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OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 Release Notes true 2023-01-05T21:28:39.589Z 4.3 markdown 2021-04-24T05:18:09.972Z

OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 Release Notes

The OpenMandriva Lx teams are pleased to announce the availability of OpenMandriva Lx 4.3.

Available Media

This release is available as a live media USB flash drive (memory stick), downloadable in ISO format. These are available on our downloads page. USB flash drive installation is usually noticeably faster. As always speed depends on many factors. Live media means you are able to run OpenMandriva Lx straight from a memory stick (see below) and try it before installing it. You may also install the system to hard disk either from the running live image or from the boot manager.

  • Available ISO files are: - x86_64 KDE Plasma desktop full featured (includes the most common used functionalities, multimedia and office software). - znver1 KDE Plasma desktop: we have also built a version specifically for current AMD processors (Ryzen, ThreadRipper, EPYC) that outperforms the generic (x86_64) version by taking advantage of new features in those processors. znver1 is for the listed processors (Ryzen, ThreadRipper, EPYC) only, do not install on any other hardware.

Installable images are offered for the Pinebook Pro, Raspberry Pi 4B, Raspberry Pi 3B+, Synquacer, Cubox Pulse and generic UEFI compatible devices (such as most aarch64 server boards)

System requirements

OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 requires at least 2048 MB of memory and at least 10 GB of hard drive space (see below for known issues with partitioning).

Important Note: Graphics Hardware:

The KDE Plasma Desktop requires a 3D graphics card that supports OpenGL 2.0 or above. We recommend using AMD, Intel, Adreno or VC4 graphics chips.

Internet Connection

Calamares Installer checks if an Internet connection is available, but OpenMandriva Lx will install just fine even without. It is perfectly OK to simply install as you normally would and proceed to use your new system as normal. Updating such a system would require being temporarily connected to the internet or downloading the packages elsewhere and transferring them to the installed system and installing the updated packages. But as you are not connected to the internet you could simply use the system and not update for how ever long you see fit.

Virtual Machines

At this time the only virtualization software that OMLx ISOs are tested on is VirtualBox. The same hardware requirements apply when running in virtual machines. For VirtualBox you must always have at least 2048 MB of memory or OpenMandriva Lx will fail to boot. Also for VirtualBox it is advisable to install to a fresh virtual machine, as trying to install to an existing one may occasionally fail.

Calamares installer

Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. It aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic. Calamares includes an advanced partitioning feature, with support for both manual and automated partitioning operations. It is the first installer with an automated “Replace Partition” option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Many Linux distros use Calamares installer and each has its own implementation and standards. The user may notice some small differences but it does not mean this is a bug.

Partitioning

At this time partitioning LVM and Raid setups with Calamares installer are not supported.

The following applies to all partitioning of all installations on hardware: If you have a UEFI/EFI computer and your BIOS offers a choice when you boot installation media between for example:

USB some Flash Drive UEFI USB some Flash Drive

You have to choose the UEFI option and boot that. But know also that not all computers will do this. Some with more spartan FIRMWARE or BIOS will offer only the one option and almost always it is the correct one. So for instance if on a notebook you don't see the above choice no worries. If you have multiple storage drives enabled they all need to have the same partition table type. They either need to all be GPT or all MBR for everything to work properly. On UEFI computers in multi-boot situation with multiple storage drives if you already have an existing /boot/efi partition you should use that. The partitioner will not create another /boot/efi with proper flags and installation will result in error with no bootloader installed. Do not format you just set the mount point to /boot/efi and select the boot flag. One can have many different boot loaders for different operating systems in the same /boot/efi partition. If there is any need to switch boot loaders that is done in FIRMWARE or BIOS settings.

Upgrading OMLx 4.2 system to OMLx 4.3

See Upgrading OMLx 4.2 system to OMLx 4.3

File system type

In the Calamares installer for OMLx (all branches) the file system list includes all file systems the operating system recognizes for a host of reasons. This does not mean one should use anything in the list for your root ( / ) partition. ext4 is the official recommendation for root, fat32 is the recommendation for boot/efi. f2fs should work for root partition if the user is using a flash storage device (ssd). Example: It is expected that users installing an OMLx operating system to realize that you would not choose fat16 or fat32 for your root partition. Conversely you would not use ext4 for a /boot/efi partition.

btrfs and xfs will not work as system (root) partiton for OMLx 4.3. This will be fixed for the next release. We apologize for any inconvienence.

No official recommendation is made at this time for storage partitions or for a seperate /home partition. It is expected the users using seperate storage partitions or a seperate /home partition know what they are doing. For /home the easy way is to use whatever you use for your root partition.

NVME SSDs

Some NVME SSDs may not be recognized by OMLx 4.3 Live ISO. The Live ISO has 2 different workarounds for this under "Troubleshooting" in the Grub2 Menu. They are (PCIE ASPM=OFF) and (NVME APST=OFF). We hope this works for most peoples hardware. Problem is known and being worked on by OpenMandriva developers and upstream developers. See more in Errata/NVME SSDs. Hardware recognition for nvme SSDs is considerably improved for OMLx 4.3. This issue is of course very hardware specific.

Installer and EFI Support

This release of OpenMandriva Lx supports booting and installation with and without UEFI.

Note that secure boot is NOT supported. Note it is NOT recommended to mix MBR and GPT partitions.

If you wish to perform an EFI installation on an existing MBR disk it will be necessary to convert the disk partition table to the newer GPT partitioning scheme. To do this you need to use the gdisk tool. A typical invocation would be gdisk /dev/sda: the existing partition table will be converted in memory to the GPT scheme. Warnings will be issued about potential data loss, the disk will not be altered until you write the partition table by pressing w. You are advised to back up any important data.

There may be occasions where the conversion cannot be performed, this will usually be due to insufficient space at the beginning or end of the disk to write the partition table. It may be necessary to delete or resize a partition to create the needed space, gparted is your friend in these circumstances.

There is still a need to create a /boot/efi partition to contain the boot equipment and this must be created while running the Calamares installer. When the installer reaches the partitioning stage the / (root) partition should be removed and a small (300 MB) fat32 partition created at the start of the drive. The partition must be named /boot/efi and the boot flag set. If diskspace is critical then a smaller partition may be used, but be sure to set it as fat32 in Calamares otherwise the installation will fail. If you fail to observe these steps the installation of the boot loader will fail. Subsequently partition the disk in the normal way.

Please share your experiences on the forums so that we may improve this aspect of the installation.

If you are installing beside Windows 8, 8.1, 10 or similar EFI booted OS as a precaution please ensure that you have recovery disks and you have backed up any important data. Our testing has been limited with this configuration, but successful installations have been performed with no issues. We would welcome any feedback in this area.

Changing Partition Type

Please note that Calamares cannot convert one partition type to another and preserve partition data. If you run Calamares from the live image it is not possible to change an existing partition type. Trying to do this generates an error message. In order to do this you must first delete the partition and recreate it as the type that you wish.

Booting from USB

It is also possible to boot this release from an USB storage device. To transfer the live/installation image you may:

  • Use rosa-imagewriter available from our repos:

sudo dnf --refresh install rosa-imagewriter

Or, if you do not have OpenMandriva Lx yet, you can get rosa-imagewriter download links at this page. At least 4 GB of flash drive capacity is recommended. Persistent storage is not necessary. Note that this will erase everything on your USB!

Please do not use other usb-writing tools as some Windows tools (e.g. Rufus) truncate the volume name. This breaks the boot process.

  • Via dd You may alternatively dd the image to your USB stick:

$ sudo dd if=<iso_name> of=<usb_drive> bs=4M conv=fdatasync status=progress

Replace <iso_name> with the path to the ISO and <usb_drive> with the device node of the USB drive, i.e. /dev/sdb.

  • SUSE Studio ImageWriter has also been tested and works for burning ISO images to USB storage device.

Booting from DVD

Booting from DVD is deprecated. For OMLx 4.3 ISOs there are workarounds in Booting OM Lx 4.3 ISO from DVD that should enable one to boot from DVD.

About Repositories

We now have the om-repo-picker aka Software Repository Selector to select additional repositories for more package availability. Do not mix the repositories from different release versions/update channels. This means, as an example, do not use Cooker repositories on a Rock system. If you use Rock, use Rock repositories only. This is explained in more detail in OpenMandriva Release Plan and Repositories. If you mix different release/update channel repositories and you break your computer the solution is to do a fresh install. After that fresh install do not do this again.

How to install and remove packages

While graphical tools (Discover, dnfdragora, etc.) are useful to find out available extra software, we strongly suggest to install packages from command line:

$ sudo dnf --refresh install <package_name>

To remove a package:

$ sudo dnf remove <package_name>

One may in install or remove a string of packages. Example:

$ sudo dnf --refresh install <package_name_1> <package_name_2> <package_name_3> <package_name_4>

More about package management with dnf here.

Recommended update procedure

While we do provide Discover and dnfdragora gui's for package mangement we find it best if users update their OMLx 4.3/Rock system from Konsole (or other terminal). This is very easy, just copy and paste this command:

$ sudo dnf clean all ; sudo dnf upgrade

Then press Enter key and when prompted enter your root (superuser) password. We recommend this because we see a lot of problem reports that begin with "I updated my system with Discover updater" or "I updated my system with dnfdragora".

New Features and Major Changes

In order to keep current with latest changes in Linux, computer security issues, and computer code writing there are major changes in OMLx 4.3rc.

Major changes:

  • The kernel has been updated to 5.16.7
  • KDE products have been updated: Frameworks 5.90.0, Plasma Desktop 5.23.5, KDE Gear 21.12.2
  • Qt 5.15.3 with all patches proposed by KDE
  • Mesa 21.3.5
  • FFMPEG to 5.0 Upgraded also some cool stuff not on the ISO but available in our repositories: -AMDVLK 2022.Q1.2 official AMD Vulkan driver. It is an alternative driver and can be installed at same time with RADV. It can be used to improve performance or stability in some games on Linux -OBS-Studio 27.1.3 software for video recording and live streaming; it finally supports wayland session. It also supports recording h264 with VAAPI (hardware accelerated video encoding) and we also patched it to support HEVC-x265 with HW VAAPI -Blender 3.0.1 -GIMP 2.10.30 -Audacity 3.1.3 -Firefox 96.0 -Steam 1.0.0.72 -LXQt 1.0.0

Default sound server switched to Pipewire

PipeWire has become our default sound server in the current system release, thus replacing PulseAudio. However, PulseAudio is still in our repository and you can return to it at any time. See OM Lx 4.3 Errata

Note: The sound test in KDE SystemSettings does not work with Pipewire, it only works with Pulseaudio.

Pipewire

Clang compiled kernel

OpenMandriva provides a clang compiled kernel. Users can install same version of kernel-release-desktop and kernel-release-desktop-clang for comparison.

What to do if I have a problem

Should you have problems please report in the English Support forum with a descriptive title and enough of a description and information for someone to be able to help you. If your issue is a serious technical issue then please file a bug report.

Helping the project

om-donate-32px.png{.align-left}The OpenMandriva development teams (Cooker & QA) are always looking for new contributors to assist in creating and maintaining packages and to assist bugfixing and testing. You are welcome to join us and help us in this work which is not only rewarding but also tremendous fun! If you feel that your talents do not lie in the realm of software, then the OpenMandriva Workshop group, which is made up from the artwork, documentation, translation and Communication teams, is always open for the submissions of artwork and translations. New contributors who would like to help with these wide-ranging tasks should see the wiki for more details, and to learn how to join! Alternatively you may use our forum.

Donate to the project

om-donate-32px.png{.align-left}It also costs time and money to keep our servers up and running. If you can, please donate to keep the lights on!

Please read also OMLx 4.3 Errata