openSUSE 13.1 RC2 came out today! Could see some awesome bug-hunting moments ahead. I didn’t waste time & fired the download page. Thought I’d start with the Live editions and I downloaded GNOME Live 64bit. I dd’ed the nearly 1GB image to a pendrive. Oh! What’s dd’ed? See it in action here. :)

I first tried a Live session on my test notebook, that’s an HP Compaq 6515b model. GRUB shows up correctly… then, oops, GNOME desktop loads but with broken display. This was ticking right since beta 1 and I had also reported it – Bug 841475

Ok… Let’s chill. I thought I’ll do complete trial this time and then report bugs that I find. So, to verify if the broken GNOME desktop is a real bug I tried a Live session on another notebook, this time an Acer Aspire 4741.

Great! It boots & desktop loads fine on my Acer Aspire notebook. Broken desktop on HP isn’t a generic ‘bug’ as such then, should be a hardware specific thing. Well, playing around the desktop was already fun, so I said let’s tinker things on Acer for a while :)

First things first… Internet! My Broadcom BCM57780 Ethernet & Atheros AR9287 Wireless are both installed. Ethernet connection was doing well. Firefox shoots perfectly. I took a screenshot, resized the same in GIMP and uploaded in this blog post. Nothing bugs till now.

I signed to my Gmail, used Facebook for a while … then I thought I should get back to testing. I fired up a couple more applications, LibreOffice Writer etc, installed a few more fonts and applications. Checked my CPU usage, it was decently fine.

Something to note though, zypper is still slow at first use but once the refresh is over, all is good.

I would have continued the adventure but I was feeling damn hungry. Time for dinner! I’ll see later if something can be hacked with zypper repos to make the refresh faster.