I have installed Open SUSE 12.3 with gnome desktop on my Lenovo Yoga ultra book. Read my previous posts for how to get WiFi working.
The brightness control doesn’t work. I have tried many options found by search but this is the one that worked.
su
cd /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight
cat max_brightness
That number 4882 is the maximum brightness
echo 3000 | tee ./brightness
The one under /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0 didn’t work.
xbacklight didn’t work because it sets the file under acpi_video0.
No patches or kernel parameter settings were needed for this to work.
Lesson in journalism: How to report results of scientific study?
Remove all “may be”, “might have been” from the study results before publishing. Readers are only interested in looking at solid stories. It is our duty to remove all doubt from those results.
For example, if scientists find a new link between apes and monkeys dating back to a certain era, the study may say “we may have found the earliest known link between common monkeys and apes”. But a journalist should report it as “we now know when monkeys and apes became separate species”.
Quick solution:
yast2 runlevel set runlevel=x
I wanted to disable X Windows on my server running OpenSUSE 12.3. Changing /etc/inittab did not work. The above command setting the run level to 3 worked.
This post is written on a Lenovo Yoga 13 Ultrabook running OpenSUSE 12.3 using Chrome. Below are the steps I followed to get it working with WiFi.
I first tried installing Ubuntu because there were more online forum posts on Ubuntu. There were almost no posts on Open SUSE at the time at got the ultra book. I installed Ubuntu successfully knowing that there won’t be wireless but I could build the driver. Problem? The development packages were neither installed nor was available on the media. My lack of prior experience with Ubuntu also was a bottleneck.
Then I found a forum post on Open SUSE that had a driver download link. I knew I could compile the driver on Open SUSE because the media has all the packages in it. Yes, the media is 4.7 GB in size compared to Ubuntu’s less than 1 GB.
What doesn’t work? Trying to make a USB installer from Windows for Open SUSE. I tried a couple of utilities like UNetbootin and they failed to boot. One of them failed to complete creating the disk saying not enough space on 32 GB flash drive.
I have another computer with Open SUSE, so I used the image writer software.
On the laptop, I went in to bios, F2/FN+F2 (need be real quick). Disabled UEFI, secure boot, enabled legacy, enabled USB booting and made the USB stick as the first boot device.
Boot and installed Open SUSE. I chose to wipe out Windows 8 and created my own partitions. I made that 1 GB partition for bios boot.. type. At the end of partitioning, it still complained about it and I chose to ignore.
I could install the default settings and add the development packages after initial setup, but selected them at the point where it allows to change the selections. Selected, base development, C/C++ development and Kernel development. First time I selected KDE and then during the second time to verify that the steps were repeatable, I selected gnome. I do not have a preference. Now I have KDE on one computer and gnome on the other (this Lenovo Yoga Ultrabook.)
Note: During the first boot, it would boot from USB and won’t go to the ‘boot from hard drive’ option in the menu. So, I had to change the boot order at the first boot.
The wireless device is a USB device and not a PCI express according the author of this driver.
I downloaded the driver from https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au on a Linux machine to a folder:
git clone http://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au.git
Then I made a tar:
tar -zcvf rtl8723au.tar.gz rtl8723au
Copied the tar to another USB stick and extracted to the laptop.
Got to that folder as root.
make
make install
modprobe 8723au
Now I was able to add the wireless connection.
All of these were done with the help of this Open SUSE forum post.
Update May 5, 2013:
The gnome brightness control do not seem to have any effect. The screen is always full bright.
The touch pad controls are flaky. It may be a hardware problem. I almost never can get the right mouse button click right.
The Ultrabook gets hot while playing videos. Haven’t played games on it.
Update May 14, 2013:
There was an update today related to network manager. It caused the wireless network to stop working. I had to just redo the steps to get it working again.
