28 September, 2011

Tumbleweed image dream

At the (pretty cool) openMind conference in Tampere, Finland, it came up that a big advantage of Tumbleweed is that it always has the latest hardware support. Thanks to the rolling release, Tumbleweed comes with the latest Linux kernel which plays a big part of the hardware support of a Linux distro.

If your hardware does not work properly with the 'stable' release of openSUSE (or other distro's) trying the latest kernel can solve that. But that's hard to get on your system, even with stuff like the openSUSE Kernel repositories because it usually requires you to first install something.

Van openMind 2011

So here's something I think would be very cool to have: a weekly Tumbleweed image build in KIWI/OBS so people can test (LiveCD/USB image) and install Tumbleweed directly! Building this should not be crazy hard and we might be able to automatically test and thus verify basic stability with openQA... It would offer state of the art hardware support with openSUSE!

7 comments:

  1. I strongly concur

    My experience with distros is limited to debian, Kubuntu, openSUSE and Arch linux. There is lots to like about openSUSE but I have had the best experience with Arch:

    I came to the conclusion that all that time packagers spend creating a release is a waste of effort because a rolling release of vanilla packages id much more stable. I'm sure I'm being naive here because if it were that simple all distributions would roll by now.

    Anyhow, arch does not release installers very often (there has been a new one fairly recently due mostly I think to the kernel major version change) and I found myself with exactly this problem, only the most recent kernel would boot on my hardware and no installer with that kernel was available.

    I hope this project thrives, I'll probably use it.

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  2. "Tumbleweed comes with the latest Linux kernel which plays a big part of the hardware support of a Linux distro."

    I hope people would learn what Linux is before talking like that.

    As Linux is a monolithic kernel. And monolithic kernel means that is the whole operating system.
    Kernel (what means just monolithic kernel) is the synonym for operating system before the other OS architecture called Server-Client was developed few decades later. Before that, Kernel was the used term for the software what today carries the term "Operating System".
    Since the S-C architecture was developed, there became problem as it included a Microkernel as well some lazy people called just "kernel" and not "microkernel" as it were suppose to be called. But the architecture were so different by idea to Monolithic, that the newer term "Operating System" or just a "OS" was taken in use. And since then, it has been mostly by marketing propaganda when people started to believe that the software product was the operating system, even that the software product included software from operating system to middleware and to user interface and application programs.

    Linux and Linux kernel are same thing. No difference. Linux and Linux Operating System are same thing. No difference.

    Operating System only reason to exist is to operate the software and allocate hardware resources to software. Nothing else. No fancy user interfaces, no commands, no shells, no interaction with user anykind. Only way to "talk to" OS is to use its system calls what it offers for software.

    Operating System is always the one and the only one what is responsible does your device work or not.

    Even GNU people have tried to hide the truth that Linux is the operating system. By calling it is just a kernel.

    The whole situation would be totally different if Linux would be a microkernel and not a kernel. Then, and ONLY then, Linux would be just a kernel and most important part of the Operating System. But Linux is not a microkernel but a kernel aka operating system and responsible for every hardware and software operation.

    Every Linux distributor and contributor should learn that Linux is the operating system and different distributions ain't different operating systems but different software systems ran by same Linux operating system with different configurations and package setups and app versions and marketing.

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  3. my [+1] for a Tumbleweed-ISO.
    Would be a dream to do a fresh AND clean install instead of doing an old install an updating.
    Lets call it the Running Rolling Geeko Release ;-)

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  4. Wow! Always having LiveCD with latest and greatest drivers would be just awesome!

    @MarkoK: Terminology seems to bother you very much, I feel sorry for you. But I did not quite understood what does your comment has to do with Tumbleweed and openSUSE? Maybe you just forgot to write something on subject?

    So what do you think about Weekly Tumbleweed Image Build idea?

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  5. Would an alternative or complement be to simply have the installer capable of pulling packages from Tumbleweed rather than the DVD (making it like a net install)?

    If it could also pull changed files from the update repository as it installs, it would make installs a lot faster too. Now it takes longer to install all the OpenSUSE updates then it does to do the initial install. :-(

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  6. A few days a go i installed opensuse in one of my other laptop and upgrade it to tumbleweed ( using 11.4 as first base) .
    In my opinion , yes , it is rock stable and it is (maybe) more less buggy than arch because the flow of update is not as fast as arch .Some main package only updated when the new release are coming. Faster update than pclinuxos , but slower than arch .
    Yet what i dont like is , its seems more complicated to install things like multimedia and others. Often the dependencies problem in yast not solved automatically, we must to choose from change source base or not installing some package or a few other thing . This happen when i try to install multimedia codecs.
    For you who likes ootb experience , opensuse is good , but a few more other distro are easier to set up :) .

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