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 - 6: Hello 12.2!

More than a year (12+ months) since my last entry... obviously lots have happened... BUT

Its a new year (2013), a new job, a new Laptop and a new openSUSE 12.2!  I'll stop right there before I go off on a tangent, seeing & proclaiming trends where none existed previously.

Details:

• openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 (64-bit) - KDE desktop (default)
• Toshiba Tecra R840 (Intel i5, 4Gb RAM, 320Gb Hdd, Intel HD integrated graphics)
• Dual-boot with Windows 7 (/dev/sda1) and openSUSE (/dev/sda2)

Installation:
Smooth as silk is all I can say and something that has come to be expected.

Given the dual-boot setup, I created my own disk partitioning scheme.  So this step deviated from the otherwise straight-forward install (ie click next till the end).

Disk partition scheme:

• /dev/sda1 - 100Gb - original factory installed Windows 7 (size shrunk to 100Gb)
• /dev/sda2 - 100Gb - root partition of openSUSE 12.2 ('/') formatted to ext4
• /dev/sda3 - 98Gb - extended partition
• /dev/sda5 - 6Gb - SWAP partition
• /dev/sda6 - 92Gb - common data partition formatted to NTFS (read/write for both Win7 & openSUSE 12.2)

At install time, I did not format the common data partition.  Instead, I left it blank (unformatted) and used Windows 7 to format it much later.  Once formatted, this common data partition will be known as D:\ drive on Windows 7.

Reboot into openSUSE 12.2 and use YaST Partitioner to set a mount point.  I usually mount this under /mnt/common.  Now, openSUSE 12.2 will automatically mount the common data partition in /mnt/common on boot.

The only outstanding part is that /mnt/common is accessible by root (super-user) but normal users access is troublesome.  To make /mnt/common read-writeable by normal user, I edit the mount options of /mnt/common in the /etc/fstab file.  Example, changed the options in bold from original (first line below) to the second:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-xxxxxx-part6 /mnt/common          ntfs-3g    user,users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-xxxxxx-part6 /mnt/common          ntfs-3g    uid=han,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

where han in uid=han is my normal user account on openSUSE 12.2.

There might be a more user-friendly way to do this but I did not explore since I'm comfortable editing the /etc/fstab. Readers who knows how this can be done, please feel free to leave a comment.  Thanks.


Grub vs Grub2:
I chose to stick with Grub instead of the newer Grub2 boot loader.  The reason is simple, I could easily edit the boot options via /boot/grub/menu.lst because its a text file.  In Grub2, this is non-trivial and until they have an easier editing interface, I'll stick with Grub.


Additional Software