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Archive for the ‘Base System’ Category

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.11 BETA6 (13.25.18-1) rpm are released for any openSUSE version

November 20th, 2013 by

Finally Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.11 BETA6 (13.25.18-1) rpm are released for any openSUSE version

Welcome in paradise … 🙂

Notice

This release concern only owners of radeon HD5xxx or above. All owner of HD2xx and HD4xx are really encouraged to use the free radeon driver (which received a lot of improvement in 3.11)

There’s 13 and thirteen 🙂 When I speak about 13.1 it’s openSUSE version, 13.11 is FGLRX version, don’t get confused! Oh and 3.11 is the kernel version 🙂

This is experimental & BETA software, it could fix issues you encountered (FGLRX not working for openSUSE 13.1),
But good reports have been collected around (people having used Sebastian’s script directly)

I would like to thanks again Sebastian Siebert for his effort to kept FGLRX in a good shape for all of us.
Can I ask you to help to spread the message to the world, so anyone who has an interest in having FGLRX could find the information. I will update the wiki to point here. But mailing lists, social media, forums are up to you!

Beta Repository

To make things clear about the status of the drivers, it will not be published under the normal stable repository http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx.
I’ve created some times ago a beta repository located at http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-beta.
The FGLRX 13.11 beta6 rpm are released for any openSUSE version from 11.4(Evergreen) to latest 13.1 + Tumbleweed

Also the signer of package have change and use now the generic builder gpg key at Ioda-Net. (gpg key id 65BE584C)

Installing the new repository

Admitting you’ve the normal repository named FGLRX, (use zypper lr -d to find the number or name you give it). You have to start by disabling it
so you could fallback to it quickly when new stable version will be published. Open a root console or add sudo at your convenience and issue the following command:

zypper mr -dR FGLRX

amd-fglrx-beta

To add another repository in the same console as root issue the following command which will install normally the right repository for your distribution

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_`lsb-release -r | awk '{print $2}'` FGLRX-BETA

If you are using Tumbleweed use this one

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_Tumbleweed FGLRX-BETA

Now the update/upgrade process

zypper dup -r FGLRX-BETA

Let the system upgrade the package, and try to enjoy the new beta.

(more…)

Only for the brave, Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.10 BETA2 (13.20.11-1) rpm released

October 6th, 2013 by

Only for the brave, Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.10 BETA2 (13.20.11-1) rpm released

Notice

This release concern only owners of radeon HD5xxx or above. And adventurous users who know how to deal with troubles.
The majority could easily wait the final release, expected somewhat later even if it take a long time 🙂

This is experimental & BETA software, it could fix issues you encountered, but also can eat your kittens. You’ve been warned !
flgrx build for 3.11 series kernel ( Tumbleweed & 13.1 ).
But this time I’ve to update the Sebastian script myself, so I consider also the package as beta stage.

Installing the new repository

Admitting you’ve the normal repository named FGLRX, (use zypper lr -d to find the number or name you give it). You have to start by disabling it
so you could fallback to it quickly. Open a root console or add sudo at your convenience and issue the following command:

zypper mr -dR FGLRX

The beta driver is available for 11.4 (evergreen kernel), 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, Tumbleweed (12.3 based + kernel 3.11) at amd-fglrx-beta

To add another repository in the same console as root issue the following command which will install normally the right repository for your distribution

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_`lsb-release -r | awk '{print $2}'` FGLRX-BETA

If you are using Tumbleweed use this one

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_Tumbleweed FGLRX-BETA

Now the update/upgrade process

zypper dup -r FGLRX-BETA

Let the system upgrade the package, and try to enjoy the new beta

(more…)

How I ran openSUSE on a Nexus 7

September 22nd, 2013 by

The Nexus 7 (2012 version) is a 7 inch tablet by Google+Asus.
The nice thing about it is, that it has an unlockable bootloader. Also it has an armv7 CPU and we built openSUSE for this CPU for some years. I had one such device with a broken display, so doing some more risky things with it seemed to be appropriate.
I wanted to run my own software on it. Running openSUSE in a chroot (change-root) environment is usually a lot easier than replacing the whole system, so this is where I went.

First, I needed two tools. One is the “adb” – Android DeBug tool from the official sdk and the other is “fastboot” which was hard to find, so I mirror it here.
I got me the stable ROM from http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Grouper_Info and followed their installation instructions. adb shell only seemed to work while in bootloader (which you reach by holding Volume-Down+Power during boot)
The hardest part was to re-enable USB-debugging by going into Settings/About tablet and tapping Build-Number seven times.

Also before zapping everything that was there, I did in adb shell : cp -a /system/app /sdcard/
and back later.
So after following all the other installation steps, I had cyanogenmod booting. I attached a bluetooth keyboard so that I can better type. The ROM comes with a terminal app, which I opened. type su - to become root after a security popup.
Now, I downloaded my lastest Raspberry-Pi image from http://www.zq1.de/bernhard/linux/opensuse/. This is under /sdcard/Download where I unpacked it with xz -d
Then comes the tricky part. The image has a partition table, but here we just need the root filesystem. With fdisk -lu we can see that it starts at sector 309248. One could copy out that part with dd or use a loop device with offset like this:
#!/system/xbin/sh
mknod /dev/loop0 b 7 0
losetup -d /dev/loop0 # cleanup of previous try
losetup -o `expr 512 \* 309248` /dev/loop0 rasp*img
mkdir -p mnt
mount -t ext2 /dev/loop0 mnt

Now we have access to the openSUSE files under mnt.
In there I created me a chroot.sh:
#!/system/xbin/sh
for m in proc sys dev ; do mount -o bind /$m $m ; done
HOME=/root PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/root/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin /system/xbin/chroot . bin/bash
for m in proc sys dev ; do umount $m ; done

With that, the only remaining thing to do was to add a nameserver line to /etc/resolv.conf before I could use zypper to install software e.g. zypper install yast2-network yast2-ncurses.
Running yast lan on the Nexus 7 gives nice sight.

I guess one could also use the armv7 rootfs to have software built for armv7 instead of the compatible armv6. But for me it does not matter much.

New Raspberry Pi Image

September 7th, 2013 by

update: new image with kernel-3.6 and minimal X11/icewm http://www.zq1.de/~bernhard/linux/opensuse/raspberrypi-opensuse-20130911x.img.xz (103MB)

We got a new armv6 based image for the Raspberry Pi.
This one is only 82MB compressed, so pretty minimalistic.
http://www.zq1.de/~bernhard/linux/opensuse/raspberrypi-opensuse-20130907.img.xz

The exciting new thing is that this was created using an alternative image building automatism which I wrote from scratch in three hours this morning.
The scripts can be found at
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/devel:ARM:Factory:Contrib:RaspberryPi/altimagebuild
and are also embedded within the image under /home/abuild/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

This means that everyone can now easily build his own images the way he likes and even branch and do submit requests for changes that are useful for others.
The way to use this is simple.
If you have 6GB RAM, you can speed things up with export OSC_BUILD_ROOT=/dev/shm/arm before you do
osc co devel:ARM:Factory:Contrib:RaspberryPi altimagebuild
cd devel:ARM:Factory:Contrib:RaspberryPi/altimagebuild
bash -x main.sh

This pseudo-package does not easily build within OBS or osc alone because it needs root permissions for some of the steps (chroot, mknod, mount), which could only be workarounded with User-Mode-Linux or patching osc.
The build consists of three steps that can be seen in main.sh:

  1. First, osc build is used to pull in required packages and setup the armv6 rootfs.
  2. Second, mkrootfs.sh modifies a copy of the rootfs under .root to contain all required configs
  3. And finally, mkimage.sh takes the .root dir and creates a .img from it that can be booted

This can build an image from scatch in three minutes. And my Raspberry Pi booted successfully with it within 55 seconds.

There are some remaining open issues:

  • the repo key is initially untrusted
  • still uses old 3.1 kernel – solved
  • build scripts have no error handling

Compared to the old image, this one has some advantages:

  • It is easier to resize because the root partition is the last one
  • Compressed image is much smaller
  • Reproducible image build, so easy to customize
  • It is armv6 with floating point support, so could be faster
  • We have over 5200 successfully built packages from openSUSE:Factory:ARM
    so for example you can install a minimalistic graphical environment with zypper install xauth twm xorg-x11-server xinit and start it with startx

So if you wanted to play with openSUSE on RPi, you can do so right now and have a lot of fun.

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.8 BETA1 (13.20.5-1) rpm released

August 15th, 2013 by

Notice

This release concern only owners of radeon HD5xxx or above. And adventurous users who know how to deal with troubles.
The majority could easily wait the final release, expected somewhat later.

This is experimental & BETA sofware, it could fix issues you encountered, but also can eat your kitten. You’ve been warned !
But good reports have been collected around, especially with never 3.10x kernel series.

Installing the new repository

Admitting you’ve the normal repository named FGLRX, (use zypper lr -d to find the number or name you give it). You have to start by disabling it, so you could fallback to it quickly. Open a root console or add sudo at your convenience and issue the following command:

zypper mr -dR FGLRX

The beta driver is available for 11.4 (evergreen kernel), 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, Tumbleweed (12.3 based + kernel 3.10) at amd-fglrx-beta

To add another repository in the same console as root issue the following command which will install normally the right repository for your distribution

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_`lsb-release -r | awk '{print $2}'` FGLRX-BETA

If you are using Tumbleweed use this one

zypper ar -n FGLRX-BETA -cgf http://geeko.ioda.net/amd-fglrx-beta/openSUSE_Tumbleweed FGLRX-BETA

Now the update/upgrade process

zypper dup -r FGLRX-BETA

Let the system upgrade the package, and try to enjoy the new beta

(more…)

openSUSE 12.3 on Android

May 9th, 2013 by

Here is a new image for your armv7l powered phone or tablet(any recent dual core device should work), you can get openSUSE 12.3 XFCE running on it without the need for repartition, formats, bootloader hacks or sacrificing your nicely running latest android on it. What you need is rooted device with busybox, Android VNC and terminal app installed and 4GB free space on sdcard(internal or external).

Instructions to run it are same as mentioned earlier. In addition to those you can also use LinuxonAndroid app with patched bootscript.sh. Replace /data/data/com.zpwebsites.linuxonandroid/files/bootscript.sh on your device with the patched one and follow the directions shown here(last 3 images):

openSUSE on android

Proprietary AMD/ATI fglrx 12.104 Catalyst 13.4 rpm released

April 29th, 2013 by

Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx 13.4 (12.104-1) rpm released

Notice

This release concern only owners of radeon HD5xxx or above.
For older gpu, the fglrx-legacy is still 13.1, and thus didn’t work with Kernel 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 nor openSUSE 12.3 and xorg 1.13
SDB:AMD_fgrlx_legacy
Beware of that, and prefer the free open-source radeon driver which came out of the box from your openSUSE distribution.

Release note about 13.4

This Catalyst fglrx version support openSUSE version from 11.4 to 12.3 (new repository) and also Tumbleweed (thus also kernel 3.8x series).

Release Note

A release note is available on AMD website

Fixed issues

    [370253]: Serious Sam 3 - Color of Objects turning into be red when enabling separate shader object
    [371937]: Team Fortress 2 - Screen black issue while entering the game screen under cinnamon desktop environment
    [371374]: Team Fortress 2 - Screen random flickering and corruptions in Lakeside Map
    [354777]: Maya 2012 Benchmark - Benchmark falling out of TIMMO
    [372137]: NX8.0 - Severe flickering is observed while playing animation in manufacturing mode
    [373561]: Mari crashes at startup on Ubuntu only
    [374371]: Severe corruption occurs in Unigine Heaven 4.0 on Saturn XT when running at extremely high settings
    [373787]: Softimage fails to refresh properly
    [372918]: Maxon - Wrong shading when UBOs are used to store light parameters

 Known Bugs

    [373836]: Vsync application shows corruption filed
    [373772]: Team Fortress 2 – Game could not be loaded in “High Performance GPU” mode
    [373909]: Driver install via .deb package will cause OS desktop corruption
    [371372]: SCQA - Anti-Aliasing does not work

Sebastien Siebert making script

Sebastian Siebert post about 13.4

If you have any problems with the driver, don’t be afraid to report to Sebastian (German and English bugreports are gladly accepted).
he will try, as far as I am able to reproduce the bug. Together with the necessary system information, he will go directly to the right place at AMD to have the bug fixed in the next driver release.
Thank you very much, Sebastian.

See below what to do in case of troubles.

Or you can also ping him on irc (freespacer)

(more…)

One that got away – 12.3 Networking

March 13th, 2013 by

Well openSUSE 12.3 is about to go live  and we are all pretty excited. It is, as far as I can tell a rock solid release and we have outdone ourselves. Considering the short release cycle makes this even more impressive.

One can only thank everyone in the community for pulling together, getting a lot of stuff done and delivering a great release.

Yet, there’s one sprinkle that rains on our parade. While we completed the switch to systemd we somewhere along the lines forgot to check the status of NetworkManager on an installed system. Thus, when you upgrade from a previous release and NetworkManager is disabled, it will be enabled and running after the upgrade is complete, sorry. If you happen to be running a network bridge your bridge will not be working and you’ll end up in some weird network state where ifconfig will tell you that both your bridge and your Ethernet card have an IP address. Your routing table will also be messed up. Addressing the issue is easy.

Login as root, which you will have to do at the login manager if you happen to run NIS, disable NetworkManager, stop the NetworkManager service, and restart your network. You are now back to your original configuration, no sweat 😉 . Below is a list of commands you want to run as the root user to make this happen:

# systemctl –force disable NetworkManager.service

# systemctl stop NetworkManager.service

# rcnetwork restart

openSUSE 12.3 Image available for ARM64 (AArch64)

March 5th, 2013 by

Howdy,

the openSUSE on ARM team was quite busy the last few weeks with getting openSUSE 12.3 for AArch64 (ARM64, also called ARMv8) ready. At the time of this post, we have finished around 4100 packages (out of ~ 6000) of openSUSE 12.3 built for AArch64, the ARM 64bit platform. With those successfully built packages, we’re also able to build a regular openSUSE image for you to try and run in the ARMv8 System emulator (ARMv8 Foundation Model).

This is a huge achievement and milestone for us, thanks to lots of helpful hands within openSUSE. Just to put this into perspective: This is not a minimal system with a couple of toolchain packages. It is also not an embedded variant of a Linux environment. No, this is the full featured, standard openSUSE distribution as you’re used to, ported to AArch64, up and running. We have built it based on (slightly newer versions of) standard openSUSE 12.3 packages, and the changes are mostly already merged back into openSUSE Factory. For all we know it’s also more successful package builds than any other Linux distribution has on AArch64! If you’d like to see the status yourself, please check out the OBS repository we created for this.

As an open distribution, it is important to make contributions easy and we worked hard to enable others to participate in our effort. We extended OBS to automatically spawn a Foundation Model virtual machine when you want to build for aarch64. This works remotely on the OBS server as well as locally using osc build. More information on this is available on the respective wiki page.

So, dive right into it:  Get the image and start with openSUSE on AArch64 by following our wiki page: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM/AArch64.

AMD fglrx, fgrlx-legacy : news, cleanup & important informations

March 3rd, 2013 by

Status of fgrlx & fglrx-legacy regarding next coming 12.3

fglrx

fglrx (Catalyst 13.1) drivers has been refreshed and published for 12.3 with the RC2 build.
During the first few days after the release, and fresh new build will be made with the final version, and first updates.

fglrx-legacy

fglrx-legacy (Catalyst 13.1) will never support (actually) xorg 1.13 which is the version that come in openSUSE 12.3. Even if it can handle kernel 3.8
So the previous build has been removed from the server. To insure end-users no trouble or hassle trying to get it working.
If you still have a radeon from hd2xxx to hd4xxx you’re welcomed to use the free radeon. It made progress and could eventually be as efficient as the proprietary drivers.
The bonus you get, you can report bug, and they will be fixable.

Status of mirrors

One year ago I announced the move to the new host for the package mirror. During that time, I’ve kept a redirection active, and also a symlink from ati to amd-fglrx

This time is over now, so please update your repositories

Repositories available

FLGRX

http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx/ add openSUSE_(you version) from 11.2 to 12.3

FLGRX-LEGACY

http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-legacy/ add openSUSE_(you version) from 11.2 to 12.2

Spread the word

If I already updated the en.opensuse.org wiki page (even if the reviewing process is stuck actually), I need your help to spread the word, to reach any end-users that need those informations.

Notice about tumbleweed, evergreen

I saw several users, trying to use the one-click-installer with tumbleweed. Sorry this can’t work due to the lack of perfect recognition of tumbleweed. etc/SuSE-release is 12.2 actually.

So if you use tumbleweed you just have to install the tumbleweed repository (again one for fglrx, one for fgrlx-legacy depending on your gpu)

But beware, tumbleweed is a moving target, and the proprio drivers could stop working at any update, kernel or xorg

Evergreen : some users successfully use fglrx-legacy 13.1 with the kernel 3.0.58