The 8th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released today. As has become common now, the OpenSUSE team did not post any changelog, sadly. There’s a list of most annoying bugs, and the download locations are listed inside the release announcement.
The 8th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released today. As has become common now, the OpenSUSE team did not post any changelog, sadly. There’s a list of most annoying bugs, and the download locations are listed inside the release announcement.
Having just installed 10.0 and liking it fairly well, I do look forward to 10.1 being released soon. I find it is on the whole better than Linux-based operating systems have been in the past. But a few problems I hope to solve and learn how some of these new technologies actually work.
I hope they’ve improved the boot speed and overall performance “feel” of the OS with this release. For whatever reason 10.0 feels a little sluggish.
I’m looking forward to it.
You could simple speed up the boot time if you deinstall SUPER preloading (package ‘preload’).
From the “Bugs” page:
Due to the integration of the new package manager which is not complete, note the following:
New package manager, eh? Anyone know anything about this?
I think it has something to do with the slick or super suse. I think its help from the yoper delvelopers with apt-rpm or smart im not sure.
If SUSE gets a package manager like this. I think ill be using it instead of Ubuntu since i love apt.
Edited 2006-03-17 02:32
to quote mr. jaeger
Package Manager Major Changes
=============================
We’re replacing our package manager resolver library with a new version
called “libzypp”.
libzypp is the integration of SUSE’s yast2 Package manager and
Ximian’s libredcarpet. At Novell we used two solutions so far – Red
Carpet and YaST package manager – and decided to merge both in a best
of breed approach.
The advantages for SUSE Linux are:
* A better resolver than before
* More information about why a package is installed or no solution is
found
* A better integration of all those feature that were added over the
years to our package manager.
* A command line interface (“rug”)
* A common handling of packages *and* patches
* Dependency handling for update packages
* A better way to handle selections (we call them now “patterns”)
* Remote management (not yet in SUSE Linux 10.1)
* Additional repositories during installation (no GUI in SUSE Linux 10.1)
* More flexibility in handling of different repositories, e.g. it is
possible to have additional patterns for each repository.
The new library handles yum metadata, YaST sources (both also remote
via ftp, http, nfs and smb) and additionally Zenworks, Opencarpet and
RCE (Red Carpet Enterprise) servers as installation sources. The
alternatives smart and apt-get will also work as they did on SUSE
Linux 10.0.
Together with libzypp, we get the zmd daemon, the rug command line
interface, the zen-updater, zen-remover, zen-installer packages.
In addition to the existing packages, we’re adding these new packages:
* zmd: system daemon used by rug, zen-*
* rug: Command line client
* web-updater: Updater with more features than zen-updater
* zen-updater: Simple updater
* zen-remover: Tool to remove packages
* zen-installer: Tool to add packages
We’re still working on the integration of “libzypp” into our tree, the
package manager in our FACTORY tree is not yet fully functional.
Hmm…I ran FC1/2/3 for a while, on multiple machines, and I _always_ ran into a problem with rcd. After a while it would just start locking up, and the only way to resolve the problem was to reboot. Killing rcd and would leave the RPM database locked (I never did bother trying to find out how to manually unlock the database — I shouldn’t have to).
Now, I have had my fair share of issues with YAST in the past. I haven’t used either in a while, having primarily switched back to Windoze (I run Ubuntu on my server) so I can’t really speak on their stability these days. I am going to guess that the problem was related to something I did, but who knows what. In contrast, I haven’t had _any_ problems with apt at all — I love it.
Having said all that, I just installed SUSE 10.0 x86-64 on my main machine (Shuttle SN25P w/ Athlon X2 3800+ + 2GB RAM) and it’s damn fast (I haven’t compared it to the 32bit version on the same hardware, so that unscientific and superficial analysis is incredibly subjective)! However, I cannot run Gnome, for some reason. I tried SUSE and Ubuntu, and both give me the same results — black screen when X starts, and that’s it. The mouse works, but nothing else. I gather I’m not the only person who has encountered this problem…
But I digress. I have mixed feelings about combining YAST and RedCarpet. It makes sense that they should standardize on a single package manager, but merging the two and trying to cram them into an almost-release-candidate distribution seems retarded to me. I’m sure they have good reason.
is this distro that buggy that it requires 8+ beta releases?
The integration of a new package manager backend came just in the middle of the beta testing period. It was already pretty much stable and almost ready for RC at beta3, IMHO. But this package manager changes were forced on openSUSE because of the business product line, which is based on the openSUSE project. Not a good timing, but at least, the rest of the distribution was tested even more 🙂
The new package manager sounds very interesting and is a pretty big change. Linux distros generally don’t offer much guidance in their package managers. You are presented with a huge list of strange-sounding programs, and it’s not always obvious to the new user that joe, vim, nano, leafpad and kate are all text editors, for example. I wonder if SuSE will tweak things up and offer a “best of breed” approach. The field is open on this one.
I do hope that SuSE do something about the general slowness of the OS, though. It is the one thing that stops me from making more use of it. Things do seem aimed at serving rather than nipping around the desktop, both some of the kernel settings and YaST generally which assumes you are a bit of a sysadmin. If SuSE was faster and YaST was a little friendlier to Joe User this OS could be a killer.
Don’t think I’ll be trying beta 8, though. There could be many more releases before the final cut, for all we know
Kudos to SuSE for making it all available as bittorrent, though. When I last looked, the betas for FreeBSD were only up as iso files.
“When I last looked, the betas for FreeBSD were only up as iso files.”
A bit off-topic, but I fail to see why this is a point of complaint. I’ve never had download speed issues when fetching FreeBSD. AFAIK the FreeBSD project has quite a few quite heavily connected servers mirroring for them. I generally get 1000-2000kB/s+ grabbing isos, and I’m in Hawaii. I fail to see how BT would make this any better. I can, however, see how things could get worse.
8 RC and what?
– look at IE 6.00.2900.2186 or XP and take a look at their release number (it may also be build)
– I also develop with eclipse milestone M1, M2, M3 and only use to have 1 problem in 2 years.
The problem is not the number of RC, as long as it stay a RC, the real question is more: How many unit testcases has the kernel and/or Suse…I dont think Novel only rely on user feedback to acknowledge on code quality…
Has SUSE/Novell mentioned whether compiz and xgl will be integrated in the final release? If they have, I haven’t seen the announcement (of course, I haven’t really been looking for it, either). Just curious.
Hopefully the new package manager will auto-resolve dependencies when applicable instead of popping up a list of manual fixes, which is what YaST does now.
Xgl and Compiz are included in beta8, although they are not installed by default. They’re on CD5.
The Gnome Control panel also has an icon that appears to allow you to turn it on, but I’ve just configured it manually according to the opensuse wiki page on Xgl.
I just did a fresh install and it’s working mighty nicely. ALL of the installation issues that I had on previous beta’s (mostly because of the new package management) are fixed. Now I’m putting on a few extra’s and I’ll give it the once-over….but it looks like it will be a good release next month….I was worried for a while when they broke everything mid-stream…but WOW..what a difference now with beta 8!
It makes sense that they should standardize on a single package manager, but merging the two and trying to cram them into an almost-release-candidate distribution seems retarded to me. I’m sure they have good reason.
They probably want to road-test Red Carpet/YaST integration in time for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/preview.html) so they can solve the kinds of bugs you mentioned.
In Novell Linux Desktop 9, their current enterprise desktop offering, the two are seperate – which is a complete pain. You can use Red Carpet to install updates and new packages from the Internet (http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bu4rlng…).
However, you can also use YaST, which not only does the above but also lets you install patches from a CD, as well as add/remove packages from the original install set (http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bsj9mwg…).
The same kind of problems exist during deployment and administration. If you want to deploy NLD, you don’t use Red Carpet or ZENWorks, you use AutoYaST instead (http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bt056w8…).
Once you’ve used AutoYaST to deploy NLD, though, it’s back to ZENWorks and Red Carpet to perform software delivery (http://www.novell.com/documentation/zenworks7/lm7install/data/bxg22…) and – more importantly – lock down desktops (http://www.novell.com/documentation/zenworks7/lm7install/data/bxg2x…).
Basically, it’s a mess to work with and the sooner Novell integrates Red Carpet & ZENWorks with YaST the better. This looks like the first step in a long overdue direction.