This will be the first release in quite a few years that I won’t try at the day of release. I’ve been using OpenSuSE since Pre-Novell (9.0 I believe), and have usually upgraded as soon as possible.

But why not this time?

Because the last three times I tried to upgrade, it was a mess for two days. The sturdy and solid SuSE is gone, and I’m left with a flaky OpenSuSE, which usually needs a few weeks to settle the most annoying bugs.

Preciously, SuSE was the one distro that you could be sure was working. But not anymore. They’ve simply got to many fuckups on the release day for me to thrust ‘em.

I will upgrade. But not in a few weeks.

Section "ServerFlags"
  # Uncomment the following option to reenable
  # kbd/mouse driver sections.
  # Otherwise evdev driver is used.
  # Option       "AutoAddDevices" "off"
  Option       "AIGLX" "on"
  Option       "AllowMouseOpenFail" "on"
  Option       "ZapWarning" "on"
EndSection

That’s right. Just uncomment that one line, # Option "AutoAddDevices" "off" – restart X, and everything worked. You can do this from SSH, or you can do it from the console – where the keyboard works fine. Just boot in single user mode or ssh in.

OpenSuSE 11.1 works quite alright on Intel hardware, with one major quirk: 3D rendering is utterly broken. Or rather – it was when it shipped.

If you suspect you’ve got this problem, run glxgears from a terminal, and watch the output:

$ glxgears
1025 frames in 5.0 seconds = 204.958 FPS
1005 frames in 5.0 seconds = 200.824 FPS
1018 frames in 5.0 seconds = 203.526 FPS

If you get values around that, you clearly miss hardware 3D rendering… The effect is that X will consume lots of cpu, and everything will look sluggish.

Upgrading to working x3100-drivers for x11 is quite straight forward with zypper. Two commands is all you need:

$ sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_Factory/ X11
Adding repository 'X11' [done]
Repository 'X11' successfully added
Enabled: Yes
Autorefresh: No
URI: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_Factory/
$ sudo zypper up -t package -r X11
[lots of packages listed - press y to accept]

This will update your X.org packages, including the x3100/GMA965 drivers.

Now, restart X, and you should have at least twice the frame rate in glxgears, and with almost no CPU usage from X. If you don’t experience this, you should run SaX2, either from YaST or the command line, and ensure that the box Activate 3D Acceleration at the bottom of SaX2′s window is checked. Restart X after exiting SaX2, and everything should be fine.

Vmware workstation, fresh out of the box, did not want to run on openSuSE, claiming it could not find any modules:
$ vmware
Logging to /tmp/vmware-vidarlo/setup-17389.log
modinfo: could not find module vmmon
modinfo: could not find module vmnet
modinfo: could not find module vmblock
modinfo: could not find module vmci
modinfo: could not find module vsock
modinfo: could not find module vmmon
modinfo: could not find module vmnet
modinfo: could not find module vmblock
modinfo: could not find module vmci
modinfo: could not find module vsock

The problem was that the modules were precompiled, and included with VMware workstation. However, these did not insert into the running kernel (2.6.27-x86_64).

Removing the precompiled modules did the trick for me – simply rm -Rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary should remove ‘em, and force VMware workstation to compile the modules on next run. This worked nice for me. If you’re cautios, you might want to move the modules instead of removing them…:)

Please note that you need gcc, kernel source and other build dependencies to compile the VMWare modules So right now, VMware workstation works like a charm. Even though they don’t support anything newer than 10.3 officially…

This is written from my openSuSE-perspective, but I can’t see any reason why it shoudn’t work on (almost) any Linux distribution showing similar problems with VMWare…

Så kva er nytt? Mykje. For første gong sidan Novell overtok roret har zypp virkelig blitt brukbar – den har blitt rask, og betre på korrekt handtering av avhengigheiter.

Installasjonen av OpenSuSE 11 er som SuSE har vore siste ti åra – enkel. Ein del rare feilskjer er det. Mellom anna ser det ikkje ut til at installeren har lyst til å resolve DNS sånn heilt utan viare, så eg måtte finne IPen til FTP-tenaren eg nytta, og taste inn den. Dette fungerte. WLAN var også litt flaky, men fungerte forsåvidt greit nok, berre du veit kva ESSID-du skal kople deg til. Som vanleg er det ikkje spesielt lurt å legge til fleire repositories under installering – det fører fort til litt problemer for installeren.

Eit anna svakt punkt var at installeren nekta å gjennomføre ei oppgradering for meg – fordi eg hadde krypterte partisjoner. Eg hadde eigentleg ikkje rekna med at oppgradering ville vise seg fysisk gjennomførbart, ettersom eg har såpass sært pakkeutvalg etter eit år med ein distro, så det var ikkje veldig plagsomt. Uansett går det med minimalt med ekstra tid til å sette opp fra scratch framfor upgrade.

Vanleg installasjon – altså å trykke enter når en blir spurt om det, fungerte heilt knirkefritt, utover det vesle problemet med DNS, som kjem om ein vil ta netinstall.

Alt i alt er det vel verdt å prøve OpenSuSE 11. Fin distro, som virker rimelig ferdig, til forskjell frå ein del av det suse-folka har prestert før… I tillegg er det såvidt meg bekjent den første distroen som tar i bruk KDE4. Du har framleis mogelegheit til å velje KDE3.5 om du vil det, eller nytte Gnome.

To get Apt working, you’ll have to install the apt-package. This can be done with zypper, or Yast. Using zypper, simply type zypper install apt as root (or use sudo). If you prefer Yast, search for apt in the search-pane.

After having installed apt I had to make minor tweaks to the setup. Apt complained about running out of memory. I don’t know why, but I assume that the rpm repos I use (default SuSE 10.3 and packman) is to big for the default setting. I fixed this error-message by adding the line APT::Cache-Limit "1000000000"; to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/apt.conf file. You can add it wherever you want in the main section, I placed it below the Aquire::CDROM::Copy "True"; line. This did away with that warning.

The next problem I hit was that the packman repos RPM keys was not imported into the RPM system. This was solved by installing the package rpmkeys-packman from packman (or click the package name to get to a download page if you haven’t added the packman repos to YaST). Then simply run rpm --import /usr/lib/rpm/gnupg/packman* as root.

For /etc/apt/sources.list I use the following text, for the SuSE non-oss and oss repos, and packman:

#Main 10.3 Repository
repomd http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.3/repo/oss/suse/ /
repomd http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.3/repo/non-oss/suse/ /
#Packman
repomd http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.3/ /

Change this to whatever mirrors you want to use, those I use works fine, is quickly updated and decent speeds.

You should probably have the same software repositories in apt and yast, though I don’t know what happens if you don’t. You might end up with one of them complaining about unresolvable depencies.

Now, try a apt-get update. If it’s all working, you should get no error messages… If you got this working, you should be able to apt-get install synaptics to get a graphical apt front end

I’d say yes without a moment of hesitation. Installing it was a breeze. Pop in CD, boot, and install from network. Due to a decent internet connection at school, this is somewhat faster than installing from DVD.

The laptop comes with a decent network card (gigabit intel) and even a decent wifi-card, a IPW3945ABG card, which has drivers for Linux, produced by Intel. Only drawback is that the IPW3945-card requires a binary blob. However, it’s acceptable to me.

After the installation was finished, I was in for a shock. Normally, Intel graphics chipsets Just Works(TM) with Linux. However, the x3100 chipset is not supported by SuSE 10.2, so framebuffer it is. To get the framebuffer running at 1280×800 which is the native resolution, you’ll have to pass the vga=871 flag to the kernel at bootime. I simply added the flag in /boot/grub/menu.lst which means I don’t have to type it in on every reboot at least.

From what I can understand, the Inte Linux Graphics project supports my intel chipset quite well, but the x3100 support is so recent that I have to compile it myself to get accelerated X expirience. I’ll probably do that some day, for framebuffer-based X is slow. Scrolling makes the cpuload fling through the roof, and even then it ain’t smooth.

Except for the graphics, it Just Works(TM). I’ve read that suspend2ram haves some hiccups, but I’ll be able to live with suspend to disk until those problems is sorted out. Thinkpads tend to be well supported, so I suppose SuSE 10.3 will improve my points here.

Edit: To get s2ram to work, I had to use the parameters -f -a 1 -m. This works fine, from both console and X11. Edit /etc/pm/config and add the parameters there.

Also make S2RAM remove the ipw3945 module upon suspend, to ensure that wireless networking will be up and running when resuming. If you don’t remove this before suspending, you’ll have to restart the ipw3945d manually.

As you can see, SuSE belives the battery time is 1:26 remaining, with a almost full battery. However, I guess this is some bug or quirk since it is the first charge of the battery, for it started on 00:05 minutes left, then went upwards. Besides, 21W of power consumption ain’t to bad. At max load, the cpu alone requires a hefty 35W.