Beta1 is here. It is bleeding from many wounds, but looks nice, has all the latest software, and waits for (at this stage: experienced) testers :) For more details and a list of most annoying bugs, please check out:

http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/ann ... 10-beta-1/

Here are some references to EFIKA and generic PPC32 related bugs:

Random freezes during hardware detection:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=374309

Many 64bit packages are installed:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=336678

Installed system can't be booted from inst32:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=373569

Have a lot of fun!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

There was a problem, that after a default installation the fresh SuSE partition could not be listed from the firmware. It can be worked around during installation by setting inode size from 'default' (which is 256 byte now) to 128 byte.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Good news: many of the problems in Beta1 are fixed now or problem is localized, so I'm waiting now for a fresh factory sync, which has the fixes :)

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Well, beta2 seems to have a kernel bug, so only about 1 out of 30 installations could pass partition detection (this is how many times I tried it on EFIKA :-) ).

For anybody, who succeeded with installation (or upgraded a Pegasos to beta2): I started building Packman packages for openSUSE 11.0. It has openJDK, so I tried to create some Java related packages, without much luck until now. I don't give up, so if you have any recommendations, which Java package would you see in my Packman repo, please let me know!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

We appreciate your effort Peter. Keep up the good work!

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

OK, situation is improving:

- every third installation gets past the partition detection phase (a 10x improvement ;-) )

- a fix for the 64bit problem is expected to arrive to factory soon

- a workaround for the inode size problem is in the works, so one will not need to do manual partitioning

- openJDK is still buggy, but is getting better

Have a lot of fun!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Beta3 is due to be announced tomorrow. As I'm running one of the SuSE mirrors I already have access to it :) I did not do a full installation, but checked the most important things.

The bad news: installer fixes aren't yet in beta3

The good news: the installer feels to be faster and more stable and lockups seem to be gone

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Beta3 is released now: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-anno ... 00010.html

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

The latest factory has the workaround for the inode size problem. Installing over NFS is still problematic, but HTTP seems to be reliable. The 64bit problem is nearly gone, only two offending packages are left instead of 20+.

If anybody wants to give it a try, I'd recommend using a HTTP installation source and textmode=1, as graphical installation does not seem to work (this is a problem also on x86).

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

what are the benevits of suse 11 over the previous version?

could you give a short howto install suse 11 (e.g. where is the installer that i need to download, what mirror do i choose?) and i give it a try.

There is a new version of almost everything. If you are a Pegasos user, then KDE4 is something, what runs nicely on that machine, and it is worth to change (but it is a bit slow on the EFIKA, still a lot faster than KDE3 and Gnome). If you are a developer, you will find the latest glibc and gcc versions with a 2.6.25 kernel.

For a more detailed list of changes see:

* http://en.opensuse.org/Factory/News
* http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap/11.0

Right now I'd suggest to wait a few days on EFIKA, as some ugly bugs were smashed recently, for which the fixes are not yet in 'factory'.

On the Pegasos the inst32 does not boot any more, but the upgrade from 10.3 is smooth (at least I never had trouble with it). Of course it is always a good idea to make a backup :-)

The steps are:
- disable 10.3 installation sources
- add factory to the installation sources
- execute: This installs the latest version of zypper, a command line package management tool
- execute: this is Distribution UPgrade, and takes a considerable time to finish
- reboot the machine and enjoy

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

A few more things for the upgrade:

- one needs to upgrade rpm first, as 11.0 changed from bzip to lzma compression, and 11.0 rpm files can't be installed with 10.3 rpm command: - and the format of the zypper locks file has changed recently, so once zypper is upgraded, please change that file before going on to the next step:
- it is better to use http installation sources, or if you use nfs, make sure, that the related modules are loaded by you before the upgrade, and not automagically: After a kernel upgrade, the nfs module can't be loaded any more automagically...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

openSUSE 11.0 RC1 is out, grab while it is hot! One of the fastest mirror is http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distri ... VD-ppc.iso and you can also use a torrent download: http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distri ... pc.torrent
Or you can grab just inst32 from http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distri ... oot/inst32 and use http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/distri ... st-source/ as an installation source.

RC1, as its name implies is a release candidate. Almost all problems are fixed, and those which are not fixed can be worked around.

Here is a list of recent fixes still open problems:

- sound does not work without a small fix in forth. See http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms ... devicetree I use a stripped down version, which includes only the sound fix, but using the whole script should also work.

- the 64bit trouble is gone

- the inode size problem is gone

- the installer wants to install a PREP boot loader, change it to 'none'

- 'boot installed system' does not work any more :-( There are a couple of workarounds to create a bootable kernel. Either catch the countdown at the end of installation, stop it, switch console, or use the rescue system for the same task. At the prompt enter the following commands, X is the partition number, where you installed openSUSE 11.0: Then switch back to the countdown and restart it, or in rescue mode reboot the machine. I'll try to automatize it on a Genesi hosted installation source next week...

Before booting for stage two, don't forget to load sound.forth, so sound and mixer settings will be properly set up.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Just tried the installation of 11.0 RC1 dvd on my powerbook 12" G4. It was pretty much flawless, apart from a glitch with yaboot -which was my fault rather than the installer's.

After installation finished, booting from yaboot to kdm (of kde 4.0.4) took 41.2 secs. In comparison, my previous Debian/Gentoo (normal) installations took >1m/53 secs respectively.

On the other hand, my current Gentoo installation using einit as booting system, takes just 15s from yaboot prompt to console prompt :)

I think OpenSuse should hire the einit(actually it's renamed to kyuba now) developers!

Apart from that, it's a great experience, almost everything works out of the box (I couldn't get the wireless card to work, though i didn't try that much) as it's using the b43legacy module, whereas I'm using bcm43xx on Gentoo which works fine.

Oh, and apparently JFS fsck tools are not included, and as I learned JFS support is going to be dropped (too bad, I think it's a great fs), just so you know...

I'm very pleased with the release, and plan to install it on my pegasos in the next few days. Good job Peter (and the rest of the OpenSuse team :)!

OK, a first test version of the driver update disk for EFIKA is now available at http://genesi.hu/dud This is just a test and will disappear soon (and move to powerdeveloper.org). Please check it out!

Right now all it does is running mkzimage, without the '--cmdline' parameter this time. The resulting file is called 'zImage'. To boot the installed system one needs to pass 'root=/dev/sdaX' as a boot argument to the kernel.

To use this driverupdate, one needs an additional parameter to be passed to inst32: BTW: this should also work for those, who have a Pegasos where yaboot does not work. Please note, that the 11.0 installer does not boot on the Pegasos, but an upgrade from 10.3 works correctly.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/