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I am testing openSUSE 12.2 KDE in a VM in Virtualbox on my host distribution PCLinuxOS. The VM specs for openSUSE: RAM 3584 MB, video maxed out at 128MB, virtual hard disk 16GB. According to the specs on one of the openSUSE sites this is more than enough to run the distribution properly. openSUSE runs painfully slow in this setup.
The first thing to would be to run 'top' in a terminal and find out if there is a busy process. Then openSUSE uses file indexers like tracker, which can tax the filesystem quite heavily after installation. I thing iotop would flag that. Then there is the desktop. If you are using effects, they tax the virtualized graphical system. You can check by temporarily running one of the lesser desktops.
Setting the time, time zone and configuring NTP is very slow and the settings for the hardware clock on/off UTC keeps changing back to on UTC between boots. Is there something I can do to get openSUSE to stop changing that setting? Can't run it with UTC on in a VM because the VM uses the host software clock as the hardware clock for the VM.
Well, you should not run NTP on any guest system, it should run _only_ on the host. Then you use tools from the virtualization environment to keep both in sync. I use vmware myself, not virtualbox, so I don't know exactly how you do this in vbox. In the case of vmware, they have this issue properly documented on their site, so it is not just my opinion on "not use NTP". Then the other thing. You have to run "yast", select "date system and time", and then make sure that the tick box for "hardware clock set to utc" is off, ie, configure it for local time. 12.2 may complain and warn bitterly against this change: ignore it. There is a bugzilla reported about that issue. There were bugs related to this settings, so you are not finished yet :-) Edit "/etc/sysconfig/clock", you should have: HWCLOCK="--localtime" Then you should rm /etc/adjtime (there was a bug in 12.2 by which it was not created or was wrong) and force its recreationg by running hwclock --systohc --localtime but make sure by running "date" that the clock has the correct time before doing it. You may want to read this: https://forums.opensuse.org/blogs/jdmcdaniel3/what-utc-gmt-time-possible-iss... and also this: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB%3AConfiguring_the_clock Finally, for checking that the clock is running correctly, use these two commands in a terminal running as root: hwclock --debug date Please ignore what KDE clock says. There was also a bug affecting its timezone setting, but as I don't use kde I don't remember how to correct it.
Also running the package manager to install or just do the updates it wants to do is very slow. Is there anything I can do to solve this?
Dunno. Repository refresh, network performance, database update, busy cpu...
I am sure this distribution will perform much better installed on real hardware and not in a VM environment. I could very easily start using this one a long side my other ones. I have some ideas where this one could be a better fit than the others.
Now and then some people have issues with a slow system on real hardware, too. Difficult to diagnose. However, a virtual machine like yours would be reproducible.
Thanks for any help getting this figured out.
Welcome :-) - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 "Celadon" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlE53z4ACgkQja8UbcUWM1zrlAEAnRa+hFAYBnz4EPYCWaBRg1im 8nfkvy8UFZ4V2WIS+EIA/Rn6rz/4LZrh8Vj39TD8Qhllo8gxr3FJY3QyQjNfVUMi =7BQU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----