Last week openSUSE 13.1 Beta 1 was released. Shortly after I tweeted about my bug-hunting spree. I downloaded the GNOME Live image and made a Live pendrive.
Image by Andy S.
Upon booting the Live pendrive on my notebook I stumbled on something weird. The GNOME desktop loaded but graphic was broken. I checked the graphic driver & it seemed correctly loaded. I tried the pendrive on another notebook, still same results. So, that was my first bug encounter, got it reported: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841475
I followed the instructions as specified by Dominique Leuenberger in the bug report & it seemed to test things further I needed to install. I went ahead and installed on my HP Compaq 6515b notebook. I didn’t encounter any broken display during the installation process. I hoped it should now be fixed upon booting. Alas, Grub failed this time … I initially formatted the drive as Btrfs. Thought maybe that’s bugging and I re-formatted to ext4 and installed again. Still same issue with Grub. That was my second bug encounter which I reported: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841711
Hopefully, if these two are solved ahead I’ll continue with some more bug-hunting in the coming days.
Update — 24 September 2013
While the two bugs I reported earlier are being investigated I decided to download the openSUSE 13.1 Beta 1 DVD and test things again on my HP notebook. The installer loaded as lightning, super fast, I was impressed. I partitioned the disk with Btrfs as follows :
20G / 91G /home 2G swap
Installation complete & I rebooted. I was greeted by a nice & sleek KDE desktop. No broken display as was the case with the GNOME Live. Good to go ahead with further tests. The Broadcom (BCM5787M) ethernet adaptor was installed already. Wireless adaptor Broadcom BCM4311 wasn’t though. I proceeded with the firmware installation as follows:
zypper in b43-fwcutter
/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
The firmware started downloading & while installation was ON my notebook froze. I rebooted and tried again. This time I received a kernel panic. Like this I filed my third bug report: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=842111