This post is not intended as criticism of the openSuSE project in any way. Most of what I am writing about here concerns their next release, which is currently at Milestone 5. I understand quite well what pre-release software is, and the uncertainty and instability it can be subject to. What I am trying to do is bring some attention to something I have noticed, which concerns me, and perhaps get some comments from others who have similar/better/worse experiences. If I am very lucky, I might even hear from someone who can point out that I am doing something wrong!
There has been quite a bit of commentary and speculation about the Novell takeover and the possible impact on the SuSE/openSuSE products and development. (Note that I am avoiding the patent controversy here, intentionally.) The official statements from Novell and SuSE have been basically that there should be little or no impact, product development and releases should continue as normal. However, I have been following the openSuSE 11.4 (factory) pre-release development pretty closely because some of the newest things being developed are important to my Lenovo S10-3s netbook (Broadcom brcm, and Synaptics ClickPad). What I have seen and experienced since the sale/takeover was announced has been troubling - or else I am doing something wrong.
First, the openSuSE ISO images are supposed to be what they call "hybrid images", which can either be burned to a CD/DVD or copied directly to a USB flash drive. Writing to USB can be done either directly with dd (for hard-core old geezers like me), or using the openSuSE Imagewriter utility. It has always worked quite well for me, until sometime around their 11.4 Milestone 5 release. Suddenly, the USB image wouldn't boot. I tried both the 32 and 64 bit images, and I tried using both dd and Imagewriter, and it just won't boot. It goes through what should be a process of reconfiguring the disk label, and then panics. Ugh. It still works when burned to a CD, so the basic Live image is ok. When this first happened, I believe it was shortly before Christmas, I assumed that it would be noticed and fixed in short order. It has been this way for a month now, and it is still the same as of the most recent daily, Build 1030.
Second, according to the published development schedule there should have been a Milestone 6 release last Thursday. There has been no sign of the release, and I have not seen any comment or explanation from the development team. They are certainly not known for meeting their planned target dates, but this seems exceptionally late, even for open SuSE.
Third, the latest daily (Build 1030) Live image runs exceptionally poorly when booted from CD, and even after being installed and booted from a hard drive. Even considering that this is a pre-release / development version, it really is quite grim, and it seems to me that this is very late in the development cycle for it to take such a turn.
So, as I said, I know that I am talking about pre-release software here, and I know that the release information say that it might stop working at any time, and so on. Maybe I am just doing something wrong/silly in not being able to get the LiveUSB image to boot any more (although I did go back and download the 11.3 image, and it still converts to USB and boots just fine). Maybe the horrible performance problems are just because of the continuing development of KDE 4, and the horrible appearance of Firefox (it looks like something running with Motif from about 10 years ago) is because they are using a beta release of that as well. Maybe by the time I have finished writing this, they will have released Milestone 6, and it will boot and run reasonably well, as the previous Milestones did. But on the other hand, maybe all of this is an indication of internal turmoil on the project, or some other side effect of the recent commercial developments.
If anyone else has been trying the openSuSE factory builds, and has either noticed similar problems or perhaps has avoided/solved them by doing something that I haven't thought of, I would love to hear about it. Of course, if anyone has any insight into what is going on internally which might have a bearing on this, I'd love to hear about that as well.
jw 25/1/2011
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I tell you what might be helpful, raise a bug report on it don't just moan about it on another website. You said yourself that "and I have not seen any comment or explanation from the development team". Did it occur to you that they might not even be aware of the problem? It's a fairly unusual way to install it IMO.
Well, I'm using openSUSE 11.4 M5 right now. About the live image problems: if I use a livecd to install openSUSE, I always do it from an USB drive, writing the iso with dd. It happend once that I can't boot the liveImage, but the problem was that my USB key's partition table was messed up. I used gparted to create a new partition table and everything worked. Try that or fill a bug report to openSUSE.
The milestone 6 it not out yet because there is a serious bug with kernel and udev on 32bit systems, and there are some problems with the artwork. There was an announcment on the forums, I found it by luck, but you are right, some official announcments are required in this case.
About the KDE: don't use the ATI or NVIDIA opensource drivers with KDE desktop effects enabled. If you want desktop effects, install the binary driver or else just turn off the desktop effects. Together they are a pain.
About firefox I don't know, for me looks ok, maybe install gtk-oxygene or gtk-qtcurve theme.
@KuleRucket - Thanks for reading and commenting, even if your comment wasn't particularly helpful, and came across sounding rather snotty. I said several times in the post that what I was looking for was comments, and perhaps someone else could tell me what I was doing wrong. I am about 20 years worth of experience beyond needing advice on when to file bug reports. But thanks anyway, and have a nice day.
@inp3dance - Thanks for the information. Your experience more or less matches with mine, in that the last version I was able to successfully boot from LiveUSB was M5, I was going to guess something like Build 996. I tried again, first cleaning up the partition table and then rewriting Build 1030, but still no luck. Then I finally found a bug report for it - #666504. It turns out that the problem is an incompatible change in the fdisk utility. Ugh. Thanks also for the information about the delay in M6 - I hope this also gives them time to fix the LiveUSB problem. Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw
M6 is late: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2011-01/msg00225.html
For tested factory builds please look into: http://openqa.opensuse.org/results/
I used M5 KDE iso to install from USB on 2 machines without any problems.
On the ISO images, in my experience reporting an issue/asking a question like this on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org mailing list works best. With the combined experience and background there you should get a workaround, a fix, or be asked to file a bug report if it is believed to be a genuinely new bug. I do not recall seeing this before, but may have missed it of course.
As for Milestone 6, have you seen the announcement our release manager posted at http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2011 ? Speaking from many years of experience, projects like openSUSE have a tendency for their quality to become about the worst shortly before Beta 1 and then rise again up to the release. A release manager making the call to wait until a number of (new) issues he is concerned about have been addressed sounds like good judgement to me, especially when communicated that clearly.
As you noted this is prerelease software and there are hickups, but the situation does not strike me as different from earlier releases. If there is any single reason I can see than that various teams decided to take a number of changes they considered important late in the release cycle.
I am looking forward to the next milestone myself and am typing these lines on an instance of openSUSE which serves me well. ;-)
Gerald Pfeifer
openSUSE member and Director Product Management @Novell
1. Have you raised a bug report? No? Then how do you expect them to fix it?
2. A pre-release milestone is less than a week late? Big deal. I notice it's out now...
3. A daily build runs poorly? As you point out yourself "this is a pre-release / development version". It's not even a milestone.
The sensible way to deal with all these problems would be to discuss them on the Suse forums and/or file bug reports, or wait until release versions.
Absolutely the wrong way is to publically lambast the developers on a popular technology news site blog for their development versions being, er, development versions.
@347107 - Perhaps you should have taken the time to read the very first sentence in my post:
"This post is not intended as criticism of the openSuSE project in any way."
If you think that is "publicly lambasting" the developers, then we have a difference of opinion, that's unfortunate.
Perhaps you could have also taken the time to read the comments; as I pointed out above, there has been a bug report filed on this already, #666504. It describes not only the symptoms, but the underlying cause of the problem. I am not of the opinion that making the development team deal with duplicate bug reports contributes a lot of the effort.
As for "a daily release runs poorly? It's not even a milestone?", well, as you said, the Milestone 6 release is out now. It still has the same problem with Live USB boot. But the bug is still open, so I am sure it will get taken care of before the final release.
Here's what concerns me, and it has nothing to do with the openSuSE distribution itself. If we have reached the point where we can not even have open, civil discussion in public, without rabid "defenders" of whatever distribution making unfounded accusations and nasty statements, then we are in a poor state indeed.
Thanks for reading and commenting, anyway, and have a very nice day.
jw
"(Note that I am avoiding the patent controversy here, intentionally.)" By mentioning it? For example, if I said '(Note that I am avoiding Billy's mother's wh0redom here, intentionally.)', have I really avoided it?