Release Notes

13.2.20141013

Abstract

openSUSE is a free and Linux-based operating system for your PC, Laptop or
Server. You can surf the web, manage your e-mails and photos, do office work,
play videos or music and have a lot of fun!

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Table of Contents

Installation

    For Detailed Installation Information

General

    openSUSE Documentation
    UEFI   Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
    UEFI, GPT, and MS-DOS Partitions
    Booting When in Secure Boot Mode

System Upgrade
Technical

    Garbage on the Screen During Installation with the Nouveau Driver
    AppArmor and Permission Settings
    Skype

Miscellaneous
More Information and Feedback

If you upgrade from an older version to this openSUSE release, see previous
release notes listed here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Release_Notes

Installation

For Detailed Installation Information

For detailed installation information, see the section called    openSUSE
Documentation   .

General

openSUSE Documentation

In Start-Up, find step-by-step installation instructions, as well as
introductions to the KDE and Gnome desktops and to the LibreOffice suite. Also
covered are basic administration topics such as deployment and software
management and an introduction to the bash shell.

Find the documentation in /usr/share/doc/manual/opensuse-manuals_$LANG after
installing the package opensuse-startup_$LANG, or online on http://
doc.opensuse.org.

UEFI   Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

Prior to installing openSUSE on a system that boots using UEFI (Unified
Extensible Firmware Interface), you are urgently advised to check for any
firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends and, if available, to install
such an update. A pre-installed Windows 8 is a strong indication that your
system boots using UEFI.

Background: Some UEFI firmware has bugs that cause it to break if too much data
gets written to the UEFI storage area. Nobody really knows how much "too much"
is, though. openSUSE minimizes the risk by not writing more than the bare
minimum required to boot the OS. The minimum means telling the UEFI firmware
about the location of the openSUSE boot loader. Upstream Linux Kernel features
that use the UEFI storage area for storing boot and crash information (pstore)
have been disabled by default. Nevertheless, it is recommended to install any
firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends.

UEFI, GPT, and MS-DOS Partitions

Together with the EFI/UEFI specification, a new style of partitioning arrived:
GPT (GUID Partition Table). This new schema uses globally unique identifiers
(128-bit values displayed in 32 hexadecimal digits) to identify devices and
partition types.

Additionally, the UEFI specification also allows legacy MBR (MS-DOS)
partitions. The Linux boot loaders (ELILO or GRUB2) try to automatically
generate a GUID for those legacy partitions, and write them to the firmware.
Such a GUID can change frequently, causing a rewrite in the firmware. A rewrite
consist of two different operation: removing the old entry and creating a new
entry that replaces the first one.

Modern firmware has a garbage collector that collects deleted entries and frees
the memory reserved for old entries. A problem arises when faulty firmware does
not collect and free those entries; this may end up with a non-bootable system.

The workaround is simple: convert the legacy MBR partition to the new GPT to
avoid this problem completely.

Booting When in Secure Boot Mode

This only affects machines in UEFI mode with secure boot enabled.

The new version of the shim loader allows more machines to boot with Secure
Boot enabled than with openSUSE 13.1. Nevertheless, in case of trouble, first
update the BIOS of your machine to the latest version. If the BIOS update does
not help, report the model of your machine to the wiki (http://en.opensuse.org/
openSUSE:UEFI). Then we can track it for the next release.

System Upgrade

Technical

Garbage on the Screen During Installation with the Nouveau Driver

On some systems with NVIDIA cards, the installer may show garbage on the top
part of the screen due to problems with the default nouveau driver. If you are
affected by this problem, you can disable the nouveau kernel module to run the
installer and then enable it again once the system is installed or upgraded.

To disable the kernel module, once you boot from the installation media, select
the 'Installation' entry in grub and press 'e' to edit the parameters. Then go
to the line starting with 'linux' (or 'linuxefi') and add brokenmodules=nouveau
at the end. Now press F10 to continue booting with the new parameter. After the
system is installed, you can re-enable the nouveau module by editing /etc/
modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf and removing the entry that blacklists nouveau.

AppArmor and Permission Settings

AppArmor is enabled by default. This means more security, but might prevent
services from working if you run them in unexpected ways. If you encounter
strange permission problems, try to switch the AppArmor profile for the
affected service to complain mode with:

aa-complain /usr/bin/$your_service

Complain mode means: allow everything, and log things that the profile would
not allow.

Even if it helps, report it as a bug! We want to fix AppArmor profiles to also
cover corner cases.

Skype

PulseAudio 4.0 exposes a bug in the current version of Skype for Linux (v4.2).
Until Skype is fixed and updated, run skype from the command line:

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 skype

For more information about this bug, see http://arunraghavan.net/2013/08/
pulseaudio-4-0-and-skype/.

Miscellaneous

N/A

More Information and Feedback

  * Read the READMEs on the CDs.

  * Get detailed changelog information about a particular package from the RPM:

    rpm --changelog -qp <FILENAME>.rpm

    <FILENAME>. is the name of the RPM.

  * Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of the DVD for a chronological
    log of all changes made to the updated packages.

  * Find more information in the docu directory on the DVD.

  * https://activedoc.opensuse.org/ contains additional or updated
    documentation.

  * Visit http://www.opensuse.org for the latest product news from openSUSE.

Copyright    2014 SUSE LLC

Thanks for using openSUSE.

The openSUSE Team.

