>>> On 12/31/2016 at 02:36 PM, Berthold Gunreben <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I am happy to announce that openSUSE Tumbleweed 20161226 is available > for s390x. > > openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release, that typically always > provides the latest updated packages. This makes it a perfect platform > for development. > > This is the very first version of openSUSE Tumbleweed that is available > for s390x.
I performed a bunch of test installations last night today, and came across a few things to consider for anyone else trying this. 1. Don't try to perform the install with 512MB of virtual memory. Things seemed to go OK until close to the end when it all collapsed. Besides, performance of the installer stinks with that amount. 768MB seems OK, even with using VNC for the install. 2. You may want to go to http://mirrors.opensuse.org/list/factory.html and find a mirror that's close to you _and_ has the ports/zsystems contents. Otherwise you're likely to be downloading RPMs from around the world, which would be very slow. Or not. Several experiments produced both good and bad speeds. 3. The "Server (Text Mode)" installation type fits on a single 3390-3 with about a hundred MB left over. Probably any of the graphical desktop choices will require something bigger. If you use SSH for the install instead of VNC, that will leave you about 200MB of free space. (~700 packages being installed versus ~880.) 4. The first reboot after the install tries to use the virtual reader instead of the just-installed DASD volume. You'll have to manually IPL from the target volume. If you're like me and you do a "change rdr all keep nohold" before IPLing from the reader, then those files will still be in place when the reboot happens, and you'll be restarting the installer. You'll need to interrupt that and then IPL from the target volume. 5. If you haven't weaned yourself from commands like "ifconfig," "netstat," etc., you'll want to install the net-tools-deprecated package: zypper install net-tools-deprecated 6. You might not want to select "Add Online Repositories Before Installation" for a couple of reasons. One, you won't get many updates from them, and two, if you decide you want to try it anyway, you need to define at least 1GB virtual storage for the guest. Also, see points 11 and 12. 7. Network interface names will _not_ be eth?. They'll be similar to enccw0.0.0800 (for an OSA card at device numbers 800-802). 8. NTP will be automatically configured to use servers with the name 0.opensuse.pool.ntp.org through 3.opensuse.pool.ntp.org. Depending on your network configuration these may or may not be reachable. 9. You won't see any "32bit" packages because, well, none were built, just 64bit. 10. The "man" command doesn't get installed by default, but "info" does. This doesn't help you with packages that only have man pages and not info pages. "zypper in man" will fix that of course. It will also pull in a total of 19 packages. 11. The package and update repositories that get added at the end of the install will be mostly useless. This is because they point at http://download.opensuse.org/update/tumbleweed/ which only contains noarch, ia32 and x86_64 packages. The only one that will (for now) be of any real use is the repository you used to do the install, which "zypper lr" should display as "openSUSE-20161226-0." 12. Worse, the noarch packages that _are_ available from download.opensuse.org/update/tumbleweed/ have a vendor of openSUSE, while the packages from the download.opensuse.org/ports/zsystems/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ have a vendor of obs://build.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Factory:zSystems. As a result, a "zypper lu" command will never show any applicable updates because of the difference in vendor. I'll have to get with Berthold to see if it can be fixed and how. All that aside, the install is pretty easy and quick. If you decide to try the FTPBOOT EXEC that Berthold mentioned in his other note, you might want to beware of the mirrors.rit.edu download site. I ran into some problems accessing it via FTP, but HTTP worked just fine. Unfortunately FTPBOOT EXEC only knows how to do FTP downloads. But, if you can use another means to download the install kernel, parmfile, and initrd, pointing the actual install to http://mirrors.rit.edu/opensuse/ports/zsystems/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ worked fine for me. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
