openSUSE 13.2 Part 1

I've done a bit of testing with Triela, the Dell, and the cluster, but I won't write about Triela until I'm done testing on her.

When I went to test 13.2 live GNOME on the 1GB cluster node, I wasn't able to read from the DVD+RW since the DVD drive (from the Half-top) didn't seem to want to read it, and so I was forced to make a bootable USB drive, which worked fine (once I got it to work). It was mostly laggy, but upon further inspection with System Monitor, the processor was also almost always at 100% because of the GNOME shell - I'm sure a lightweight environment like Xfce would be a better choice. If I care enough to, I may do a test installation on it, but for now I'll resume testing with Debian Xfce live (when I'm able to LOL).

Running 13.2 in the live GNOME environment from a DVD+RW seems to be slower than running 13.1's live GNOME environment off of DVD+RW; I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies, but it wasn't bad enough to where I forced to install to actually do the testing.

On the Dell, there wasn't a whole lot to test, seeing that the main focus of the testing is going to be on Triela and Mei-chan. The live test didn't really tell me anything that I needed to know, so after some slight poking around, I went ahead and started the installation.

Once I got to the partitioner, I realised that the hard drive still had an MSDOS partition table and changed it to GPT instead (GPT allows more than four partitions without having to make an extended partition first - while Triela is the only machine that has more than four partitions, I'd prefer to just move along with GPT when I'm able to). Once I got to the last installation screen, the installer failed to make partitions, so I had to reboot into PartedMagic to fix that.

After recreating the partition table, and making a couple basic partitions (ext4 partition, and 2GB swap), I rebooted into the 13.2 installer and let the partitioner carry out the suggested changes (BTRFS for /, XFS for /home, and a little 7MB partition for legacy boot); installation carried out just fine.

Once rebooted (and escaping the live DVD's GRUB 2 menu), I was met with the refreshed GRUB 2 screen: the full openSUSE logo (the chameleon with "openSUSE" underneath it) at the top centre; the booting choices in white text, the head-portion of the openSUSE chameleon to the left of the main options; and the highlighted option in black text, with the highlight bar the same colour as the full logo - some sort of cyan-doped green. I can't comment on the green colour used, but I'll at least say that I hope the monitor's colours are off.

The screen of the second part of the installation came up, but then quickly went away, replacing itself with terminal. Since I never paid attention to it when installing 13.2 Beta or RC1, I can't say when they actually took the graphical screen away when the installer was performing automatic configuration. Anyway, this is a nice bonus, as there wasn't ever a point to be in the graphical installer during the automatic configuration.

The response of the Activities button/hot corner was instant which was surprising, as I was used to the slight lag (1-2 seconds) with RC1's GNOME live. Afer clicking the "Show Applications" button, the application names showed up instantly, but the system had to load the icons; however, once the icons were loaded, there wasn't much of a lag at all.

Besides poking at System Monitor to see the RAM usage (about 400MB of 2GB - about 22%), I loaded up LibreOffice Writer to see how quick it loaded, and I certainly wasn't disappointed, as it loaded pretty quickly (about 5-10 seconds if I remember right).

Overall, it is easily feasible to use 13.2 to breathe new life into an old system (provided the CPU has Hyper-threading/Hyper-transport if it's only a single-core). I may test 13.2 with Ziggy and/or the VAIO, but that will have to be quite some time later, as Triela/Mei-chan are my main concerns at this point.