon:GNOME36 - Cinnamon releases based on GNOME 3.6 (none yet)
* X11:Cinnamon:Factory - Development project for Factory (will happen soon).

I had 1.4.0-UP1 on openSUSE Factory, it was supposed to ship with 12.2, but I've requested it to be deleted because I didn't found it was up to the standards that openSUSE delievers.

Regarding X11:MATE, this is a new repository, most of the stuff is working, but there's a lot of polishing to do. The repository layout will be more standardized and I've enabled MATE for all the supported distributions. I know the defaults are very ugly, but they can be tweaked I'm working with MATE upstream to provide a good experience to openSUSE users. I hope that 12.3 will also offfer MATE as an option, I'm working towards that goal.

Regarding X11:Unity, it's not working and it mainly depends on how fast we get xorg-x11-proto updated to protocol v6. There's no real hurry, and this might take some time, no idea on how long. When we're ready people will know

Give me a few days to work out on the patterns, test the stuff, and allow MirrorBrain to update worldwide. I will provide install instructions soon.

[NormanF]

No problem with Cinnamon 2D here - I just added a thread on software rendering on the forum and GNOME no longer warns of a fall-back mode when being installed on low powered computers. You'll need to grab the latest version of Unity but I think we'll have to wait til Ubuntu 12.10 comes out to see how to compile it from source. But the progress that's been made has been nothing short of amazing. I really like using a desktop environment on a computer I couldn't deploy it on before!

[s23]

Edit: Information provided from the horse's mouth while I'm typing.

Using 12.2 KDE now. Must say I'm impressed with the 3.4.6 kernel; the developers must be doing something right, seeing as the netbook had 100+ MB of stuff in swap at one point and was barely slowed down at all. With 2.6 kernels, that kind of swapping would grind things to a halt.

I'm not sure if I'm impressed with the rest of it though.

- The memory hogging that resulted in 100+ MB of swap seems to have been a bug in Nepomuk. Stuff like this (IMO) has become sadly typical of KDE, at least on most distros. Anyway disabling Nepomuk stopped the memory leak, so I'll throw that out there for anyone else with this issue.

- AppArmor is disabled by default, and there are only default profiles for daemons, not desktop apps. Also, the YAST AppArmor plugin crashes on trying to create a new profile.

- Performance is bearable by default, but memory consumption is ridiculous. The default desktop plus a few Firefox tabs and Amarok uses 650 MB, compared to maybe 300 MB for similar use on Salix. I've only ever seen runaway memory consumption like this in one other distro. (That would be ROSA, FWIW.) This distro probably won't work on anything with < 1GB of RAM. However, to Novell's (umm, AttachMate's?) credit, they actually say you need 1+ GB of RAM.

- Automatic updates drag in the Fluendo MP3 codec. Yay! Unfortunately though, this only works for GStreamer based players; Kaffeine apparently uses Xine and so can't play MP3s, and K3B doesn't support MP3 either, though I think it should (it uses GStreamer doesn't it?).

Also re performance, I'll note that the OpenSUSE kernel comes with zram built as a module, and creating zram swap devices improves the performance situation a lot; even more than lowering swappiness (probably because with zram, the kernel can keep its filesystem cache).

IMO this release still doesn't rise to the level of the 11.x series. It works as a desktop, if you have RAM to waste. I probably wouldn't use it for business. I would say that superior alternatives exist; but this being Linux, there IMO aren't any superior alternatives in the end user desktop arena.

TLR you pretty much get what you pay for in terms of desktop usability. This is not surprising considering how much money Microsoft and Apple probably spend on GUI development, and I doubt it can be helped, given lack of developers, division and duplication of effort, etc. In a way it's too bad, because Linux has some cool features under the hood; but hey, what can you do.

Edit: I should also mention the bug (in KWin's compositor, I guess) which causes OpenGL-tilted windows (e.g. in the flip switch effect) to appear bent. Purely cosmetic, but looks rather unprofessional!

[s23]

More work from nmarques!! Great artwork for MATE.

http://www.marques.so/2012/09/mate-d...nsuse-started/

[mack_guy911]

Cinnamon 1.6.0 available for GNOME 3.4 openSUSE users

http://www.marques.so/2012/09/cinnam...pensuse-users/

[NormanF]

Originally Posted by mack_guy911

Cinnamon 1.6.0 available for GNOME 3.4 openSUSE users

http://www.marques.so/2012/09/cinnam...pensuse-users/

The existing version I installed boots up OK. I do welcome the latest Cinnamon in the OpenSUSE Cinnamon repository.

[mack_guy911]

hope to see new review on opensuse 12.2 form mrk so far its best suse i ever used very stable no weird stuff i like it more than kubuntu which produce too much heat best part cpu is not very high and because of that low on temperature


stability its what i see the main best part of this distro also default fonts ........ etc


good review:

http://www.muktware.com/4281/opensus...w-fast-furious

[Mrkvonic]

I've written a review of openSUSE 12.2 Mantis 64-bit edition tested on a laptop with SSD, with Gnome 3 and Cinnamon desktop environments, focusing on live session, installation and post-install use, including Wireless, Samba sharing, multimedia playback and problems - Flash and MP3, installation in a quadruple-boot configuration, basic look & feel overview and changes, new themes and icons, applications, and many problems like visual integration, dark/light theme mix, missing packages and plugins, broken Firefox add-ons, broken printing, broken fingerprint reader, very high system usage, and more.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/opensuse-12-2.html


Cheers,
Mrk

[mack_guy911]

fair review i agree gnome 3 still sucks


today i update my brother laptop ubuntu 10.04 after along time its awesome seeing gnome 2x its so perfect as compare to gnome 3 and unity

please mrk if you have time can you install classic gnome on 12.04 and review it

i heard it still workable on 12.04 so i just wondering about stability

[zapjb]

I've been distro-hopping on my old Fujitsu 12" Lifebook B6210. Tried OS12.2 it was great until I updated it. Then it went wonky & my sound stopped working. And it got slow & unresponsive.

I've tried 6 or so distros on the Fujitsu in the last week.

What I have now is Linux Mint Cinnamon 13 32bit. Fully updated & everything works. But I've had it less than 1 day. So we'll see.

[NormanF]

Originally Posted by Mrkvonic

I've written a review of openSUSE 12.2 Mantis 64-bit edition tested on a laptop with SSD, with Gnome 3 and Cinnamon desktop environments, focusing on live session, installation and post-install use, including Wireless, Samba sharing, multimedia playback and problems - Flash and MP3, installation in a quadruple-boot configuration, basic look & feel overview and changes, new themes and icons, applications, and many problems like visual integration, dark/light theme mix, missing packages and plugins, broken Firefox add-ons, broken printing, broken fingerprint reader, very high system usage, and more.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/opensuse-12-2.html


Cheers,
Mrk

You need to try Pantheon. Too simple and none of that GNOME 3 crap. At least its usable and doesn't insult users' intelligence by making everything complicated on purpose. And you get the shut down button back in the right corner menu. I don't like that I can't right click the desktop but I can do it underneath the shell just fine. The old dock works you can have workspaces and whatnot. You have reviewed GNOME 3, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon and Mate 2. Now there is one more Unix desktop environment for Dedoimedo left to review.

Cheers!