openSUSE Leap is a free and Linux-based operating system for your PC, Laptop or Server. You can surf the Web, manage your e-mails and photos, do office work, play videos or music and have a lot of fun!

The end of the maintenance period for openSUSE Leap 42.2 is now reached. To keep your systems up-to-date and secure, upgrade to a current openSUSE version. Before starting the upgrade, make sure that all maintenance updates for openSUSE Leap 42.2 are applied.

For more information about upgrading to a current openSUSE version, see http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Distribution-Upgrade.

If you upgrade from an older version to this openSUSE Leap release, see previous release notes listed here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Release_Notes.

Information about the project is available at https://www.opensuse.org.

1 Installation #

This section contains installation-related notes. For detailed upgrade instructions, see the documentation at https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/startup/html/book.opensuse.startup/part.basics.html.

1.1 Minimal System Installation # To avoid some big recommended packages from being installed, the pattern for minimal installations uses another pattern that creates conflicts with undesired packages. This pattern, patterns-openSUSE-minimal_base-conflicts , can be removed after installation. Note that the minimal installation has no firewall by default. If you need one, install SuSEfirewall2 .

1.2 UEFI—Unified Extensible Firmware Interface # Prior to installing openSUSE on a system that boots using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), you are urgently advised to check for any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends and, if available, to install such an update. A pre-installed Windows 8 is a strong indication that your system boots using UEFI. Background: Some UEFI firmware has bugs that cause it to break if too much data gets written to the UEFI storage area. However, there is no clear data of how much is “too much”. openSUSE minimizes the risk by not writing more than the bare minimum required to boot the OS. The minimum means telling the UEFI firmware about the location of the openSUSE boot loader. Upstream Linux kernel features that use the UEFI storage area for storing boot and crash information ( pstore ) have been disabled by default. Nevertheless, it is recommended to install any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends.

1.3 Installer Crashes When Set to Mount by Label by Default # When setting the default mount value to By Label during partitioning, the installer will report an error and crash. As a workaround, use another option for installation. If needed, switch back to By Label on the running system.

1.4 UEFI, GPT, and MS-DOS Partitions # Together with the EFI/UEFI specification, a new style of partitioning arrived: GPT (GUID Partition Table). This new schema uses globally unique identifiers (128-bit values displayed in 32 hexadecimal digits) to identify devices and partition types. Additionally, the UEFI specification also allows legacy MBR (MS-DOS) partitions. The Linux boot loaders (ELILO or GRUB 2) try to automatically generate a GUID for those legacy partitions, and write them to the firmware. Such a GUID can change frequently, causing a rewrite in the firmware. A rewrite consists of two different operations: Removing the old entry and creating a new entry that replaces the first one. Modern firmware has a garbage collector that collects deleted entries and frees the memory reserved for old entries. A problem arises when faulty firmware does not collect and free those entries. This can result in a non-bootable system. To work around this problem, convert the legacy MBR partition to GPT.