First look at openSUSE 12.3



The openSUSE project has been around for a long time under one name or another. The community distribution attempts to be one of the best and most flexible desktop, server and cloud solutions available in the Linux ecosystem. It is a lofty goal, but the project, through the course of its long history, has generally done quite well at providing a polished Linux distribution to its users. The latest release from the project, version 12.3, appears to be mostly made up of incremental improvements. The packages in openSUSE's repositories have been upgraded, giving users access to the KDE 4.10 desktop, GNOME 3.6 and up-to-date virtualization technology. Improvements have been made to openSUSE's OpenStack cloud technology and the systemd init implementation. The project has transitioned from using MySQL to MariaDB and the project's Btrfs implementation has been updated in the hopes of offering better reliability and file system snapshot support. This version of openSUSE will receive security updates for two releases plus two months, or approximately 18 months in total based on the current release schedule.



People wishing to try the latest version of openSUSE have a number of download options. The project offers a handful of flavours, including a full DVD with a large collection of optional software, a KDE edition, a GNOME edition, a Rescue CD and there is a minimal net-install option. Each of these flavours can be had in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to download the KDE edition of openSUSE 12.3 and I found the ISO image was about 930 MB in size. Booting from the openSUSE media brings up a boot menu which will let us launch the distribution's desktop environment from the live media, launch the system installer or perform a media check. Diving into the live environment brings us to a KDE desktop. A window opens which introduces us to the distribution and provides many links to the project's documentation, help forums and to the KDE project's user documentation. Dismissing this window we find a collection of icons on the desktop. These icons act as launchers for a web browser, the system installer, the LibreOffice suite and the KInfocenter which provides us with information on our machine's hardware. At the bottom of the display we find an application menu, task switcher and system tray. I found that desktop effects were enabled by default. These are mostly subtle visual effects and the KDE desktop was quite responsive while these bits of eye-candy were enabled.







openSUSE 12.3 - the welcome screen

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The openSUSE installer is a graphical application which has a great many features. Generally speaking each page of the installer gives us a simple question and we can supply answers or take the default settings. Should we wish to look deeper most pages have advanced options which allow us to tunnel further into the configuration details. This makes installing openSUSE fairly straight forward, but it also gives us a great deal of power over our initial setup. The installer walks us through accepting the license agreement and confirming our preferred language and keyboard layout. We select our time zone from a map of the world and we can optionally set the date & time.



The partitioning screen takes a singular approach, letting us check boxes to indicate which features we want for our system and the partition manager will then attempt to match our desires with a partition layout. Alternatively we can manually manage partitions and I found the installer to be very flexible. We can select almost any file system for our partitions, encryption is supported and we can even set mount flags for specific mount points. Both LVM and Btrfs are supported by the partition manager. The next page of the installer asks us to create a user account and set passwords for both our account and the root user. The final screen shows a summary of actions the installer will take and there are links next to these actions. Clicking the links bring up pages where we can alter the pending actions. For example we can swap out GRUB2 for GRUB Legacy or LILO, we can change which partitions will be formatted and other details.



The first couple of times I went through the installer I tried to set up a Btrfs volume as I had the last time I experimented with openSUSE. It was one of the features I enjoyed most when using openSUSE last year, but this time I wasn't able to get the installer to configure the advanced file system. I tried with a few different layouts and with simply handing the entire free disk space over to the installer's guided partitioning wizard, but each time I was shown an error saying Btrfs couldn't be set up. I finally gave in and set up my system using the ext3 file system instead. The installer copied its files to my hard drive quite quickly, only taking a few minutes. When the installer finished it offered to reboot the machine.







openSUSE 12.3 - running the graphical installer

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Aside from the errors I ran into while setting up openSUSE I ran into an additional issue, namely hardware support. At first I attempted to load openSUSE on my desktop machine (dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU, 6 GB of RAM, Radeon video card, Realtek network card) and, initially, I had trouble getting the distribution to boot. Disabling kernel mode setting I was able to get openSUSE to boot, but only to a text console; I was not able to access the desktop or graphical installer. Switching to my laptop (dual-core 2 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, Intel video card, Intel wireless card) I ran to into lock-ups the first two times I attempted to boot from the live media. The third time I attempted to load openSUSE on my laptop the operating system brought me to the live desktop without any problems and without any adjustments made on my part. In addition to running openSUSE on my laptop I also ran the distribution in a VirtualBox virtual machine. In both environments I found openSUSE ran quickly, boot times were short and the desktop was very responsive, even with file indexing and visual effects enabled. The operating system was light on resources, using approximately 225 MB of memory while logged into the KDE desktop.



Booting openSUSE brings us to a graphical login screen. The first time a user logs in they see the same welcome screen we encountered on the live media. Icons for launching popular applications sit on the desktop and the background is mostly dark and subtle. Shortly after logging in a small notification appeared in the corner of the screen letting me know package updates were available in the repositories. Clicking on this notice brings up the Apper package manager and it displays a list of packages waiting to be downloaded. We can select which items we wish to upgrade and then Apper goes to work, downloading and applying the updates, all the while showing us progress information. It's a smooth experience, made smoother than we might normally expect of Linux distributions as we are not prompted for a password or privilege escalation prior to the new packages being installed. Apart from handling updates Apper also functions as the distribution's primary graphical package manager. Using Apper we can browse through software categories using a simple web-like interface. We can mark packages for installation or removal with the click of a button. Queued actions are handled in batches by Apper. I found the package manager worked quickly and I encountered no problems with it.







openSUSE 12.3 - downloading package updates

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I did, however, run into a problem when trying to play multimedia files. There are audio and video applications present in openSUSE's default installation, but no non-free codecs. The system will offer to hunt down these codecs when we attempt to play media files, but this doesn't help us as the codecs are not packaged in the main repositories. Enabling media playback is a rather roundabout process which leads us through several pages of the openSUSE wiki, downloading the necessary community repository information, enabling these repositories and then confirming we will choose to trust the third-party package signing keys. It is not a user-friendly process and even doing it properly takes us through about eight screens. Once the community repository is enabled the system will offer to download the codecs. In my case what actually happened was the package manager downloaded the codecs, Flash support and about 970MB of additional packages, including the "screen" utility, several command line shells, the Python scripting language and LibreOffice updates. It was a long, slow download with a lot of extra software attached to it, but I did (in the end) end up with multimedia and Flash support.



The KDE edition of openSUSE comes with a useful collection of software. We're given the Firefox and Konqueror web browsers. The Kopete and Konversation chat clients are installed for us as is the LibreOffice suite. The Okular document viewer is available to us. The KTorrent bittorrent client is installed by default as is the Marble virtual globe. The KDE System Settings panel is available to help us configure the graphical interface and the YaST configuration utility lets us administer the rest of the operating system. There are accessibility features available, including an app to assist users in manipulating the mouse, another magnifies the screen and there is a virtual keyboard in the default installation. I found two privacy tools, KGpg and the Kleopatra utility, these both deal with security keys and encryption. The Network Manager utility assists us in getting on-line and there are the usual small apps for editing text files, managing archives, crunching numbers and taking notes. Java is available to us and I found the system runs both a mail service and secure shell by default. Behind the scenes openSUSE runs on the Linux kernel, version 3.7. I found when trying to run a command from the system's console, when the command was not available, the system would to try to locate the missing program in the distribution's repositories.



The YaST configuration manager has always been a shining star in openSUSE's sky. The graphical portal allows us to configure all aspects of the operating system from the comfort of a well organized graphical interface. There are a lot of options to choose from, but they are arranged clearly and the YaST family of tools do a nice job of providing both power and ease of use. I found the YaST tools worked well and they grant a lot of power to the system administrator, giving us control over all the distribution's services, security, networking and packages. I did run into a few cases where YaST's utilities would produce an error indicating a new configuration couldn't be saved, but I found closing the control centre, going back and trying a second time always gave me the desired results. One unexpected characteristic of openSUSE's default configuration is all user accounts are granted sudo privileges by default. This is handy in a home environment, but probably isn't what we want in more complex situations. The YaST control centre dedicates a module to managing sudo and the default behaviour is easy to change should we require a more restricted security policy.







openSUSE 12.3 - the YaST configuration centre

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One thing which surprised me in the wake of openSUSE 12.3's launch wasn't technical in nature, but perhaps political. A few years back the Fedora team introduced a policy change in their distribution which would allow regular users to install updates without administrator privileges. There was quite a strong (and negative) reaction from the Linux community over the issue and the change was eventually reversed. On the other hand openSUSE allows users, even users without any sort of admin or sudo access, to install updates in the same manner and I have yet to hear a peep from the community over the issue. There appears to be a double standard here and I have to wonder why openSUSE gets a pass while Fedora does not over the same feature.





While getting openSUSE up and running I ran into several speed bumps involving hardware support, enabling multimedia support and an inability to use Btrfs and the associated Btrfs features. These problems make me think the current version of openSUSE could have benefited from additional quality assurance checks. It certainly wasn't the same simple install-and-go experience I enjoyed with version 12.2 of the distribution. However, once the pieces were in place the distribution provided a surprisingly smooth, fast and pleasant experience. The operating system boots quickly and runs fast. Even with all the desktop features enabled the system is responsive and KDE 4.10 is quite polished. There were a few minor glitches when using the YaST configuration panel, but overall YaST is still one of the better configuration tools in the Linux community. I really like the detailed documentation provided by openSUSE, the welcome screen and the attention to little details. The openSUSE project is really ideal for users who want a balance between power and ease of use and the entire system appears focused on the idea that things should be easy without removing control form the user. It's a fine line to walk, but I think the openSUSE developers have done a good job.



