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openSUSE 11.2 on Dell Mini 10v

January 4th, 2010 by

The Dell Mini 10v is nothing special from a hardware perspective for a Netbook, and follows along the specs of most other Netbook models on the market today. The integrated buttons in the track-pad take some time getting used to, and IMHO separate buttons are more user friendly. For my recently acquired new toy I increased the RAM to 2 GB and added the larger battery. On the software side the Dell Mini 10v is something special as it is one of few Netbooks available with Linux pre-installed. Other Netbook brands either have no Linux option or charge extra when straying of the beaten hardware and OS combination path, at what I consider to be outrages rates. While as a devoted SUSE user I’d rather see openSUSE than Ubuntu pre-installed getting Linux on the machine and not having any of my hard earned money diverted to the monopolist from Redmond was a key purchasing decision.

Once unpacked and the battery charged I played with the Ubuntu distribution pre-installed by Dell for a while. Network configuration was easy enough and I could probably get used to the Desktop interface if I used it for a while. Next up was Moblin, more out of curiosity than for “serious” evaluation purposes. Having read some concerns about openSUSE 11.2 on Netbooks in some mailing list thread or review I decided to give it a try, knowing that I might be in for an unpleasant surprise. At the same time I was setting up the machine a thread about the Broadcom wireless card used in the Dell Mini appeared on the openSUSE mailing list,very timely indeed. As it turns out my concerns were unfounded.

I downloaded the GNOME Live CD from http://www.opensuse.org/en/, then used the information provided on the openSUSE wiki (http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick) to create a USB live image. After fiddling with the BIOS setting to boot from USB media first I was able to run the openSUSE 11.2 live image and the installer from the stick. Once openSUSE 11.2 was installed I configured the Ethernet card to get network access. Empowered with access to the Internet I added the packman repository

# zypper ar http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/11.2/ Packman

This can also be done through YaST for those more comfortable with GUI tools.

Next step was to refresh the repository data

# zypper refresh

and then to install the Broadcom firmware package and kernel driver

# zypper in broadcom-wl broadcom-wl-kmp-default

last but not least I loaded the module into the kernel

# modprobe wl

and now the Broadcom wireless card showed up when using the ifconfig command as eth1. I used the NetworkManager applet to configure the network connecting to my wireless AP and everything works just fine.

In summary, all is well with openSUSE 11.2 on the Dell Mini 10v including the 3D desktop with compiz.

Posted in openSUSE 11.2 | 1 Comment »

How to activate Flash Plugin for Google Chrome on openSUSE 11.2

December 9th, 2009 by

A couple of days ago, Google release a Beta version of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux. After installing the RPM I has been notice that the flash player doesn’t work. For make it work do the following as root:

cd /opt/google/chrome

ln -s /usr/lib/browser-plugins/ plugins

Restart Chrome and you are ready to watch some videos on youtube 🙂

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Documentation, KDE, Mozilla, openSUSE 11.2 | 20 Comments »

openSUSE celebrates X-mas in Nürnberg

December 8th, 2009 by

The openSUSE team in Nürnberg invites everybody interested in Linux and in particular in openSUSE to join our Christmas party on Wednesday December 16 in the basement of our office building in Nürnberg. We’ll give some presentation about openSUSE 11.2 in action, GIMP and how to participate at our project. Beside of the presentations we have some machines where especially openSUSE  Education and the openSUSE Build Service will be shown but openSUSE 11.2  is available too, of course. More information
We hope to reach out to many local people in the Nürnberg area.

Tags: ,
Posted in Boosters, Events, Marketing, openSUSE 11.2 | 1 Comment »

New pm-utils for openSUSE

November 25th, 2009 by

The current SUSE version of pm-utils is pretty old. Rpm -q said somethink like 0.99.4.20071229. And it also contains a hacked support for s2ram, which is nowadays in upstream version. There has been also a bnc#378883 – Need an updated pm-utils I started a work on this week.

A new pm-utils package for openSUSE is available in home:mvyskocil:branches:Base:System. The HIBERNATE_METHOD is no longer supported, because upstream version contains something better – modules. There are three methods how to run software suspend on Linux

  1. kernel – plain echo something > /proc/something
  2. suspend – tool contains a lot of quirks needed on some HW
  3. tuxonice – kernel and userspace support for hibernate, not in upstream kernel, nor in openSUSE

Because there are too many ways in current Linux world, pm-utils simply support all by specific modules stored in /usr/lib/pm-utils/modules.d, which implements appropriate functions for suspend/hibernate and hybrid. The SUSE default is uswsusp module calls s2ram/s2disk/s2both from software suspend project, because it should be considered as a safe default.

If you want to use different module, you can add a config file somewhere to
/etc/pm/conf.d/
and set the value of SLEEP_MODULE.

# The default sleep/wake system to use. Valid values are:
# kernel The built-in kernel suspend/resume support.
# Use this if nothing else is supported on your system.
# uswsusp If your system has support for the userspace
# suspend programs (s2ram/s2disk/s2both), then use this.
# tuxonice If your system has support for tuxonice, use this.
#
# The system defaults to "kernel" if this is commented out.
SLEEP_MODULE="uswsusp"

You can type more methods, which will be called, so SLEEP_MODULE=”kernel uswsusp” will use kernel and if it fail, or not available, it call uswsusp. Please note that config files are read in C sort order, so names matters.

So please install new pm-utils and test it and tell me if you found any regression (please inform me about a regressions only, I cannot fix generic suspend problems).

Posted in Base System, Factory | 2 Comments »

Report from openSUSE 11.2 Release Party in Prague

November 24th, 2009 by

On November 20th, the Czech members of the openSUSE Boosters Team organized openSUSE 11.2 Release Party. The party took place in the nice building of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

MFF

We have prepared installation DVDs, which we’ve burnt with Pavol the day before the party – about 20 32bit and the same amount of 64bit DVDs together with some promo DVDs. It was interesting that the 32bit DVDs were taken before the 64bit ones – we expected it to be the other way round. We had also some promotional stuff like T-shirts, caps, stickers etc. Everything disappeared in several minutes, so it seems that people enjoy wearing T-shirts with that little green creatures. 😉

promo

It was hard to estimate how many people will come – we have expected something around 20 participants. However, to our pleasant surprise, about 40 people showed up. Moreover, not only students and young people were present, but also two or three colleagues born a bit earlier.

people

After Pavol’s quick introduction of members of Czech openSUSE Boosters Team, Michal Hrusecky started his talk about new features in openSUSE 11.2 and new look and feel. Finally, Michal noted opening of Factory, new development model with devel projects, the Contrib repository and Junior Jobs.

michal

After a short snack break, Lubos talked about new KDE in openSUSE 11.2. It seems that the rotating cube effect never bores, so Lubos was asked to rotate his desktop. After having some troubles with figuring out how to switch the cube on, he of course succeeded and the cube worked – WOW! Next, Lubos exhumed his about two years old presentation named ‘What will be new in KDE 4.0’ (or something like that) and retroactively evaluated what the KDE developers achieved or not.

lubos

The rest of the party was rather interactive. Boosters and other participants helped with installation of 11.2, solving problems, answered questions and helped with creating bugzilla accounts and reporting bugs in case we had no clue. 😉

int2

int1

Our thanks belong to Faculty of Mathematics and Physics for allowing us to use classroom, SUSE CZ for sponsoring the promotional stuff and snacks and last but not least, to everybody who showed up at the party. Thanks!

For more photos from the party, please visit picasaweb.

Posted in Distribution, Events, openSUSE 11.2 | 2 Comments »

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e : creating open minds

November 17th, 2009 by

openSUSE Education community is proud to announce openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.2 . Li-f-e flavor bundles the best of softwares openSUSE has to offer, such as most popular Desktop Environments, educational application, development suites, multimedia, great user experience out of the box, and a lot more that is expected in a modern Operating System.

Li-f-e
Some highlights of what makes this a very special distribution:

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Education, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE 11.2, Server, Usability | 22 Comments »

openSUSE Launch Event in Nürnberg

November 13th, 2009 by

Yesterday evening we celebrated the openSUSE 11.2 launch in the Novell/SUSE Linux offices. Around fifty people showed up – both openSUSE folks employed by Novell and externals.

(more…)

Posted in Events, openSUSE 11.2 | Comments Off on openSUSE Launch Event in Nürnberg

openSUSE 11.2 is out

November 12th, 2009 by

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. After a couple of month good work towards the 11.2 we’re enjoying a very nice distribution which I already like very much. It is running on most of my machines for a few weeks now. I have already seen some SUSE Linux distros going gold over the time I spent with SUSE and my personal gut feeling tells me this is one of the more remarkable versions.

As usual it comes with tons of new up to date software and also the installation runs smoothly, please read the announcement for all the details, but what for me the most remarkable with 11.2 is that it is a real community openSUSE distro.

There is so much effort visible in 11.2 which was achieved through our growing community rather than just the SUSE people. We had a lots of requests in openFATE suggesting features, we discussed some of them quite heated, others were no-brainer. We again had lots of testers who hammered the alphas and betas and reported big and small bugs. On the openSUSE Conference many discussions about the upcoming distribution took place which were inspiring. We were able to utilize the powerful openSUSE Buildservice to build the distro together with all packagers very effectively. That improved the quality of our packages again. Another very visible thing for me personally is the desktop artwork which was done in best cooperation with upstream – and it looks so great that I hesitate to start applications which cover the desktop all day 😉

It is really exciting to see how things come together on the way to community distribution, and how far we got with openSUSE 11.2. I am happy about that and I am proud to be part of this and like to say thank you for every little bit you might have contributed. I believe that the message that openSUSE is your community distribution has arrived.

Of course openSUSE continues to be open for your ideas, the distribution can be the vehicle to power up ideas from a little application to huge software projects. The openSUSE project is the powerful community behind which helps to make ideas reality. And all that based on the principles of free software! I am really happy today and very excited about what future will bring 🙂

I hope to see you on the release event here in Nürnberg soon 🙂

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Posted in Artwork, Build Service, Distribution, openSUSE 11.2, Packaging, Quality Assurance | Comments Off on openSUSE 11.2 is out

openSUSE 11.2 Persistent LiveUSB Setup

November 12th, 2009 by

openSUSE 11.2 is out the door and it looks great – be sure to get your copy while it’s hot! One of the really great features of 11.2 is the opportunity to deploy the live media to USB in no time. Thanks to hybrid iso and clicfs you can carry around your persistent openSUSE 11.2 and use it wherever you are. What does persistence mean? Changes you do to the live media are preserved across reboots and you have a real operating system in a pocket without any restrictions. Isn’t that easy?

The setup is a breeze:

1. Download the 11.2 hybrid live media

2. Byte-copy the hybrid iso to your USB stick /dev/sdX
dd if=openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=32kBe aware that dd will erase all vital data from your flash media! Thus double-check that /dev/sdX actually is your USB stick.

3. Utilize fdisk to prepare an empty 0x83 partition for persistence from the remaining space on /dev/sdX, i.e. /dev/sdX2 (you should have at least a 2GB USB stick to be able to do this). The 0x83 partition /dev/sdX2 doesn’t need to be formatted with any filesystem – Kiwi will take care of this on first boot fully automatically.

That’s it! More detailed information about persistent 11.2 LiveUSB setup can be found on the wiki

Have a lot of fun!

Additional Hint: If you happen to have an installed version of openSUSE 11.2 already and prefer a GUI method to deploy the hybrid iso to USB flash media, you also may use kiwi-tools-imagewriter instead of dd.

Posted in openSUSE 11.2 | 6 Comments »

Linux launch party in mainstream press

November 11th, 2009 by

This appeared in todays The Times of India country’s number one English newspaper.

Be there for the launch party in your town.

Posted in Events, Marketing, openSUSE 11.2 | Comments Off on Linux launch party in mainstream press

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