First look at Mantis readying itself to strike its victims in July 2012

This post is not about praying mantis or any kind of Mantis fists that exists in Kungfu, but about  openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 1 which was released on Thursday, 17 February 2012 . openSUSE 12.2 is code named Mantis.I downloaded the GNOME live CD "openSUSE-GNOME-LiveCD-Build0151-i686.iso" from this page.This time I wanted to do something different and decided to try out the Metalink download approach .To download using Metalink technology one must install the Firefox / Seamonkey extension DownloadThemAll!. The advantage of Metalink technology over conventional download is that using Metalink the a single file can be downloaded in parts from many servers at the same time and finally a single file can be recreated from the pieces at the client end.This effectively speeds up the download and provides a fail safe method to download iso files . I copied the iso image onto a flash or USB drive using " SUSE Studio Imagewriter ". One can check this page (SDB:Live USB stick) to learn more about writing images onto USB drives and booting from them.The rest of the post is about live image which I gave a test run.

 The default wallpaper dubbed light ray can be seen hogging the boot menu and the desktop as seen below when the openSUSE 12.2 GNOME live iso image was booted up

 It seems at this point of time that openSUSE 12.2 will run GNOME 3.3.4 or greater version of GNOME 3.X desktop and kernel version 3.2 or greater . But it is still early days to predict these things as these are versions used by Milestone 1 and there is till a long way till the final version of 12.2 gets released in July 2012.For the fans here is the detailed openSUSE 12.2 Timeline.

Here is a screenshot of the famed activities window or the window switcher

More polishing is done to the adwaita theme by the GNOME 3 team . The scroll bars on various software are slick and look better than the interface in openSUSE 12.1.Below is the Screenshot of YaST software installer.

The live image(milestone 1) most probably features almost all the software that are likely to show up in final version of 12.2.Almost of the software worked on the milestone image which is quite surprising.I started playing Gbrainy on the live image and gave the desktop search a spin which promptly displayed the screenshots that i had taken during the live cd boot session.

Screenshot of nautilus and gnome-tweak-tool using which I could make nautilus the desktop manager and bring back the desktop icons.

One can even chat using Empathy using the live cd.The below screenshot features empathy , gnome-calculator ,palimpsest ( Disk Utility which can be used to Manage Drives and Media). The contacts in the contact list in empathy have been blackened out for obvious reasons.

I tried to browse the internet using the Firefox on the live cd and to my surprise the internet connection worked without a glitch. Here is the screenshot of Firefox with the BBC site being displayed

Firefox on the live cd could also play HTML 5 videos out of box without the need to install any non-oss codecs.

Firefox showing version of OS(openSUSE 12.2) it is running on