Installing OpenSuSE 13.1 on an Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t

I tried to install the most recent OpenSuSE image I received when I attended the OpenSuSE Conference. We were given pendrives with a live image so I was interested how smooth the OpenSuSE installation was, compared to installing Fedora. The test machine is a three to four year old Intel Ideapad s10-3t, which I received from Intel a while ago. It’s certainly not the most powerful machine, but it’s got some dual core CPU, a gigabyte of RAM, and a widescreen touch display.

The initial boot took a while. Apparently it changed something on the pendrive itself to expand to its full size, or so. The installation was a bit painful and, at the end of the day, not successful. The first error I received was about my username being wrong. It told me that I must only contain letters, digits, and other things. It did not tell me what was actually wrong; and I doubt it could, because my username was very legit. I clicked away the dialogue and tried again. Then it worked…

When I was asked about my partitioning scheme I was moderately confused. The window didn’t present any “next” button. I clicked the three only available buttons to no avail until it occurred to me that the machine has a wide screen so the vertical space was not sufficient to display everything. And yeah, after moving the window up, I could proceed.

While I was positively surprised to see that it offered full disk encryption, I wasn’t too impressed with the buttons. They were very tiny on the bottom of the screen, barely clickable.

Anyway, I found my way to proceed, but when attempting to install, YaST received “system error code -1014” and failed to partition the disk. The disk could be at fault, but I have reasons to believe it was not the disks fault:

Apparently something ate all the memory so that I couldn’t even start a terminal. I guess GNOME’s system requirements are higher than I expected.

Installing Fedora 20 on an Exo PC Slate

For our booth at FOSDEM we had some hardware to show off the latest and greatest GNOME. I brought the tablet I got from the Desktop Summit. In order to prepare it I installed Fedora 20 which comes with a nice and shiny installer. I found a few issues and glitches and will present then them in the course of this post.

It worked well enough, but it has a few glitches. One of them is that GNOME apparently does not detect that it is running on hardware which does not have a keyboard. So it was a bit to enter a password for a wifi when there is no (soft) keyboard…

Some incoherences exist. One of them is that it shows the “Next” button on the bottom right. Which is what I’d expect. But sometimes it also asks the user to press a button on the upper left. I didn’t even remotely expect having to press a button on the “back” side of the screen in order to continue installation.

It was very nice though that it seems to offer installation along an existing operating system *and* full disk encryption. The Ubuntu installer can install you a fully encrypted system nicely, but only if you install Ubuntu on the whole disk. The Fedora installer seems to manage that nicely.

As it seems to be normal nowadays, installation starts even though you haven’t provided all the necessary information yet. That is very convenient and have a much fast installation experience.

Another coherence issue is on the user dialogue. I can actually guess what the thinking was when designing these menus. You have this “overview” screen as seen above and then you “dive” into the sub menus. I expected a more linearly following set of menus. Why would I need return to the overview menu at all? I claim that it is much easier to just continue, not to go forth and back… Anyway, a real bug is visible: Mnemonics are not formatted properly.

The user dialogue, while being at it, seemed to have forced me to enter a strong password. I just wanted to install a system for a demo machine. Probably not the usual usecase, but annoying enough if it doesn’t work smoothly. I think I found out later that I needed to double press the “Next” button (labelled “done” and being placed in the area of the screen where I’d expect “back” buttons to be).

Turns out, that the same thing happened with the root password, which really annoyed me. Especially as the soft keyboard doesn’t really allow for convenient input of complicated characters.

But then I discovered something. On the very bottom there something weirdly coloured. It was a notification for the current menu. Why on earth complain about the password I’ve entered on the very bottom when the widget is on the very top? That was surprising and confusing. Plus, the warning itself was not very visible due to the onscreen keyboard obstructing the view. So I guess it’d be smarter to not have the warnings there.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the installation experience was. It could, of course, have been better, but all in all it was quite good. I finished in less than half and hour. Too bad that I didn’t know that neither Eye of GNOME nor Epiphany were installed by default.

Bugsquadding Talk on GCDS

I just had my talk with Pedro and I think it went quite well.

We talked about how to do QA in GNOME and how to use our tools properly. There were about 30 people listening and discussing with us. It was a great honour to meet the bugsquad heros like Philip, Akhil and guenther. Thanks to Andre to look over our slides.

Besides telling about our infrastructure, we slightly discussed alternative ways to access our bug database: There seems to be DeskZilla and Mylyn to work with bugzilla through the XML-RPC API. I haven’t tried Deskzilla yet (the GNOME key link is broken atm), but Cosimo says it doesn’t work with the GNOME bugzilla probably because it’s heavily patched. I wonder when we’ll migrate to Bugzilla-3…
I tried Mylin but it unfortunately doesn’t work either 🙁 You can query and show the bugs but you can’t update them. It’s a pity because I think that webinterfaces suck in general and our GNOME bugzilla in special.

Although the intended target group wasn’t there, we managed to recruit triagers 🙂 Let’s hope they’ll stay with us for a while. You can find the bugsquad-slides.

I followed the KDE Bugsquad BoF and we discussed several things. They seem to have more fundamental problems than we do, especially getting the bugzilla used by the developers. I collected a couple of ideas: Given that you can’t edit bugs right away if you just have created an account, would it be good to automatically set editing right once a user has commit permissions on the VCS? What about a bugsquad (micro) blog to keep the community informed and involved? It could be a good idea to have kind of a monthly digest which will be sent around. I also envy the KDE Bugdays which apparently are a lot of work, but also potentially recruits new bug triagers. Maybe one could write an webapp for managing the work involved…

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This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.