openSUSE 12.2: Green Means Go!
September 5th, 2012 by Jos Poortvliet
Dear users, developers, and Geekos around the world – openSUSE 12.2 is ready for you! Two months of extra stabilization work have resulted into a stellar release, chock-full of goodies, yet stable as you all like it.
(In other languages: cs de es fr it nl pt ru tr zh zh-tw)
The latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in mature new technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder.
“We are proud of this release, maintaining the usual high openSUSE quality standards.” said Andrew Wafaa from the openSUSE Board. “The delay in the schedule caused by our growth in the last two years means we have to work on scaling our processes. Now this release is out and with the upcoming openSUSE conference in October in Prague, the community has time and opportunity to work on that.”
A few of the most notable changes are in the following areas:
Performance
From the kernel to the desktop, openSUSE 12.2 brings you speed-ups: Linux 3.4 has a faster storage layer to prevent blocking during large transfers. glibc 2.15, the basic library, improves the performance of many functions especially on 64 bit systems. Systemd 44 enables faster booting. And KDE 4.8.4 builds on Qt 4.8.1 to make the desktop more responsive.
Evolution
openSUSE adopts the latest developments in Linux distribution technology as they mature. The GRUB2 bootloader is now the default, we’ve begun the process of revising and simplifying the UNIX filesystem hierarchy to improve compatibility across distributions, and during startup and and shutdown Plymouth 0.8.6.1 provides flicker-free transitions and attractive animations.
Polish
GNOME 3.4 introduces smooth scrolling in all applications, a reworked System Settings app and polished Contacts manager. XFCE 4.10 has an improved application finder and allows vertical panels. The Dolphin file manager is both prettier and faster.
Innovation
XOrg 1.12 introduces support for multitouch input devices, and multi-seat deployments. Mozilla Firefox supports the latest Web technologies. The llvmpipe software 3D renderer enables Gnome Shell and virtual machines to use compositing even where no 3D hardware is present. GIMP 2.8 and Krita 2.4 make Free image processing and natural media painting competitive with proprietary tools. Tomahawk Player promises to make listening to music on your computer a social experience.
Stability
LibreOffice 3.5 continues to refine the Free office suite experience with many additions and improvements. KDE 4.8.4′s email and calendaring applications have increased stability, while the next-generation btrfs filesystem now has improved error handling and recovery tools.
Management
The 3.4 kernel allows the capping of CPU usage across entire groups of processes. The new version of systemd offers a watchdog function for supervising services under its control, as well as a new process management tool. Sysadmins will benefit from a new suite of Digital Forensics/Incident Response tools.
Novelty
A set of heavyweight scientific tools brings math applications such as numeric computation, plotting, and visualization to openSUSE. The Stellarium astronomical simulator lets you explore the night sky without a telescope. Programmers will enjoy version 1.0.2 of Google’s Go language, as well as the latest C++ language standards implemented in GCC 4.7.1 and Qt Creator 2.5.
Aside from these technical changes, the documentation team has made a major revision of the reference manuals, and has introduced changes to make it easier for community contributors to write openSUSE documentation.
For more details about the latest innovations in openSUSE 12.2 visit opensuse.org/12.2.
Support and release process
As usual, this release will continue to be supported for at least 2 release cycles + 2 months. Currently, openSUSE 12.3 is scheduled in about six months, as the 12.2 release was delayed for two months. As the project is currently re-thinking its engineering- and release processes, this schedule is likely to change.
A number of changes has already been implemented to the openSUSE development process, with the release team experimenting with staging projects to distribute the integration workload and the Open Build Service team having upgraded the build farm with SSDs and using preinstall images to rapidly setup build virtual machines. More changes, however, are to be decided upon at the openSUSE Summit in Orlando and the openSUSE Conference in October in Prague. Be there if you want to make a difference!
Go, get it!
Downloads of openSUSE 12.2 can be found at software.opensuse.org/122
Users currently running openSUSE 12.1 can upgrade to openSUSE 12.2 via the instructions at this link. Users who have a properly set-up Tumbleweed setup will automatically migrate to the new release without any additional effort!
Have a lot of fun!
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- Tags:No tags available
- Category: Announcements · Distribution
- Posted: 2012-09-05 - 12:00
- Author: Jos Poortvliet
- Feed: RSS 2.0
123 Responses to “openSUSE 12.2: Green Means Go!”
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Biff September 7, 2012 at 09:41 |
Three cheers for a still broken nouveau!
What exactly is the point of this broken program?
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jsh September 8, 2012 at 06:23 |
I also have a problem with nouveau, and again have to revert back to the proprietary to have my display working.
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&s=48' class='avatar avatar-48 photo avatar-default' '48' '48' /> Bob September 8, 2012 at 09:25 |
Yeah, strange things are going on in this world – and one of this is to replace relatively well written proprietary Linux programs with their buggy and slower OSS counterparts. Remember the “gnash” joke? If OSS manages to beat its equivalent propware – no problem. But for all the the other cases it would be awfully nice and helpful for most of us to have the respective default installation choices.
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hopeful September 10, 2012 at 11:37 |
The point is that you have a picture while you download Nvidia driver ;-)
Otherwise you have to do it in text mode yast, like in the previous release…Reply-
Zippy September 12, 2012 at 19:53 |
What?
What does nouveau have to do with a graphical install of the real Nvidia drivers?
Nothing.
I have been using Yast to instal nvidia longer than nouveau has been around
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&s=48' class='avatar avatar-48 photo avatar-default' '48' '48' /> gan September 8, 2012 at 12:48 |
It hangs if you boot with wireless(on laptop) turned off, whatever you use network manager or not(as in 12.1).
Acpi problems, cannot modify monitor brightness, it works with acpi=off but you will not have any power management.Reply-
&s=48' class='avatar avatar-48 photo avatar-default' '48' '48' /> ren September 8, 2012 at 15:13 |
And randomly hangs on poweroff.
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Ingo September 8, 2012 at 13:42 |
Very impressive! This release is much(!) faster than every other OS i’ve ever tried.
Just awesome‘Think openSuse’s back in business huh? :)
good work and thank you!
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Nagapuspa57 September 9, 2012 at 13:31 |
Thx openSUSE team. I has been long time waiting for this release.
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devesh September 9, 2012 at 17:06 |
I also have a problem with nouveau, and again have to revert back to the proprietary to have my display working
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Ingo September 9, 2012 at 18:28 |
Press Ctrl-Alt & Backspace if there are frafical issues with Nouveau. Works fine, but just a workaround
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Victorhck September 10, 2012 at 19:54 |
Thnx to all the team!!
Have a lot of fun!!Reply -
Cahya September 11, 2012 at 05:51 |
Well, I have a problem when upgrading my Tumbleweed, so I did clean install to get this release on Gnome edition. Overall, it is nice, very nice indeed ;).
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Eric P. September 11, 2012 at 06:59 |
This release is awful! I’ve NEVER experience such an unpolished Linux distribution I’ve used in my nearly-fifteen years using Linux!
1. It takes 35 minutes to install from DVD (including the autoconfiguration step) on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM with a 160 GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD.
2. Once openSUSE 12.2 is installed, the Ethernet interface (Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5755M) flaps constantly.
3. The Software Manager and the Software Update tool both freeze for long periods of time and complain that the repositories are unavailable – probably because of the flapping of the Ethernet interface.
4. Every time that the Software Manager is launched, it’s all scrunched up in the upper left corner of the screen (and expanding it to full-size leaves the package and the description windows so small that they’re unusable).
5. The installer-script for the Broadcom 43xx drivers (/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware) causes a kernel panic _every_ time (leaving the system in an unusable state on more than one occasion) so the Broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN NIC is also unusable.
6. The Software Manager closes after every change (forcing users to re-enter the root password in order to return to the interface).
7. The packaging of VirtualBox more obtuse than any other distribution that I’ve ever used: The VirtualBox-qt package is not installed along with the Virtualbox package/pattern (Other distributions include the qt interface along with the executable); the VBox GTK interface (installed by default along with VirtualBox) does not explain that the reason that it failed to run is that the user must belong to the vboxuser group, and; Installing the Default kernel does not update GRUB (so, on the next boot, the Desktop kernel is loaded instead).
8. The video driver (nouveau) seems to be very unstable and occasionally leaves 98% of the screen unusable.If I sound ungrateful, it’s only because I was so hopeful that I’d finally found a better RPM-based desktop distribution to fill the gap left by Mandriva’s collapse.
openSUSE 12.1, seems good – though the installation process seems interminably long and VirtualBox suffers from the same packaging idiocy.
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Netscapist September 11, 2012 at 17:31 |
Probably you are right.
>>>1. It takes 35 minutes to install from DVD (including the autoconfiguration step) on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM with a 160 GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD.
You are a lucky guy! I can not install from DVD at all. System is hanging. No log, no trace. The LiveCD is okay.
>>>3. The Software Manager and the Software Update tool both freeze for long periods of time and complain that the repositories are unavailable – probably because of the flapping of the Ethernet interface.
Yes, it freezes in spite of my stable wired network connection. Suddenly it started working normally a day ago. I have no explanation. Maybe there were problems with repositories.
>>>6. The Software Manager closes after every change (forcing users to re-enter the root password in order to return to the interface).
Just follow these steps:
1. Start YaST
2. Choose /etc/sysconfig Editor
3. Go to System
4. Then go to YaST
5. Choose GUI
6. Select PKGMGR_ACTION_AT_EXIT
7. Then select Restart
All done, have fun.>>>7. The packaging of VirtualBox
Just forget about this defective version of VirtualBox. Use VirtualBox from the official site: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads . Works fine for me, no problem.
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Netscapist September 11, 2012 at 17:41 |
>>>8. The video driver (nouveau) seems to be very unstable and occasionally leaves 98% of the screen unusable.
Just replace it with nVidia.
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Experienced Newbie September 12, 2012 at 04:08 |
To fix the garble screen with nouveau driver.
1. Press ESC at grub boot and remove “splash=silent” from kernel opts. Append ” 3″ to get RL3. Boot and login as root, or the affected user.2. This is a KDE problem, that starts to occur from the second boot. Remove /var/tmp/kde-cache tmp and socket files. Do the same in the /tmp directory. Same thing in ~user/.kde4/ directory. If unhappy, remove “splash=silent” from the grub menu, which permanently stops the splash screen. It does, however, work OK with the splash.
Voila! No more cubist displays.
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Eric P. September 12, 2012 at 22:43 |
It also seems to effect GNOME3. :(
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Opensuse Reposworthless September 17, 2012 at 18:48 |
The VirtualBox in the repos is worthless.
Download an RPM from the official site.
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anamezon September 11, 2012 at 08:53 |
“The llvmpipe software 3D renderer enables Gnome Shell and virtual machines to use compositing even where no 3D hardware is present.”
yep, by piping/offloading all the work to the CPU(s) :( so unless you have hardware with a 3D-able driver, the choice is yours (I hope this llvmpipe can be turned on/off?) – fast and simple, or slow and beautiful … either way, enjoy this release!
for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.