Booting up openSUSE 12.1

Initial boot up went well. Nothing remarkable.

Customizing Ubuntu 12.1

One of the first things that we do to NON-server openSUSE boxes is to make it multi-media ready and friendly.  We do this by installing searching for and installing the openSUSE restricted codecs meta package. You can get the jist about this from here.  Amongst other things, this allows you to playback and use encrypted DVDs, mp3, some propietery codecs, proprietary drives (ATI, nvidia etc).

We dont care what any body else says, but the default gnome desktop environment was plesant to use. It was a little sluggish, but the UI is generally heading in the right direction - in our humble opinion (IOHO)

What Stood Out:

- painless install process. Accepting default install options required less than 7 clicks in total! Remarkable.

- btrfs as a file system option is now very prominent

- Issues with GPT labels for large drives were gracefully handled by the installer

- upstart service manager is still de-jour in the Ubuntu world ....and NOT systemd

Test Drive System Specs:

$ sudo lshw  -quiet -short -sanitize -enable cpuinfo -html
H/W path       Device      Class       Description
==================================================
system      System Product Name (To Be Filled By O.E.M.)
/0                         bus         M4A88T-M
/0/0                       memory      64KiB BIOS
/0/4                       processor   AMD Phenom(tm) II X2 550 Processor
/0/4/5                     memory      256KiB L1 cache
/0/4/6                     memory      1MiB L2 cache
/0/4/7                     memory      6MiB L3 cache
/0/33                      memory      2GiB System Memory
/0/33/0                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/33/1                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/33/2                    memory      2GiB DIMM Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/33/3                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/100                     bridge      RS880 Host Bridge
/0/100/1                   bridge      RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (int gfx)
/0/100/1/5                 display     RS880 [Radeon HD 4250]
/0/100/a                   bridge      RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 5)
/0/100/a/0     eth0        network     RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
/0/100/11      scsi2       storage     SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [IDE mode]
/0/100/11/0    /dev/sda    disk        1TB WDC WD10EARS-00M