openSUSE 13.1 RC 1 was released today. I could see some more bug-hunting fun ahead. While I was still reading the announcement on openSUSE website, Nitin had already shared the link on facebook & started downloading. That was blazing fast. Happy to see that the aspiring openSUSE Advocate is so enthusiastic.

I downloaded the installation DVD & loaded a KDE desktop on my notebook. It’s an HP Compaq 6515b. Installation went through correctly. My ethernet adaptor, a Broadcom BCM5787M was installed by default. However, the wireless adaptor, Broadcom BCM4311 wasn’t (as was the case with 13.1 beta). I proceeded with the driver installation as follows:

zypper in b43-fwcutter
/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware

The firmware download progress was shown, then installation and then my notebook froze. This is a bug which I had reported earlier during Beta testing: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=842111

See the previous bug reports in this article: openSUSE 13.1 bug-hunting spree

On first two trials my notebook kept freezing. I took a breath & tried a third time… and… it worked! I was happy yet perplexed as I could not determine what made it not to work the first two times.

It’s 23h00 & there’s LUGM meetup tomorrow. So, I’ll stop testing for tonight & get on with the bug-hunting adventure tomorrow evening.

####Update – Saturday 12 October 2013

I installed Google Chrome this morning & installed G+ Hangout plugin.

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

sudo zypper in google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm

sudo zypper in google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm

Nothing blocks… all is well!