booting - grub text-based menu

To get to the GRUB text-based menu during boot, press 'Esc' to exit the splash screen and then press 'e' for edit.

Or another method: switch to command line mode by pressing the 'c' key

openSUSE 13.1 - UEFI dual boot

Don't let the errors trick you :)

Dual boot: Windows 8.1 and openSUSE 13.1.

After installation no boot loader - system boots into Windows
Selecting "Installation" - "Abort" - "Boot into installed system" allows to boot into the installed system, but that's an impractical situation.

The bootloader preselected at time of the installation is "grub". Trying to select "grub2-efi" and "enable secure boot" results in the following error:

"unsupported combination of hardware platform x86_64 and bootloader grub2-efi opensuse 13.1".

After the installation trying to mount the "EFI boot" partition (/dev/sda2 in my case) to install grub2 with: "grub2-install --target=x86_64-efi /boot/efi, the following error was printed:

"mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'".

After a lot of reading I finally realized I had changed the "Secure Boot" settings in the BIOS before.

Re-setting the BIOS "Secure Boot" back to "Enabled" and voila:

The installer automatically mounts the EFI boot partition with /boot/efi and the Boot Loader is already set to Grub2-EFI.
After the installation there are two entries in the boot menu: openSUSE 13.1 and Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/sda2).
selected "Security" in the BIOS top menu, then "Secure Boot Control" and changed that from "Disabled" to "Enabled". The "UEFI/Legacy Boot" was also changed back to "Both" System will boot by following UEFI/Legacy Boot Priority setting.
There's a really good How-To which I didn't follow entirely but it has helpful tips:
How to: Dual-boot (preinstalled) Windows 8 and Linux - UEFI etc.

VmWare-Workstation 10.0.1 on openSUSE 13.1

yes, it's possible.
Execute the .bundle file (make it executable with +x if it's not yet). After the installation the link/launcher of VMware Workstation is placed in the Application Launcher Menu under "Recently Installed" (KDE).

Make sure 'gcc' and 'make' are installed. When launching it, it will tell you that a couple of modules need to be compiled and you'll get an error about 'gcc'. Installing it compiling might still fail, so 'make' might be missing. After installing it everything went well here.

The logs are in /var/log/vmware-installer. So if anything goes wrong check the logfile.

I'll try to run another installation with 'make' missing to catch the error and update the posting. stay tuned!

vlc - playlist

unhappy with amarok's memory consumption -amarok 10.5% MEM vs. vlc 1.8%- I switched to VLC.
I'm listening to the same couple of radio stations throughout the day and had to figure out a way how to start vlc with those stations.
I thought the best way would be to save the stations to a playlist, but I didn't find a way how to save a playlist. After each restart the playlist came up empty.

Here's how it works for me now:

Media -> Open Network Stream -> Enter URL of the station's stream
do this for all stations needed
Save playlist to file. I saved it as "vlc-playlist.xspf" to my home directory.
Now you can either start VLC from the CLI with "vlc vlc-playlist.xspf" or add an Icon/Launcher to the GUI with the Command: "/usr/bin/vlc vlc-playlist.xspf" and vlc will start with the x stations saved in that playlist.