Saturday, February 18, 2017

Testing OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

It has been a long time since I have tested a new distro, so here I am again, Now trying openSUSE Tumbleweed. I never tried openSUSE for more than a few days, so hopefully this time I willl build my own oppinion. I am going for Tumbleweed, the rolling release, since I am the bleeding edge guy.

Install

I have selected the NET install iso, because I have a decent internet connection, and I like to have a clean desktop, only installing software as needed. The iso is available from http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/ .

I have created a bootable usb with the following procedure:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Create_a_Live_USB_stick_using_Windows#Using_ImageUSB

Post Install Issues

After installing a 3rd SDD disk do my desktop computer 2 years ago, installing any OS resulted in a broken boot system. It was no different with Tumbleweed, I just ended on a GRUB2 "No such device". However it was quite easy to fix, OpenSUSE's media has a "Boot from installed system" which detects an existing install, and boot from it. It worked like a charm. Then having some technical background on the issue. With a full booted and functional system, I have installed GRUB to the MBR from all the 3 disks, and it was done. A reboot presented me a nice boot graphical logo to select the system (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Windows 10).

I have switched from Gnome (2.0) to Cinnamon for the last couple of years, unfortunately the installer does not have a Cinnamon option for the install type. I have selected "Minimal X Environment" so that I could install cinnamon from the repositories later, that got me into another issue. The Minimal X provided IceWM and YaST «a nice system config management tool», however while attempting to configure the WiFi network, I have found that the system was missing the core packages required for Wifi connectivity (iw; wpa_supplicant), it was kind of blocking since I don't have a wired network. I had to boot into Windows to fetch the packages from:

I have filled a bug report for this issue:

I am currently finishing this blog post from Tumbleweed, hopefully I will report about a more wide experience during next week :)