Monday, December 5, 2011

Impact of OpenSUSE 12.1 on Tumbleweed

My major motivation for trying Tumbleweed was to have an Arch Linux like distribution but with delta packages. Although delta rpms were only available for the packages in the 11.4 repository and not in the Tumbleweed repository, I continued to be interested in seeing how the 'rolling' model will evolve along with the other distributions of OpenSUSE.

The release of 12.1 distribution had a larger impact on Tumbleweed than I had expected. It was literally a distribution upgrade, no different from 11.4 to 12.1. Tumbleweed repository was emptied and based on 12.1 repository. All packages were upgraded. I had hoped that the Tumbleweed distribution to be very close to the 12.1 and the upgrade should have been minimal even though I had wondered how they will manage versions across repositories.

In the current upgrade, I had to change the repository to point to the current repository instead of 11.4. The current repository is now a symbolic repository so in future no change in the repository information will be needed. However, at least at present, Tumbleweed does not really appear to be a rolling distribution. It is more like the base with some updates, so, not particularly interesting. It is better to use Ubuntu with ppa's.

I will keep watching and may be Tumbleweed will evolve into an interesting alternative. At present, I continue to stick to Fedora and Arch Linux at home and Ubuntu at work.


4 comments:

  1. Hi - I was trying to locate someone who is using OpenSuse 12.1 on their Lenovo S10-3c and stumbled on your blog.

    Do you use the S10-3c or another variant? I ask because the earlier installation attempts with various newly released Linux distros (Ubuntu 10/11) were tough on me :(, most of them having issues with either the keyboard, the WiFi or other conflicts I didn't have time to read/research & rectify and I thought I'll get everything right before I try out OpenSuse 12.1 :)

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  2. My experience was that many of the function keys worked after ideapad-laptop driver was included in the kernel http://sethanil.blogspot.com/2010/11/lenovo-s10-3-with-2636.html

    Wifi support is provided by brcm80211 driver included in the staging drivers in the kernel. Kernels from SUSE and Ubuntu include it. http://sethanil.blogspot.com/2011/03/opensuse-tumbleweed.html

    Resuming from sleep has stopped working after upgrading to kernel 3.0 :( http://sethanil.blogspot.com/2011/08/arch-linux-experience-with-kernel-30.html

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  3. Thank you for your response and the links - quite interesting!

    I haven't much familiarity with Linux (yet) and I was hoping to set it up and run with it this weekend.

    I'll post on any updates, snags, etc.

    Best wishes for the new year and compliments of the tux :)

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  4. Hi,

    Just following up to my comments above, I finally found the workaround. Posting it here since this page shows up on a google search for S10-3c and Linux:

    "S10-3c + Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse 12.1)

    Apparently the BIOS update for the S10-3c is incomplete if you download from the Lenovo website and you need to download the 3CCN16WW.zip file (found after a quick google search) and update the BIOS according to instructions below:

    1) Unzip the file
    2) In the unzipped folder, click open the first folder and run the application. This is the American Megatrends screen, which updates the BIOS
    3) Open the second folder, click open (as admin if using Win7) the executable file and flash your BIOS & restart.

    Note:
    1) Best to remove any admin passwords, login passwords or any user specific passwords.
    2) Incase you already have the 3CCN16WW BIOS update, there is no cause for worry or any reason to downgrade (if that's possible) since I had the BIOS update from the .exe file the Lenovo official page has online.

    An hour later, I type this from an 'updating packages' Ubuntu 11.04 :)

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