Fantastic news, people. OpenSuse 11.2 was released [1], but we're not important enough anymore even to have a proper announcement that we're not a supported architecture anymore [2]. Bravo Novell!

I'm moving back to Debian.

[1] http://software.opensuse.org/112/en
[2] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-proj ... 00498.html

It is understandable unfortunately. At least, Novell officially supported the architecture longer than Ubuntu.

The Genesi Partner page on the Novell website will probably show the ODW for another day or so. We removed the Open Client and Efika some time ago. What you see there now is the Efika MX. We are expecting some strong support from Novell for the new hardware. They do a fine job with OpenSUSE.

We should also mention that Peter Czanik has done a good job for a long time keeping Genesi engaged with the OpenSUSE team: Genesi-openSUSE. It looks like Peter will be busy again soon...

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Funny things happen when you mix business into computers. Does anyone here remember when computing was NOT an industry, but a matter of scientifics and military, and a hobby for us weirdos at home?
Miss those days...
At least there's a choice. Should we waste time finding actual guilts for this PowerPC abandonement?

Nope, this day doesn't start well (not that I care for Linux, but this is bad news).

...not so fast!

power2people MPC8610

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

It's not the end of the world (yet). There were some major build server hw troubles in the past few weeks. X86 was resolved to a level, that a release could be done, PPC is not yet there. I have a recent openSUSE factory release running on my Pegasos, and the chief security officer of Novell still uses PPC as his desktop. So there is some hope for a late 11.2 release, and factory PPC will stay definitely.

OpenSUSE ARM is also in the works, ARM support in the BS was the most actively developed part in the past half year. Projects, like Maemo/Mer use it as the main development platform, meaning, that the BS supports Debian based distributions equally well. Actually, BS ARM support was first ready for Debian :-)

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

Well, my quick analysis of openSUSE PPC's silent death based on time stamps and in Monthy Python style is available in the Novell bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557580#c2

It seems to me, that not even Novell employees are aware of it, that's why I was also confident that it keeps going... We are still waiting for an official answer.

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

If they're not aware of it, then one was working on it, which means they ceased support of it, I think that's pretty clear.

A bad and a good news:

OpenSUSE "manager" just announced, that PPC is no more officially supported by Novell:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557580#c3

SuSE's security chief just wrote, that building of Factory PPC is enabled again:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ppc/ ... 00023.html

So, with some luck, openSUSE PPC will survive as a community project. openSUSE 11.2 was one of the best releases ever on x86 (extremely fast, KDE 4.3), I hope to see an even better 11.3 release with PPC :)

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

@czp

Hi Peter,

Do you really think that future OpenSUSE releases will be better for us ?

I very much regret installing 11.1 after using 10.3 for a long time. My Pegasos 2 is barely usable now it's so slow.

I'm almost afraid to use it because long term use at 100% CPU can't be good for aging kit.

I must say, that not all releases are equal (this is also true for Ubuntu, I consider 9.10 a disaster...).

OpenSUSE 11.2 was a huge improvement over 11.1 on x86 in both speed and usability, and the latest factory worked nicely on the Pegasos, except for the same beta status related annoyances as on x86. 9.3 was a very good release, just 10.0, 10.3 and 11.0. I guess, x.1 releases are a bit more problematic, as this is the time, when SuSE developers concentrate on SLES releases.

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

The first compile of the factory tree is out. I installed it using "zypper -v up && zypper -v dup" from a previous version of factory, and works mostly fine. There is no sax to configure graphics, so I used the one from this post as my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... 2870#12870

There was a new perl version introduced to factory, which broke many things, so there is no sax (as already mentoned), no new install CD or inst32, and libzypp is also missing, so ~30 packages from the earlier factory version had to be kept.

I ran KDE4 on the machine, and even if it does not work at lightning speed, it works reasonably fast, just as firefox. Actually, firefox often worked faster than on my Core2Duo, as that also had to deal with disastrous flash animations :-D

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

Is it possible to update KDE without updating SUSE?

No, KDE in factory depends on the updated applications and libraries of factory, so practically most of the system would be updated.

BTW: right now an update is not recommended, as factory is in quite an unstable state. Many core components were upgraded to latest version after release 11.2 was branched, which had some "side effects". 11.3 alpha1 was due a week ago, but I'm not sure, if it will be stable enough to be released this year...

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