Notes on openSuSE 12.2 (prerelease)
If you were following the milestones of the openSuSE 12.2 development, you might have noticed a while back that the daily build ISO became unbootable for quite a while. It has recently been repaired (the problem was that the boot filesystem was getting full, so it couldn't create the files it needed while booting). So, now that the Beta 1 release is available, I am once again happily trying it on various systems.
Here are a few random notes I have made about it, some specific to this prerelease, and some of a more general or long-standing nature.
- I have had a problem with WiFi not connecting automatically to my home network. This has certainly been around since the 12.1 release, and it may go farther back than that, I can't remember. I don't know if this is something unique to the equipment I have, or the way I set it up, or if the rest of the world has the same problem. I stumbled across a work-around for this not too long ago. When the system boots and does not automatically connect (which happens most of the time, but not quite all), go into the Network Manager applet on the panel, and disable wireless networking. Wait just a second or two and enable it again, and it will connect.
- The openSuSE 12.2 prereleases include GRUB 2 - but unlike other distributions that have made the change from Legacy GRUB, openSuSE still includes the older version as well, and you can select it on installation if you want. When you get to the final overview/confirmation screen before installation starts, click on the Bootloader section and you can change it. Very nice.
- Previous versions of openSuSE would always set up to auto-mount any Windows (NTFS) partitions they found on the disk. This is mildly irritating if you consider Windows to be an abomination and you don't want it to be mounted by default - it wasn't difficult to turn off, but it had to be done each time I installed openSuSE on something. The new release no longer does this. Hooray!
So, if you are very keen or very curious, download the Beta 1 release and have a look. I have installed it on pretty much everything around here, and it looks good.
jw