LWN: Comments on "A look at openSUSE 12.3"

A look at openSUSE 12.3

thoeme — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:30:49 +0000

>but it is clear that allowing the installer to write to the master boot record (MBR) in a dual-Linux setup leads to an unbootable system
Hm, I have just installed 12.3 parallel to 12.2, with installing 12.3 GRUB2 in the MBR (my usual choice). Starting 12.3 and 12.2 works flawlessly. Maybe its playing nicer with older openSuSE versions than with Fedora et. all.

openSUSE 12.3 does not boot

jospoortvliet — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:04:19 +0000

It wasn't, neither was the network issue which made it into the release (wasn't considered a blocker as it is solved after a reboot) and the excellent UEFI documentation wasn't available yet either - it is now on https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:UEFI

openSUSE 12.3 does not boot

geuder — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:41:07 +0000

> It's not clear that openSUSE or its installer were the only culprits,

There is at least one issue in the Release Notes: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/i386/openSUSE/12.3/RELE... (maybe that was not yet documented during the press preview)

bootloaders on openSUSE

geuder — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:46:41 +0000

> but it is clear that allowing the installer to write to the master boot record (MBR) in a dual-Linux setup leads to an unbootable system

My comment does not directly relate to the authors experience because a.) I have still been too lazy to learn EFI and b.) my 12.3 image is just downloading as I type.

However, in general OpenSUSE approach to the bootloader has never met my personal criteria of least surprise. By default they install grub (nowadays grub2 to be exact) into the /boot partition (I typically have a separate one). Into the MBR they install a generic bootloader, which does nothing more than 1.) looks at which DOS partition has the boot flag set and 2.) calls the bootloader inside that partition.

It's a while since I installed the last OpenSUSE in a multi-boot configuration, but if that's the default regardless whether they are the only one on the disk or not it is not very co-operative to say it friendly.

Generally I have failed to get the idea with their generic loader. It could look like a symmetric way of having multi-boot using different boot loaders (or versions thereof) for the different systems instead of chain-loading. But I'm not aware of any user-friendly way to switch boot flags between power-on and boot, so it makes no sense for supporting multi-boot. Or do BIOSes acutually support this??? Now that I write it, it comes to my mind that I might not have looked at BIOS menus a lot after I first used OpenSUSE some 2.5 years ago. Well even if it could be done in BIOS, it seem slow than jumping through 2 levels of grub menus in chain-load scenario.

A look at openSUSE 12.3

jospoortvliet — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:16:30 +0000

It is true that installing LibreOffice via the one-click-install link isn't trivial as you have to allow YaST to replace all LibreOffice packages. The way OBS offers one-click-install packages is unfortunately limited in that (the One-Click-Install tech would support better solutions).

But most of the issue you had, the 100 packages with Gimp etc was the usual after-installation-update. openSUSE has a lot of packages set as 'recommended' but not installed on the live image and thus not on a fresh-from-live-stick install. Upon the first update, these, including flash and some other less-fully-open things, get pulled in.

If your first 'update' action is clicking a one-click-install, the two get combined and it does indeed get rather messy.

As you say, not something a slightly experienced user won't be able to deal with but it still is something that leaves room for improvement. But hey, that's a good thing - gives fun stuff to do ;-)