Copyright © 2011 Novell, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included as the fdl.txt file.
If you upgrade from an older version to this openSUSE release, see previous release notes listed here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Release_Notes
These release notes cover the following areas:
Installation: Read this if you want to install the system from scratch.
General: Information that everybody should read.
System Upgrade: Issues related to the process if you run a system upgrade from the previous release to this openSUSE version.
Technical: This section contains a number of technical changes and enhancements for the experienced user.
The "Minimum Server" software selection pattern misses several packages and causes conflicts when installing additional packages. See http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=686397 for details.
If a conflict dialog says:
pattern:minimal_base conflicts with ...
choose to "uninstall" or "not to install pattern:minimal_base". This might cause additional or different packages to be installed.
In Start-Up, find step-by-step installation instructions, as well as introductions to the KDE and Gnome desktops and to the LibreOffice suite.
Reference covers deployment, administration, and system configuration in detail and explains how to set up various network services.
The Security Guide introduces basic concepts of system security, covering both local and network security aspects.
The System Analysis and Tuning Guide helps with problem detection, resolution and optimization.
Virtualization with KVM offers an introduction to setting up and managing virtualization with KVM, libvirt and QEMU tools.
The default behavior of updating packages using updater applets has been changed. Now, along with system update patches from maintenance the applets also show updates respecting vendor-stickiness. This behavior affects users who are subscribed to third party repositories.
To revert back to the pre-11.4 behavior to have only system updates shown by the applets, set HidePackages=true in the [Updates] section in /etc/Packagekit/ZYpp.conf. WARNING: This way, you may miss security updates published in third party repositories.
The Zypp download mode for package installation has been changed: It first downloads all packages, before it starts installing them. This means, it now needs more disk space. The traditional behavior was to process one package after the other.
If you are short on disk space, switch back to the traditional behavior by setting commit.downloadMode = DownloadAsNeeded in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf.
With openSUSE 11.3 we switched to KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) for Intel, ATI and NVIDIA graphics, which now is our default. If you encounter problems with the KMS driver support (intel, radeon, nouveau), disable KMS by adding nomodeset to the kernel boot command line. To set this permanently, add it to the kernel command line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. This option makes sure the appropriate kernel module (intel, radeon, nouveau) is loaded with modeset=0 in initrd, i.e. KMS is disabled.
In the rare cases when loading the DRM module from initrd is a general problem and unrelated to KMS, it is even possible to disable loading of the DRM module in initrd completely. For this set the NO_KMS_IN_INITRD sysconfig variable to yes via YAST, which then recreates initrd afterwards. Reboot your machine.
On Intel without KMS the Xserver falls back to the fbdev driver (the intel driver only supports KMS); alternatively, there is the "intellegacy" driver (xorg-x11-driver-video-intel-legacy package) which still supports UMS (User Mode Setting). To use it, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf and change the driver entry to intellegacy.
On ATI for current GPUs it falls back to radeonhd. On NVIDIA without KMS the nv driver is used (the nouveau driver only supports KMS).
The setuid bit on /usr/bin/Xorg is needed for starting X as an unprivileged user, e.g., via startx. This method has been deprecated for years in favor of using a display manager. Modern environments rely on device ACLs and polkit privileges, which in turn depend upon consolekit tracking the active console, which is performed by the display manager.
Users who depend on the old configuration can set the setuid bit themselves in /etc/permissions.local by removing the comment sign from the following line:
#/usr/bin/Xorg root:root 4711
and running SuSEconfig --module permissions afterwards.
To improve boot speed the CIFS and NFS services are no longer enabled by default.
Use the YaST System Services (Runlevel) editor to enable them if needed.
The syslog-ng package is built with SQL support enabled, packaged as a module in the syslog-ng-sql sub-package. The SQL module uses DBI, a database-independent abstraction layer in C and allows writing log data into several databases with DBI support.
At the moment, it is not recommended to use sqlite3 as the database, because a re-open of the database does not work with current DBI drivers. The issue seems to be fixed in the libdbi development version, but shipping this version would break other packages.
Intel SSD drives with old firmware can cause system hangs using the smartd daemon (Monitor for S.M.A.R.T. Disks and Devices), which is enabled my default.
Users should upgrade the drive's firmware. Download it from http://www.intel.com/go/ssdfirmware/.