Saturday, October 17, 2015

Thinkpad Yoga 14 with OpenSUSE

I bought my first Yoga 13 few years back, and have enjoyed both the laptop and Lenovo support. However, a laptop with a “real” tablet mode was always some thing I really wanted, and when I saw the Thinkpad Yoga 14 only for 849$, that was a dream come true.
The laptop itself is a great device. It looks professional, the keyboard is exceptional, screen, solidity and everything is much better than most laptops you can get under 1000$. The best part, however, is it’s digitizer screen. I wouldn’t dwell too much on the laptop however, so let’s look at the installation on OpenSUSE.
I installed the “OpenSUSE LEAP 42.1 Milestone 1” a while back, and it’s been working quite well. However, trying to test an pre-beta version with a new computer, and trying to update frequently is bound to give problems. And given the RC1 recently came out, I decided to re-install, and hence the blogpost.

Disk Setup

I installed two SSD’s on the TPY14. One for /home and /work (or something of the sort —/cuore in my case), the other for the OS. This setup has helped me keep my Documents, Music and school/work related files while also giving me the freedom to play around with different OSs.
sda -
sda1 -> FAT -> /boot/efi - for EFI Boot
sda2 -> BtrFS -> / - Root partition. I have loved snapshots in BtrFS. There might be some minor hickups, but I think it’s great specially if you want stability not compromised while testing new things.
sda3 -> swap
sdb -
sdb1 -> BtrFS -> /home - Home
sdb2 -> BtrFS -> /cuore - WORK

Installation

Few adjustments I made to the installation process might not be really necessary, but they were,
  1. Added online repositories,
  2. Configured wireless,
  3. Added some extra patterns that I knew I will use,
I should note that the wireless worked out of the box. It did complain I didn’t set it up few times along the way even though I had, but just pressing next in the network setup step again seemed to work.
Installation went without hick-ups, though, there were some crash reports when the desktop first loaded. But I guess it’s still RC1, so cannot complain.

Software

  • Enlightment Desktop
  • Xournal
  • Darktable
  • Digikam
  • Gimp
  • Powertop
  • Chromium
  • Jack
  • Texmaker
  • C++/Python/Kernal development


 asd