Spin Ink

Today, December 7, 2006, marks the release of OpenSuSE 10.2. After the lackluster 10.1 release with its numerous and long-standing package management issues, OpenSuSE 10.2 promises to redeem the distro. Please check the OpenSuSE 10.2 Release Notes for more information.

The following list are few highlights of OpenSuSE 10.2:

• New Package Management Tools(zypper, opensuseupdater) that are NOT part of ZenWorks
• 2.6.18.x Kernel
• Xorg 7.2
• KDE 3.5.5
• GNOME 2.16
• Firefox 2
• CUPS 1.2
• New “kickoff” KDE and “Slab” GNOME menus

OpenSuSE 10.2 Looking Great

I have been running OpenSuSE 10.2 on my machine since Alpha 5. Since then, it has evolved into a great release. If you had problems with SuSE 10.1 package management and moved to an alternative package manager, such as Smart, rest assured that YaST package management is working very well again. In fact, I have even left all of the ZenWorks applets running with syncing enabled and YaST starts and operates with perfectly acceptable speeds as well as offering the benefit of delta rpms. I have not pulled out a stopwatch, however it appears to load faster than Smart GUI now. All of this considered, I am going back to using YaST as my primary package manager. I have not used ‘rug’ yet, but I plan to give it a shot soon. I was very glad to see that some non-ZenWorks tools had been included. I do not know about a default GNOME install, but with a default KDE install, zypper and opensuseupdater are installed as well as ZenWorks. If it does not work out with ZMD and rug, I will just remove ZenWorks. Some additional points of interest, as of 10.2, the released distribution is known as, OpenSuSE. This was done to clear up the confusion created by having the project/community known as OpenSuSE, but a distro called SuSE Linux. Also, I have Intel 2200 wireless in my laptop and I cannot get Network Manager to connect to my WPA AP(worked fine in 10.1) and if I disable network manager and use traditional ifup method, then ipw-firmware endlessly eats all of the system resources. I’m still looking into this, but if you have had similar experience, please let me know.

Get OpenSuSE 10.2

OpenSuSE 10.2 can be downloaded in any number of ways. I suggest going to http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version for download links, torrents metalinks, and mirrors. If you are on SuSE Linux 10.1 and looking to upgrade, just supplement my Upgrade to SuSE Linux 10.1 article with the OpenSuSE 10.2 sources given below.

A Quick Start Guide

Life has gotten a lot busier for me recently so I will not be doing a big article detailing the setup process of OpenSuSE 10.2. Instead, I will pass along a few short notes to point people in the right direction.

Adding Sources to YaST in OpenSuSE 10.2

Adding sources to YaST is quiet easy in 10.2. It is the same procedure as it was in 10.1, but now It actually works. Adding the online Install repository still takes a very long time. With a good mirror and a 3mbit connecting it took a good 10 or 15 minutes on my machine. That said, Guru, Packman, NonOSS sources added very quickly. Below I have provided a must-have list of sources to get multimedia codecs such as mp3.

• Main Installation Source: http://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/
• OpenSuSE 10.2 Update Source: http://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/suse/update/10.2/
• nonOSS Installation Source: http://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/non-oss/
• Guru 10.2 Source: http://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.2/RPMS/
• Packman 10.2 Source: http://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/10.2/

These may not be ideal mirrors for you, but I leave it to you to find additional mirrors. These sources can be added by going to YaST -> Installation Sources -> Add -> Specify URL. With the above sources, you can add mp3 playback to amarok by installing ‘libxine1′ through YaST -> Software Manager. Sorry, thats all folks, leave a comment if you have a specific question and I will try to come back and address it.