Tag: openSUSE

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

And I have very little knowledge.

At the start of this year, I laid my hands on a new PC and ended up installing openSUSE Tumbleweed on it. As Linux distributions go, it’s a pleasure to use although I haven’t had much time to tinker with it. Until yesterday.

One, incredibly trivial, issue I have had with openSUSE is that the boot menu is really bland — just a list of available operating systems on a plain black background. So I started playing around with GRUB themes, because who doesn’t want a nice picture for the couple of seconds it takes me to hit Enter.

There is a reason why I usually avoid tinkering with stuff like this on weekdays and, inevitably enough, I broke my boot partition. This, in plain English, means that my PC is now unable to start and I have what amounts to a large brick sitting on my desk.

All is not lost, though, as I happened to have been looking at Manjaro over the weekend and, therefore, had a bootable USB stick. With this I was able get into the PC and take a backup of my Home folder. So all of my data is safe. Unless the cat gets at it, of course.

So tonight I shall be mainly trying to get Boot Repair to clean up my mess for me. And if all else fails, I will install Manjaro.

I am tempted to switch to Manjaro anyway. Doing so would let me get at the Arch AUR, which I do find myself missing on occasion. Additionally, Manjaro is really pretty.

Welcome to Tumbleweed

At the start of this year, I treated myself to a new PC. The first thing I do with any new PC is to scrape Windows off it and replace it with some variation of Linux, and this time I ended up going with openSUSE Tumbleweed.

I like openSUSE: it’s an unflashy and very solid distribution that reliably handles whatever demands I make of it. It comes in two flavours, Tumbleweed being the rolling release version and I’ve been hooked on rolling releases ever since I tried Sabayon way back in 2010. With a rolling release, you never need to reinstall or upgrade your operating system because the constant stream of updates keeps you completely up to date.

And so to Monday evening when a whole bunch of updates came down the pipe, including a fair bit of Gnome-related stuff. So I updated everything (which, I should note, is always a reliably quick process) and, to check that everything was still working as expected, I rebooted my PC.

At which point, this popped up on my screen.

Tumbleweed_Welcome_Screen
Welcome to openSUSE

Obviously, this is not my first time using openSUSE but the welcome screen is a nice touch. It’s a very friendly way of pointing you towards the documentation you are likely to need as well as where to find help if you need it. It’s also very consistent with my experience of openSUSE to date: friendly, helpful and (if I uncheck that ‘show on next startup’ option) completely unintrusive.

And I love the pirate gecko.

The Gecko saves the day

I nearly titled this post I Hate EFI because it really is a pain. But first, some context.

Having gone through several increasingly oversized laptops over the past few years, I took the decision just before Christmas to treat myself to a decent PC workstation. This duly arrived and, this week, I started assembling the system. Once everything was plugged in, I booted into Windows to confirm that all the hardware was working and then, being a Linux user, I set about replacing the operating system. This is where the fun began.

I have been using Antergos for a while and this is the first distro I attempted to install. The install itself when fine and everything seemed to be successful, until I rebooted. It turned out that the PC wouldn’t reboot unless I left the USB from which I had installed the OS plugged in. As far as I can tell, it was still using the EFI partition on the USB stick so I tried to resolve this by reinstalling with a little more care taken with the partitions. After this, it wouldn’t reboot at all.

After several attempts, I gave up and downloaded OpenSUSE Tumbleweed instead. As with Antergos, the install went smoothly and I even managed to reboot the PC. Then Tracker-Store went mad and started sucking up all of my CPU. So I reinstalled again, this time taking care to reformat my home partition. After several reboots and much checking, I’m feeling confident enough to tempt fate by claiming that everything is working. So this weekend I shall be mainly installing applications and restoring data.

I like OpenSUSE. It’s an unflashy, dependable distro that uncomplainingly copes with whatever I throw at it. Crucially, of the various distros I’ve tried, OpenSUSE is the one that best supports very new hardware — if all else fails, OpenSUSE will probably work.

I moved away from it in the past because I much prefer rolling releases. But with Tumbleweed now offering a stable rolling model I may well stick with it, for a while at least.

openSUSE 12.1 first impressions

I have been meaning to take a look at openSUSE for a while and, this evening, finally got around to putting it on my spare laptop.

I’ve only been playing around with it for an hour or so but my first impressions are really rather positive. The install went as smoothly as I have come to expect these days (that is: very smoothly indeed) and the auto configuration provided some nice touches – most notably remembering my wireless password from the LiveCD session.

I am planning to spend some time tinkering with it, but that’s for another day. For now, here’s a view of my (unchanged and unchanging) desktop.