This is the distro to beat now. It's quite amazing what happens to a Linux distribution once a real company with real money gets behind it. That's probably why Red Hat decided that a completely free offering was not economically viable. Once a big company, like Novell, or IBM or even Corel gets behind a linux product with money and resources (people), then amazing things can happen.
This, I believe, is what has happened to SuSE. I've always been a Slackware/Red Hat user. In the office we're all Windows, but we have our specialized linux installations for simple things like FTP or SAMBA.
Installing SuSE is very easy. Download SuSE Linux from their main site at http://www.suse.de. Yes, it's in Germany. However, you may get a redirect to Novell at this link. Burn the downloaded CDs and boot from the first one. Follow the prompts to install SuSE linux. It's as easy as any mature operating system like MS Windows, AIX, Mac OS, Solaris which have amazing financial backing. I'm amazed that SuSE supported by unpaid developers is able to provide such an amazing product. Now with Novell's teeth behind them, this is an unstoppable beast.
I reccommend using KDE (http://www.kde.org). Not that I don't like Gnome, but if you're coming from a MS Windows background, you'll find KDE easier to use.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Test Post
This is just a test. I had some problems earlier on publishing a post... don't know if things are working again.
Linux flavours
One of my laptops crashed today. A sad thing really. It had been chugging along quite faithfully running Fedora Core 2 for the longest time. I had it configured exactly the way I wanted it. Fortunately, I've learnt that machines are machines. You can't put too much personal dependence on them since sooner or later they WILL disappoint. Doesn't matter what type of machine it is. Computers are the worst though.
So I took this opportunity to try out different flavours of Unix. First, I downloaded a copy of Edubuntu (http://www.edubuntu.org). As with all user-grade Linuxes, the install was completely automated. In about thirty minutes I had a working Linux laptop. Fortunately, I keep a copy of the configuration files for my X setup. I tried using Edubuntu to configure X, but after some frustrating attempts, I copied my configuration file and all was well. The system is supposedly based on Debian Linux which, to my knowledge, is the favourite for Linux die hards.
I then tried FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org). Yes, not Linux but the favoured son of Unix. The current version is 6. I had tried FreeBSD a long time ago and even more recently, FreeBSD 5. These FreeBSD.org guys (and gals) have not changed the installation "wizard" at all. It's as industrial as it was back ten years ago. In any case, I went through the text wizard and completed the installation. All seemed to be well and the last step prompted me to remove the CD from the drive and reboot. That, unfortunately, was the last time I saw FreeBSD. My IBM ThinkPad would not even pass POST. The IBM logo would display on the screen and the system would hang. After searching the Internet (and where else does one go for help these days) I found the problem. Apparently, my particular model of ThinkPad (T20) has a bug in the BIOS (a particular version of the BIOS that I "luckily" had) that causes it to see the FreeBSD partition as a FAT suspend-to-disk partition, and then when it tries to parse the partition it hangs. The solution to this problem is to delete the partition (which you can't do with the drive in the machine since it won't even boot), or downgrade or upgrade the BIOS to a version that does not have this problem. Fortunately, I was able to download a bootable floppy version of the latest BIOS for the ThinkPad T20, boot my notebook and say goodbye to FreeBSD.
Lastly, I installed, or rather six hours later I'm still installing, Gentoo. I've heard really good things about Gentoo. I've seen the screenshots, nice eye-candy. I know some people who use it and swear by it. I thought that Linux geeks in general were passionate about their beloved operating system. Boy, those Gentoo geeks are something else. The only complaint I've heard about Gentoo is the time it takes to install. It takes a long, long time. So armed with grim determination and the patience of Job I set out to complete this task. I started the installation at 1 PM. I had to leave it running at 4 PM. I'll have to get back tomorrow to let you know how this story ended. If the "live-CD" that I downloaded is any indication of the final product, I won't be disappointed. However, I still can't understand why it takes a frigging whole day to install an operating system, even though, if truth be told, I did a famous "everything" install.
I'd best get on to some real work now. Later.
So I took this opportunity to try out different flavours of Unix. First, I downloaded a copy of Edubuntu (http://www.edubuntu.org). As with all user-grade Linuxes, the install was completely automated. In about thirty minutes I had a working Linux laptop. Fortunately, I keep a copy of the configuration files for my X setup. I tried using Edubuntu to configure X, but after some frustrating attempts, I copied my configuration file and all was well. The system is supposedly based on Debian Linux which, to my knowledge, is the favourite for Linux die hards.
I then tried FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org). Yes, not Linux but the favoured son of Unix. The current version is 6. I had tried FreeBSD a long time ago and even more recently, FreeBSD 5. These FreeBSD.org guys (and gals) have not changed the installation "wizard" at all. It's as industrial as it was back ten years ago. In any case, I went through the text wizard and completed the installation. All seemed to be well and the last step prompted me to remove the CD from the drive and reboot. That, unfortunately, was the last time I saw FreeBSD. My IBM ThinkPad would not even pass POST. The IBM logo would display on the screen and the system would hang. After searching the Internet (and where else does one go for help these days) I found the problem. Apparently, my particular model of ThinkPad (T20) has a bug in the BIOS (a particular version of the BIOS that I "luckily" had) that causes it to see the FreeBSD partition as a FAT suspend-to-disk partition, and then when it tries to parse the partition it hangs. The solution to this problem is to delete the partition (which you can't do with the drive in the machine since it won't even boot), or downgrade or upgrade the BIOS to a version that does not have this problem. Fortunately, I was able to download a bootable floppy version of the latest BIOS for the ThinkPad T20, boot my notebook and say goodbye to FreeBSD.
Lastly, I installed, or rather six hours later I'm still installing, Gentoo. I've heard really good things about Gentoo. I've seen the screenshots, nice eye-candy. I know some people who use it and swear by it. I thought that Linux geeks in general were passionate about their beloved operating system. Boy, those Gentoo geeks are something else. The only complaint I've heard about Gentoo is the time it takes to install. It takes a long, long time. So armed with grim determination and the patience of Job I set out to complete this task. I started the installation at 1 PM. I had to leave it running at 4 PM. I'll have to get back tomorrow to let you know how this story ended. If the "live-CD" that I downloaded is any indication of the final product, I won't be disappointed. However, I still can't understand why it takes a frigging whole day to install an operating system, even though, if truth be told, I did a famous "everything" install.
I'd best get on to some real work now. Later.
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