Monthly Archives: March 2013

openSUSE 12.3 / Lenovo T430

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My new Lenovo T430 arrived last week. After delighting in that satisfying new laptop smell, I made recovery DVDs I will presumably never need, then blew away Windows 7 and installed openSUSE 12.3 (full disclosure: I work for SUSE, so my choice of distro may not be entirely unbiased).

Some niceties:

  • The textured touchpad is lovely. Much better feel than a pure flat surface.
  • As I’d expect, the keyboard is excellent (even if PGUP/PGDN aren’t where I’m used to).
  • The openSUSE installer is quick and easy. I’m pretty sure there’s less steps than last time I did a regular openSUSE install from scratch a couple of years ago.
  • No problem setting up encrypted LVM, although on my ~500GB drive it defaults to a 20GB root and 25GB /home, with a whole lotta free space left over in the encrypted partition, so that might want some tweaking.
  • Entering the passphrase on boot happens on a pretty graphical screen, you don’t get thrown back to a terminal window where random junk is appearing over the passphrase entry prompt.
  • Moving my mail over from my old laptop was pretty much just an rsync of the Thunderbird profile directory (and maybe a tweak to ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini)

Some oddities:

  • The Novell GroupWise 8.0.2 client had a couple of problems:
    • It claims to need libXm.so.3 (listed in RPM Requires), but works fine without it. This is fortunate, because openSUSE 12.3 doesn’t ship openmotif22-libs-32bit anymore.
    • Unless you’ve installed libpangox-1_0-0-32bit, the GroupWise client will segfault somewhere in libwebrenderer.so. This is less than obvious.
  • The YaST disk partitioner seems slightly confused adding new LVs inside my encrypted VG later on (it either locked up or crashed). I haven’t had time to investigate this properly, so I’ve ignored it for the moment and used lvcreate and mkfs in a terminal instead.
  • You do need to reboot at least once after initial install for NetworkManager to work properly (this is mentioned in the release notes).
  • I’m running GNOME 3.6, and I tried using the tweak tool to have it just blank the screen – not suspend – when closing the laptop lid. Turns out systemd is being too clever for me, so I had to fiddle with that a bit (set HandleLidSwitch=ignore in /etc/systemd/logind.conf, then run sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind).

Very little else to report so far. Aside from the oddities above everything else seems to Just WorkTM. OTOH, all I’ve really done is web browsing, email and assorted fiddling around in terminals. Maybe listened to a bit of music (the inbuilt speakers are well and truly loud enough, but a bit tinnier than real speakers – can’t say I’m terribly surprised by that though).

A Reasonable Baseline

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I went and saw Peter Singer’s keynote for The Tasmanian Writers’ Festival last night. Perhaps unsurprisingly he spoke on ethics and three big problems affecting the world now (extreme poverty, animal welfare and climate change) and how these things relate to, and perhaps exacerbate each other.

Two things in particular stuck with me, and I thought it worth noting them here.

1) Professor Singer is in a field known as Applied Ethics. At some time in the past there was only Ethics. My inference is that the latter group are talking about – and thinking about – ethics, but not actually behaving any differently as a result of their cogitations. I find this notion simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

2) At one point while speaking about living ethically, Professor Singer said that if you look back at the end of each day and say to yourself “well, I didn’t lie, cheat or steal, and I didn’t maim anybody”, you’re setting the bar too low. It would be better, he suggested, to look back and say “what did I do to improve the world today, or to help someone else in some way?” This seems like a pretty good approach to me.