OpenSUSE 12.2

I've bought myself an EVGA GT630 GPU. It was a close call between that and a 9800GT, but the GT630 won on two points: it has openGL 4.2, vs 3.1, and it only draws 20A on the 12V rail, vs 26A (my PSU provides 28A). So now I can try all those distros with current and perhaps even cutting-edge versions of Xorg. My first? OpenSUSE 12.2 32 bit edition.

I downloaded i686 Studio MATE edition from OpenSUSE's susestudio 12.2 gallery. Click the CD/USB icon to download. You'll have to log into one of six online social networks; I used Google.

The browser for the appliance is Chromium. Fonts are TERRIBLE. The installer is in System > Administration > Live installer ... one of 53 menu entries. It brought up YasT2 (which I am going to render yast2 from now on), which searched for license information and did not find it. I presumed GPLv2 or 3, and accepted blindly. It was so SLUGGISH!! It could not mount my HDs, which made me a little wary; I like to look at the partitions I am using before installing. I remembered that I like to do installs with my data disk unpowered, aborted, and decided to use the netinstall version, which I had previously downloaded and burned to disk, instead.

I considered Luna OS from susestudio but it's Greek language. I also considered Aurora, which could have been faster than the net install. I spent a while browsing the suseStudio gallery searching for those links, and just about anyone can post just about anything there. There's stuff there that looks like it was posted on facebook (one of the social networks that can be used to authenticate for downloads; others include Twitter, Yahoo!, OpenID, and Novell). The suse studio gallery looks interesting, but there's a lot of garbage remixes there, and I'm not willing to spend my time sifting through whatever errors get included in whatever remix I might get. Next time I install opensuse, I'm going for the DVD.

Before I found a new susestudio appliance I was interested in trying, NetInstall was already downloading installation components. The yast2 installer is fairly comprehensive, and allows you to be as granular as you need fairly granular. System Probing took absurdly long, at least 30 min. I had to leave for a few hours before the install could complete, but as I expected the install to need at least two more hours to finish, I saw no issues. My screen was shut down when I got back, and I could not bring it back up. I had to do a hard shutdown.

I got opensuse updates: first, ran install/remove software (yast2, no packagekit included, huzzah) & grabbed ONLY pre-marked yast2 zypper updates. When they finished, yast2 automatically restarted. Then I could download the larger updates. The most annoying thing: NO estimated time to complete either downloads or installs. I then grabbed nvidia drivers from this page. Bear in mind that openSUSE uses Xorg v. 1.12, which ATI does not support, and the 3.4.11 Linux kernel, configured for i586. Some of those appliances posted on the Suse studio use i686 kernels, but I am content.

Then I added Wine. This involves going to this page here, getting the URL, pasting it into yast2, refreshing the repos, and downloading & installing wine (the largest part of which was wine-mono, big surprise, followed by wine-gecko). Annoyingly, yast2 closed entirely after finishing. That's not the only annoying thing about SUSE's package management. When patching or installing, it usually does not tell you how much you will download, how much you have downloaded, how much remains to download, or how much time remains for the downloads to finish. It still downloads one package (or delta) at a time, installs it, and then moves on to download the next. That's one thing I dislike about openSUSE's package management, especially in comparison to APT, which connects to the repos, downloads everything, tells you how long downloads will take, and then installs everything.

Then I went to get other software I wanted: conky, chromium-browser (called chromium in openSUSE, and prone to overlaying graphical flash video content from one tab or window onto others, even on different desktops; see updates below), irssi, pidgin, kpat (had surprisingly few new kde dependencies), leafpad, xscreensaver-data-extra, midori. Ace of Penguins, nethack, and mousepad weren't in the repositories. Libreoffice, w3m, galculator, and abiword 2.8.6 were already installed. I couldn't think of anything else at the time.

I ran gnomesu nvidia-settings and put in my preferred resolution, 1280x1024, which worked. I tried to save my configuration to file, which did not. I created the file in my home directory, which was a poor solution. I finally remembered what the better one is, when there is no Xorg.conf file, which is to run nvidia-xconfig as root.

I discovered that PCmanFM was not configured to use the only included text editor -- beaver -- to open .txt files! Nano was not installed either; I used zypper to do so from the command line.

I got 46 fps in my normal test spot in Grizzly Hills. I then arranged my addons to suit, added a few, removed some unused addons, and got about 44-45 fps. By comparison, Madbox gives 38-39 FPS, but 25 fps when I alt-tab away from & back to WoW. I can't figure out why that happens. I think the newer kernel (i586 3.4 vs i386 3.2) and the newer Xorg (a consideration I didn't know about before) are the sources of improved framerates. And, of course, nobody runs Linux as heavy as Ubuntu.

My current addons:

• Auctioneer Advanced suite, incl. BeanCounter, Enchantrix, and Informant
• BagSync
• Butsu
• Cellular
• ColorTools
• Cutup - MoP (rogues only)
• GnomishVendorShrinker
• LagBar (which has replaced several LDB feeds; I need to try switching between the LDB feeds and LagBar, to see which provides better framerates)
• LDB_PitchSpeed
• LoadIT
• LonnyCastingBar
• NinjaPanel
• OmniCC
• OmniCC Config
• Peddler
• PeskyText
• RepairGear
• Status Bars 2 (I use the thick version)
• Stubby
• Swatter
• TargetClassButton (something I find VITAL for PvP)
• TasteTheNaimbow
• teksLoot
• TomTom
• tullaRange
• tullaRange Config
• xanAutoMail
• xanDurability (which has replaced another LDB feed)
• alDamageMeter

I may reinstall focusframe, if I start playing DPS in instances. It's important to keep track of the tank.

My wife bought me a Dell N5110 laptop for about $500 last year. It has a 2 GHz Intel quad Core i3 Sandy Bridge CPU, 3GB of onboard RAM shared with the Intel onboard graphics, and Windows 7. Since use of Windows captive software is sometimes required to pass classes (and just about impossible to avoid in my chosen field), I've kept Win7 on the lappy, dual booting with Linux Mint 13 "Maya" 64 bit, with both Cinnamon and MATE desktops. The laptop also has 4 USB ports and a VGA port. This allowed my stepson to play World of Warcraft on it, using a real keyboard, monitor, and mouse when his desktop PSU died recently. I've taken to doing the same. WoW under Win7 with DirectX 11 on the laptop underperforms WoW in Wine with OpenGL under openSUSE on my desktop system (specs in the sidebar), giving 41FPS at my benchmark spot in Grizzly Hills. This is a loss of only 3-4 FPS, and WoW under DirectX11 in Win7 doesn't have some of the graphical issues that crop up for me using OpenGL under Wine.

Here's what they are: I don't get a pointer for my character on the world map; I have to guess where I am. There is not one ingame 3d model viewer that works under Wine: not those on quests, not the character UI, not the dressing room, not the mount journal, not some of the unitframes I've made the mistake of trying. Similar issues eventually cleared up for me as Wine 1.1.x got better and better through BC and WotLK. Will Wine 1.5.x (currently 1.5.15) get to that point? I don't know, but I hope so. In the meantime, I spent some time on the AppDB making sure I'm configuring correctly. According to comments on the WoW 5.x page on WineHQ's AppDB, it appears that these issues apply to the OpenGL implementation of WoW, which the WoW devs really only use for debugging (and the MacOSX client, because OS X doesn't have DirectX support). I had a complete lockup immediately after completing the 3d & final objective of a quest, so bad I couldn't even change caplock/numlock. I had to hold down the power button to shut down. With further testing, this happened 2 more times, on the same toon and on a different one, generally after a couple hours of questing. I edited /etc/sysctl.conf to add vm.swappiness = 0. Disabling swap in this manner has done my framerates good before, and I can believe that Wine's handling of swap could be problematic. At the same time, I changed my graphics API in ~/.wine/drive_c/Programs/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf to SET gxapi "D3D9". This cleared up the graphics issues, and I haven't had a lockup since. In D3D9, the framerate at the test spot in Grizzly Hills is 36 FPS or so. This isn't as fast as my laptop, and quite a bit slower than OpenGL, but it's fast enough for me. Right now, openSUSE 12.2 is my desktop distro of choice for playing WoW or word processing, as it still have the stable and sane version of Abiword, 2.8.

Next distro? I've considered Kororaa 18 and Salix OS 14. One day I'll try an Arch derivative again. Upgrading Madbox to Quantal Quetzal (which is here, though Madbox 12.10 is not) went poorly; I have two instances of my networking interface in the panel, and while they both CLAIM eth0 is connected, nothing loads). Or I might go for stripped down Debian Wheezy, in the form of CrunchBang Waldorf. Right now, I have #! 11 Waldorf & Lubuntu 12.10 downloaded. I think the idea of a lean, clean Debian system appeals to me more. But I'll have to get caught up at school before I install any new distros. If anyone wants to suggest something else, I'd love to hear about it.

UPDATE

Some issues have cropped up. There's a flash bug I can't screenshoot. My best guess is that flash content is drawn to the root window, because it will show up inside any other window that's at the same spot on the screen, regardless of what desktop you are using, or what tab you have open in your browser. Maybe I should try installing Windows versions of FF &/or SRWare Iron, to see what happens.

Speaking of Firefox, my default sans serif font got ugly. I changed the default font to Liberation Sans, and the issue cleared up.

Update II

Not that Madbox (ie, Ubuntu 12.04 w/ an openbox DE) doesn't have its flash issues; the flashplayer (and in fact some PDF readers) reverse red and blue values. That at least doesn't happen in openSUSE. And, I've added a flashblock extension to Chromium, and I'm not having the issue with Flash any more.

Madbox 12.04 i386

When I saw that the Wine PPA for Ubuntu had advanced to 1.5.7, I said I'd try a new Ubuntu-based distro to use with it. Lubuntu is my perennial favorite, but I decided I'd go for something even leaner: Madbox 12.04.

A bit of history: After Philip Newborough, the creator of CrunchBang Linux, rebased from Ubuntu to Debian, a number of folks stepped up to try to provide a lightweight distro using OpenBox based on current Ubuntu releases, cos first, that was what they liked, and second, CrunchBang 10 "Statler" was slow in coming. These included UberBang (only one version, based on Lucid Lynx 10.04), Masonux (last version based on Karmic Koala 9.10), and perhaps a couple of others. One of the folks in the #! community that goes by ADcomp also stepped up, and created Madbox. Philip says it is the implementation most like what he originally had in mind, and most true to his original vision. The ISO file is right here, and the md5sum is 34382c7847f51195a12d5884e178af7f. I couldn't find a torrent seed.

The live CD starts with a graphical GRUB2 bootloader, that allows you to choose between Belgian, French, and US (qwerty) keyboards, with Belgian as the default. It goes by VERY fast, in a mere five seconds or so. Don't blink or you'll miss it. The ISO is very lean at 375MB. As you would expect, applications are sparse: lxpanel, lxterminal, chromium-browser, PCManFM, geany for editing, Mirage for graphics, ePDFViewer for office, GNOME MPlayer, PulseAudio Volume Control, HTop, UXTerm, XTerm, GParted, networkmanager, OBConf, and lxde-appearance. If you select "Run" from the panel menu, you get lxpanelctl-run, but if you hit alt-F2, you get gmrun. This is because of an issue I'd seen elsewhere in LXDE; for whatever reason, if you modify the Openbox config file at all (found at ~/.config/openbox/something-rc.xml -- something may be nothing, lxde, or lubuntu), and set a keybinding to launch lxpanelctl-run it launches beneath whatever app has focus, and you have to alt-tab to it. It's the same with PCManFM. Incidentally, I am not currently having that issue with lxpanelctl-run in Madbox. I'm not sure if I set up the keybinding before or after adding lxde-core, but lxpanelctl-run behaves itself in Madbox's OpenBox environment. PCManFM still launches behind whatever app has focus. I will probably install Thunar to fix this.

Which reminds me of something else: when you resize lxterminal, you get some graphical corruption. I've seen this since lubuntu 11.10. Here's a pretty bad example:

Shot at 2012-07-02
This is something else I've been seeing for some time. The environment recovers if you move another window over the corrupted area. My solution is really simple: ROXterm.

Installation was with Ubiquity. Downloading and installation took 21 minutes. After you finish selecting your timezone and configuring your account, there is no slideshow, only a progress bar. Post-install, I had to update 313 packages (about 12 minutes of downloads at 200k/s) and add a lot of stuff. The repos were decidedly sluggish, which is odd: I'm in the South of the US, and the downloads from us.archives.ubuntu.com never quite reached 200kb/s, and I know I can get as much as 360kb/s. Maybe it's because I told Ubiquity I was in New York. Further investigation revealed that I'm getting transfer rates no higher than about 200KB/s, regardless of anything. I shall have to contact my ISP.

I started with synaptic, mousepad, jockey-gtk, abiword (v2.9.2, which is a buggy piece of crap that blacks out its rulers and will occasionally kick me out of my desktop session to the display manager when I click on a menu), and ubuntu-restricted-extras, then set out to fix fstab. Problem: blkid didn't work quickly, the way I'm used to it doing. It started and nothing happened, for many minutes. I don't know why. On to other things, like xchat, irssi, w3m, pidgin, and firefox.

Then I discovered that there is another way to list UUIDs: ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid > uuids.txt which worked like a charm (except for not showing labels). With that, I had no problem editing fstab to meet my needs.

I cannot invoke graphical programs with gksu using gmrun. In every case, I found myself creating a root terminal (use sudo su and provide your password) and invoking graphical programs from those, including synaptic, gparted, jockey-gtk and amdcccle, until I opened the menu item's Properties in the lxpanel-menu and changing the command to gksu [foo]. This worked for synaptic, but not amdcccle or gparted.

Jockey-gtk did its usual excellent job of installing proprietary graphical drivers. Catalyst STILL can't get my Hitachi CM751 CRT monitor to run at 1280x1024, which is one of its native resolutions. Instead, it runs it at 1600x1200, but only uses 1280x1024 pixels, centered. All 4:3 native resolutions work fine. To keep framerate comparisons honest, I run WoW in a 1280x900 window like I did at 1280x1024, but on my 1600x1200 desktop.

Framerates were generally ok, but whenever anything loaded -- a death animation, a set of particle effects, my mount -- the screen froze up for a second or so. Given how often particle effects and death animations go off in combat, this was not acceptable. I investigated. It turns out that my Config.wtf file (location: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf) had lost a setting I'd set along the way:
SET gxAPI "openGL"
No idea why. But that was the issue.

Starting RAM usage in Madbox 12.04 is about 150MB, only about 60MB leaner than with openSUSE 12.1 lxde. But either Ubuntu (compared to openSUSE) or Wine 1.5.7 (vs. Wine 1.5.6) seems to run leaner. openSUSE 12.1 swiftly ramped up to about 65-70% of my 2.95GiB of available RAM while running the game, while Madbox 12.04 took hours of play to reach that level of usage.

Eventually, I added the lxde-core desktop environment, which has overcome pretty much all of the annoyances I had with Madbox's default behavior, while only using perhaps 50-60MB more RAM. The end result? I went to my test spot (Grizzly Hills, 29.7, 50.2, facing north, with the bottom of the waterfall lined up with my shoulderpads) and got a framerate of 30fps. That is the best I've ever had. And when I tried it in the default madbox/OB desktop, I got 32fps. I used to be tickled to get 25FPS there during WotLK. Of course, back then I was playing with a 128MB nVidia GeForce 7100. But now I have to find a suitable benchmarking spot somewhere in the new zones or suitably close to Orgrimmar, with sufficiently demanding water, cos humping out to Grizzly Hills to test framerates is a pain. Some place like 58.6, 32.3 in the Vir'naal oasis, facing north on the small bare rock, zoomed all the way out, with my head lined up with the left edge of the lower falls of the rapids. I'm getting 26-27fps there with the openbox desktop session. And there's also lots of good fishing, for blackbelly mudfish -- excellent tank food if ever there was.