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openSUSE 11.2 Released
An anonymous reader tips news that openSUSE 11.2 has reached its official release. You can get it from their download page, or just grab the torrents (32-bit, 64-bit).
"openSUSE 11.2 will come with the latest version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel, the beating heart of every openSUSE system. The default file system of openSUSE will be switched to the new Ext4 as well. Of course, openSUSE will continue to support Ext3 and other filesystems — but on install, new partitions will automatically be designated Ext4. ... Desktops and servers can use the same kernel, but it's better to tune the kernel for the job at hand. That's why openSUSE now includes a desktop kernel specially tuned for desktop users. ... In addition to the work of the openSUSE Project in the desktop, openSUSE 11.2 includes the latest versions of the two desktop environments, KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28. KDE users will enjoy the new Firefox KDE integration, OpenOffice.org KDE4 integration, consistent KDE artwork and all standard applications being ported to KDE4 including KNetworkManager, Amarok, Digikam, k3b, Konversation and more."
openSUSE 11.2 will come with the latest version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel, the beating heart of every openSUSE system.
As opposed to all those other distros, which don't use the Linux kernel as their "beating heart." :)
Finally, easy upgrades come to OpenSUSE.
sudo zypper dup !
I just had to cleanly install OpenSUSE 11.1 the other day because I was in the middle of patching 10.3 when Novell took down the repositories. I worked on the broken system for a week before making the time to reformat/reinstall. I started patching it by hand to make the 10.3 -> 11.1 dup work, but it was just too time consuming.
But anyway, I'll be running zypper dup in the next few days after demand on the servers dies down. It's about time SUSE users get a clean in-place upgrade process. :-)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
No (it's a Linux distro)
This is nice and all but that's a pretty standard distro release, can anybody tell me why i would want to switch from a similar distro, say ubuntu 9.10 or fedora 12 to openSuse?
sure I could try them all but there is only so much time i want to spend installing/setting stuff up.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
It is unfortunate, however, you'll need to run Wine or VMWare or Virtualbox or Xen to get those viruses loaded and running.
(I tend to think the other way: How can I run Nautilus, KTorrent, KRDC, and GMountISO in Windows.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
http://software.opensuse.org/112/en which will point you to a mirror automatically, to bittorernt, metalink or a mirror you can select.
If you have a bit of experience, you can go with the Network version. Otherwise go with the GNOME or KDE version. Only if you will be installing on several machines should you download the DVD.
After installation there is no difference between the different versions, except for the obvious difference between KDE/GNOME. The CD versions are live versions can be run from USB stick as well.
More infor on the above URL
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Suse read NTFS partitions out of the box years before Ubuntu could.
There you go again, egging us on to use such tools with no legitimate use for actual *legal* purposes.
Somewhere, the CEOs of Comcast, Time-Warner, the RIAA, and AT&T have collectively felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if most of their objections to actual legitimate Internet use were suddenly silenced...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Congrats first and foremost to everyone who worked on this release.
I use and love openSUSE. I've been running betas of 11.2 for a while now.
My only gripe is that openSUSE still apparently hasn't switched to Upstart, nor DeviceKit. I assume Novell's layoffs last year are the reason that openSUSE seems to be falling a little behind in feature adoption. I hope this isn't a growing trend.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Verify your download (optional, for experts)"
how about:
"Verify your download (mandatory, for everybody)"
Ext4 has been mature and stable for at least 3 years now.
No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28, which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.
So not being able to run native apps to buy from iTunes, sync my iPod and iPhone
It's almost like you blame Linux for the fact your hardware vendor tries so hard to lock out 3rd party support.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Ext4 is merely an extension (that is mostly backwards-compatible) of Ext3. Ext4 was born out of patches that were intended for Ext3. In 2006, the decision was made to split some of the newer features being pushed into Ext3 under the namespace of Ext4. It isn't like they started development on Ext4 in 2006. In 2006, there was a usable file system from the day it was annouced as a "new" project.
It was pretty damn stable then, and even more stable now.
I've been running it for 3 years. The age of a product does not always equate directly to stability. There are old releases that aren't very stable, and then there are projects that are well designed, and are stable pretty much from day 1.
Ext4 is one such project. However, if you're terrified of Ext4 eating your dog, you're welcome to run Fat32 if it makes you feel better.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's almost like you blame Linux for the fact your hardware vendor tries so hard to lock out 3rd party support.
You're right. Some people do. Because Linux "evangelists" like to say that Linux can do everything Windows can do.. .except better, AND it's more secure, AND it's free, AND it has a GREAT community.
MOST of which is true. It may or may not be better, it is more secure and it's free and it does have a good community (there are plenty of Windows communities as well, of course).
But it does not do everything Windows can do, because not everything runs on Linux. And most people do not want to lose hardware that works well for them for the sake of switching to Linux. Like iPods and iPhones.
Sure, blame Apple and not Linux for the actual hardware issue (interesting: Apple is a great company at Slashdot until it is convenient for it not to be a great company at Slashdot :) my experience, anyways)... but blame Linux fans for claiming things that either aren't true or are only true if you are more committed to using Linux than using your existing proprietary hardware. Some people care more about their existing hardware that works well and that they like than whether or not it works with Linux. And it's a perfectly valid reason, too. Doesn't mean Linux is bad, it just means some people have different priorities.
Don't be obtuse. FAT is a horrible file system. He's going to stick with ext3.
A simple Google search shows that many people and many different distros have experienced data corruption and data loss and it has been attributed to anything from bugs in ext4 to the kernel not behaving as the ext4 developers were expecting due to specific configurations made for a given distro. Some people are very paranoid about data loss. Using ext3 instead is his choice, and choice is what Linux is all about.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
And you're right. I shouldn't have suggested he run Fat32 if he is paranoid that newer filesystems are inherently unsafe. He should run Fat16 to be sure.
Certainly, an older file system that doesn't have the nicer, fine-grained journaling (and journaling controls) which be much safer.
Ext4 is a wild, data-eating beast that just can't be trusted.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Oh please just shut up and go away.... Ok, OS X is nice. It's pretty. It does a lot of things well. It "just works". It "gets out of my way". blah, blah, blah. Great, good to hear it... for the bazzilionth time...
Look if there actually exist Linux folk who haven't heard how uber-awesome OS X is, they invariably live under a rock in some deep hole... deliberately. They don't want to come out. For the many of the rest of us who don't live in said hole, guess what? We choose to use (openSuse/Ubuntu/Arch/Mandriva) Linux despite OS X. Why? Cuz we are absolute nutcases who have nothing better to do than to use the piece(s) of software we like.
See now that's the problem with Linux evangelists. Some partial, hacked together, and buggy functionality is described as "supported."
In the Linux world "supported" often means someone somewhere got some limited sort of functionality, here's a link to sourceforge, rtfm, good luck. Which gets spun by some pencil-neck geek into "It works what more could you want?"
It's not so much that sometimes devices don't work to their full potential that bothers me. It's the bullshit amount of effort put setting people up for disappointment by saying everything works the same and better than it does on Windows. For many things its true, Linux owns. Sure. But stop fucking trumping up shit that sorta works as "supported."
>> So not being able to run native apps to buy from iTunes, sync my iPod and iPhone
You are saying as if it is a bad thing.
Explorer - as I use it daily in expee, Vista and Win7 - is not as well-designed as either Nautilus or Konqueror. I find it lacking on many counts.
As for me "pretending that" Linux can do everything Average Joe wants, I don't. It does what I want, it works for my mother. It works for my two boys.
There are things that are needed - for those I run VirtualBox:
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/virtualbox_xp_vb6.jpg
and can do such tasks as Visual Basic 6.0 development on XP machines. The rest can pretty much be done using FOSS under Ubuntu.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
IIRC, they neglected to call fsync when writing out configuration data, and the POSIX spec states that unless you call fsync, there's no guarantees that the data actually hits the disk right away. Combine that with the fact that ext4 extended the delay between write() and physical write out to disk (which, I believe, they've changed, although I could be wrong about that), and a sudden crash can result in data loss/corruption due to blocks having never been written out.
So, that said, it's absolutely true that KDE4 was making invalid assumptions about the behaviour of the underlying storage, which resulted in corruption. But it's also true that ext4's unusually long sync times exacerbated the problem. As such, I'd say there's plenty of blame to go around.
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE, any system crash could lead to zero byte files in almost any application. It broke an extremely standard way of writing a new version of a file by writing it to a new file then renaming it in place of the old.
You have a file foo.txt
You write foo2.txt
You rename foo2.txt to foo.txt
Now your machine could crash for up to half an hour (I think, a long time), and you'd have neither the old or the new file. Unless you didn't explicitly fsync() the write, it could have renamed foo2.txt into place without having written the contents of f002.txt, and gone was all your data. It just became painfully obvious in KDE because it broke vital configuration files but it broke thousands of applications. It's a horrible case of the denial you see in Linux land, hiding behind the POSIX specification to defend all the real world damage.
I have no faith in the people developing ext4 after that stupidity, and wouldn't use it on any of my machines. One thing would be if they handled it responsibly, but the childish approach they took was embarrassing. Any person that breaks convention wtih so little regard for the consequences, then tries to defend it so vigorously will not come near my systems. How knows how much else he's willing to break unless there's a standard that says he can't? Because there's sure as hell are many other Linuxisms that aren't POSIX in there as well, fortunately Linus has never been this kind of reckless idiot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You are saying as if it is a bad thing.
Isolated, learning one new way to do something is an acceptable cost. But Linux is to many death by a thousand cuts when it comes to that. I dabbled with Linux for ~7 years before I finally decided to switch and there was many reasons for that. But one of them was the total lack of any familiar application, even though I was fairly convinced Linux probably had some sort of application like that (in retrospect, sometimes a doubtful conclusion) but it was always too much new. I can set off some hours to learn something new, I can't set off a month all at once to learn everything new. It was really only the early experiences with Vista that pushed me over the edge, thinking this wasn't the way forward. Now that I know how to use Linux properly I wouldn't switch back, but that wall is too tall. Not one brick individually but all of the piled on top of each other.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You misunderstand.
KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD. Most file systems have delayed writes and caching at some level.
In an extreme sense, some were concerned that Ext4 could delay a write for up to a minute. It wasn't 30 minutes. The operation should still be in the journal. It should be recoverable.
And before you get all upset, you should realize that these delayed writes also exist in Ext2 and Ext3.
NTFS also supports OS-level write caching. Even worse, Windows Server will often enable it by default on top of a RAID controller having it's own level of write caching. So you can be told a file is written, when neither the OS actually sent the write to the RAID controller, and even if it did, the RAID controller hasn't actually performed the write yet.
Ext3 and Ext4 both support varying levels of journals. You make the decision of which journal behavior you want. Do you want faster performance, or do you want more piece of mind?
And since this discussion is in regards to openSUSE shipping with Ext4, openSUSE defaults to the safer ordered journaling mode.
However, feel free to talk about your ass, spread FUD and live in the stone age.
You're not any safer for it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.
Bullshit. The error was very generic and not limited to KDE
You're right: it's a common application programming error.
At what frequency does a bug cease to be a bug?
I wish I'd known that I could promote myself up out of the rank of `amateur' just by pointing out that there were plenty of other people who weren't any more skilled than I was--that would have obviated all of these years of study and hard work.
-rozzin.
KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD.
You sir, are an idiot.
Read the bug report.
I'll give you some quotes:
After a clean reboot pretty much any file written to by any application (during the previous boot) was 0 bytes.
For example Plasma and some of the KDE core config files were reset. Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...
-- Bogdan Gribincea
The files that were zeroed when my machine hardlocked I'd imagine were the ones that were in use; my desktop env is Gnome and I was running a game in Wine. Wine's reg files which it would have had open were wiped and also my Gnome terminal settings were wiped.
-- Ben Hodgetts
I'm using 2.6.28-8-generic and a crash just zeroed out a _load_ of important files in my git repository which I'd recently rebased a patch series in.
-- Peter Cliffton
Ack... had a power outage and ran into this one today too. Several configuration files from programs I was running ended up trashed. This also explains the corruption I've seen of my BOINC/SETI files when hard-rebooting in past weeks.
-- 3vi1
I did mix up 30 minutes and 30 seconds. But that's just an example of tons of different applications, databases, source files, Gnome settings and whatever cleaned out by this BUG. Why you keep denying it I don't know, but at least you earned youself a foe rating for it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You really should have bought a real mp3 player. I hope you learned something.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!