My openSUSE 12 Journal 12: Hello 12.3!

Hello openSUSE 12.3!  You were released into the big bad world on 13 March 2013 and you are fantastic!


Two weeks back, I installed 12.3 onto a new partition on my primary workstation/laptop in one hour.  By the hour thereafter, and I do need to install quite a handful of additional software, I was working on my day job without skipping a beat.  One of the software that is critical to my job is IBM Notes 9 Social Edition. As covered in my previous blog entry on the beta, IBM Notes 9 has been officially released on 2 March 2013.  Look out for my next blog entry on installing the Generally Available(GA) version of IBM Notes 9 Social Edition on openSUSE 12.3.

Hand on my heart, 12.3 is a very worthy successor to 12.2.  I am very happy with it, and if you know me, that says alot... BUT... there is one little usage/design point with the GUI of NetworkManager that got me confused and I was unable to get onto my office's Cisco LEAP wireless network.  This was resolved eventually (after 3 days and a weekend) and it turns out to be a non-issue... or a usage issue... or... anyway, look out for this in my next entry.

Installation and Partitioning

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 9: Upgrading to Stable Kernel 3.7.4

I took every step and every precaution, with fear and trembling, but I finally took the plunge to upgraded my default kernel (3.4.11) in openSUSE 12.2 to the latest stable kernel (3.7.4).

You know what?  This is the best thing I could have ever done for my laptop!!!

Special Thanks to Mike Veltman, appreciate your guidance and encouragement.

What made me do it?
I have been using openSUSE 12.2 for over 3+ weeks and have noticed some performance issues from a desktop productivity perspective.  This was confirmed when speaking with Mike and also confirmed by a comment from Jack Bauer on my previous blog entry.

Scenario:  Try copying a large amount of files (total file size of say over 1Gb) from your hard disk to an external USB drive.  During the file transfer (doesn't matter if you initiate the transfer via commandline or GUI), the rest of the desktop (except the mouse pointer) is practically dead and unresponsive.  At best, a simple task of opening a new tab on Firefox to surf will take over 10 seconds.  If you want to open LibreOffice to read a doc/spreadsheet, you can forget-about-it.

This was initially tolerated because I would schedule large file backups in the evening after work.  However, it is starting to get to me because I don't recall earlier openSUSE 11.3, 11.4 and 12.1 ever giving me such issues.  The final straw came this week and its my Windows VM... it was running well but I have to put PGP whole disk encryption on the VM.  As expected the Windows VM slowed down but I also noticed its slowing my host as well.

How I did it?