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SuSE

Journal AKAImBatman's Journal: To SuSE or not to SuSE? Is there even a question? 32

Journal by AKAImBatman

If you haven't read my first entry, I would be much obliged if you did. It gives the setup for this series of articles. While you're at it, you might even go back and read the Mandrake review as well as the comments.

So here I am. A SuSE 9.0 boot CD in my hand, and a desire to find a Linux distro that works. I'll be damned if SuSE isn't off to a great start. They *only* allow Internet installs via a small boot ISO. And unlike the Fedora boot.iso, this thing has everything. Installation, Rescue CD, boot manager, etc. I might just have to keep this thing around for the next time an OS goes haywire.

The installation proceeded smoothly, right after I got over the initial confusion caused when the CD asked for the IP Address of the FTP server. It turns out that you can enter a hostname just fine. (A hint: Make sure you write down the name of your mirror server, as well as the directory SuSE is in before you start the installation. There's no predefined list of mirrors to choose from.)

The installation GUI was slick, with it autodetecting just about everything. I had to change a few setting (such as installing GRUB on /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hda), but I can't say that I've ever seen an easier install process. It even chose ReiserFS as the default. If I had one complaint, it's that every operation takes it forever. But it's an install. You're supposed to do it once and be done with it.

Once installed, I rebooted only to see "GRUB" on the screen and nothing else. Thankfully this great install disk of SuSE's allows me to boot into an existing OS directly from the CD. Once I was in, I played with GRUB until I got it to work. It turns out that the BIOS informs GRUB that the drives are backwards when booting from the second drive. Thus (hd1,5) (where it was looking) was actually (hd0,5), and Windows was (hd1,0). I changed the menu.lst file and everything worked fine.

I suppose I should probably be annoyed by this problem, but I'm not. Given that I'm installing these OSes onto the second partition of a secondary slave drive, I'm willing to cut them some slack.

When the system came up, everything pretty much worked. All my NTFS drives were mounted, the sound worked, I could play MP3s, my TV card worked flawlessly, etc. Things that didn't work were the mouse wheel, and the video player. The mouse wheel was easily fixed by adding in the "ZAxisMapping" setting to the XF86Config file. The video player played sound, but there was no picture. This really didn't bother me too much as I was planning to install VLC.

Which brings me to my next point. Why does every Linux install have to involve RPM hell? I had to pull 15-20 RPMs from various sources in order to get VLC installed. Most home users won't know what "libtheora" is, where to get it, or how to install it. Not to mention scary names like "libart_gpl.0". Linux systems work fine for the software that's in their catalog, but anything even slightly "different" becomes a real pain in the ass for users. It's time to decide whether Linux wants to be a "hacker's system" where everything is compiled from source, or a "desktop system" where binary compatibility and simple installation is a must. So far, Linux has been targeting the "Workstation" market which just isn't good enough. FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X will eat Linux for lunch in that market.

Anyway, after mucking around with half a billion RPMs, VLC installed and even put itself into the SuSE start menu. (A nice touch.) I then loaded one of the kids' cartoons off of the NTFS drive, and it played flawlessly.

I still have to set up the NVidia drivers, but otherwise the system is working beautifully. My only complaint is (wait for it) my mouse still locks up!!! Ok, it doesn't happen as much on SuSE. In fact, I thought that the problem didn't exist until I was mucking around in the hardware GUI trying to make the GUI install my mouse wheel. That was the first time it locked up, and I figured that as long as I didn't mess with any hardware, I'd be okay. Well, it eventually locks up anyway. This seems to be an epidemic with the Linux kernel.

Please! If anyone knows how to fix the mouse problem, tell me! This is the only major issue I'm having with SuSE!

Final Verdict: I think we have a winner. There's still a few areas that would be difficult for the average user (e.g. Setting up the mouse wheel, installing the NVidia drivers, and dealing with the installation of non-catalog software like VLC), but overall it was easy to set up, and the YaST2 software library made software installation a breeze. I'm very pleased with SuSE, and would recommend it to anyone looking to find an easy to use Linux system.

Update: Check out Dot.Com.CEO's review of SuSE in the comments!
 

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To SuSE or not to SuSE? Is there even a question? More

To SuSE or not to SuSE? Is there even a question?

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  • I had the same problem with my mouse locking up (I am using SuSE 9.0) -- the solution I had wasn't ideal, but it works :) -- I switched the mouse from USB to PS/2, and hasn't locked up since.
    I'm surprised you had issues with the scroll wheel though, it picked my mouse up fine (It's just a regular Microsoft Optical mouse).
    • I switched the mouse from USB to PS/2, and hasn't locked up since.

      I actually started with my mouse using the adapter. But after a good zap of static electricity, the PS/2 port for the mouse (the keyboard works fine) started acting up. That's when I switched to the USB port, and have really never looked back. I kind of like plugging my mouse into the USB port. I probably wouldn't even mind if a future computer of mine *only* had USB support. My iBook for example, only has space to plug in devices by USB or

  • Mouse problems... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @11:38AM (#8848669)
    OK, a while ago I had the exact same problems you did - USB mice would sometimes work but would lock up, some buttons would not work, etc. The solution I found involved some setting in the BIOS involving who controls the mouse - the BIOS or the OS. Setting that option to "BIOS" solved my problems with Linux (Redhat 8 at the time), although, tbh, I am using my mouse as a PS/2 device now since I'm running out of usb ports!

    I went through exactly the same path you are going through, btw. Last time (a year or so ago), I got so frustrated with desktop Linux I went back to Windows (2003 Server currently). You've inspired me to try Suse 9 and waste an amazing amount of time, so if things go wrong it's obviously your fault :->

    • I'm afraid that I don't have that BIOS setting, but thanks for the suggestion.

      You've inspired me to try Suse 9 and waste an amazing amount of time, so if things go wrong it's obviously your fault :->

      Err... I hear that Tahiti is very nice this time of year. I'll go find out right now. ;-)

      Seriously though, I was quite pleased with SuSE. It's very easy to use overall and most problems so far have been minor. If you really want a Linux Desktop, I think you'll have a hard time finding a better option.

      I
      • Yes, well, there is a problem. I cannot do a net-install of Suse since my nforce2 on-board LAN is not supported for this kind of installation. However, your review has inspired me to find a way around the problem and, to keep a long story short I'm downloading about 4Gb as well as mkisofs for Windows. You'd better hope this is worth it mate! :->
        • SuSE has an option of loading a drivers disk for the vendor. I haven't yet found the relevant info, but that's probably the way to go. I'm not sure I want to know what you're planning with those 4GB of RPMs...

  • Might want to check if the 'Legacy USB support' is enabled in the BIOS, especially if your BIOS is made by AMI. I had awful problems with it - took a while to diagnose, since it happened on a brand new ASUS motherboard, while an older ASUS worked fine (the older one had Phoenix BIOS).

    I'm on Fedora right now.. works fine for me, but do keep us updated on your SuSE experience. I'm rather tempted to snag SuSE 9.1 after Red Hat's KDE packager (I think it's a single person, Than Ngo) did not manage to include J
  • Hi. I used to have this mouse problem -- freezing X and so on -- on a Laptop and a desktop machine with an all-in-one board. Both have a SIS chipset. Well, I finally solved it by removing 'gpm' (mouse support for the console). After this, no problems. Maybe that helps. As for the RPM Hell: You should definitely try a distro that uses Debian's apt (advanced package tool). I hesitate to recommend trying a "pure" Debian, since you obviously do your testing from an "average user" perspective (which I find perf
    • Tsk, tsk. It seems that someone didn't read the previous entries [slashdot.org].

      FWIW, I've tried Debian before, and I've gotten myself into just as much .DEB hell. Everything is fine as long as you're pulling from the main catalog. The problem is that the software that people actually want to *use* (like VideoLAN) are not in the primary catalog. With Debian, it was supposed to be as easy as adding another APT server. But when I added it, it was missing quite a few of the dependencies, and they weren't on the primary serv

  • If a distribution allows only Internet installs, then how do the maintainers expect users to want to wait long enough for the packages to download at 16 MB per hour, the nominal speed of Internet downloads in geographic areas where no provider offers affordable residential broadband?

  • "...Which brings me to my next point. Why does every Linux install have to involve RPM hell? I had to pull 15-20 RPMs from various sources in order to get VLC installed. Most home users won't know what "libtheora" is, where to get it, or how to install it. Not to mention scary names like "libart_gpl.0". Linux systems work fine for the software that's in their catalog, but anything even slightly "different" becomes a real pain in the ass for users. It's time to decide whether Linux wants to be a "hacker's sy
  • ...hijacking your journal entry.

    OK, so as I already said, you inspired me to try Suse 9. I downloaded everything, burnt it as per instructions available on the internet and installed it. Yes, I was impressed by the ease of installation and quality of graphics on the desktop. The fonts looked nice (albeit HUGE), Konqueror was working ok (except for a small detail I'll get into later on) and the programs were neatly organised on the menu. HOWEVER I had two problems. My nforce card was STILL not recognised (t

    • There was no luck with ATI. The version on their download page requires you to compile the module, which meant gcc and kernel-source.

      FWIW, I highly recommend NVidia over ATI. ATI has gone through a lot of trouble to *not* support Linux when at all possible, and they definitely don't support FreeBSD. NVidia OTOH, happily supports Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD without complaint. The question you have to ask yourself when you buy a video card is, "do I want 10% higher framerates, or do I want to buy from a com
      • Regarding the remote access thingy, I found out about this today through some irrelevant searches. Try it, they have a test server. It is TRULY a-m-a-z-i-n-g. I limited my bandwidth to 256Kbits at work to see how it would behave in the real world, and I was absolutely blown away. It was really as if I was in front of the machine I was working in. I forgot to configure either ssh or vncserver at home so I cannot test it right now from work but I can hardly see how it can not be the excellent solution...

        I'm

        • Regarding the remote access thingy, I found out about this today through some irrelevant searches.

          Found out about what? Citrix? I used to admin a Citrix thin client network, and I can say that it's an impressive technology. You can even run video over it. :-)

          So, are you going to test any other distros or have you settled?

          I'm still exploring SuSE, but I want to go for the Java Desktop System sometime in the near future.
          • Sorry, missed the link. Here [nomachine.com]. Download the server and the client for suse and try it, but do try the online demo, follow the testdrive link, d/l a client from their download area, and use it to connect using the data they e-mail you...

            I've used Citrix, nomachine is comparable. Definitely better than terminal server in terms of being responsive.

            The Java thingy is not worth it, I saw a demo at work. It's suse based anyhow so I can't imagine it being that different. So basically, it's suse without the commun

            • Sorry, missed the link. Here. Download the server and the client for suse and try it, but do try the online demo, follow the testdrive link, d/l a client from their download area, and use it to connect using the data they e-mail you...

              I've seen these guys before. Definitely nice technology, but very Linux centric. Interestingly enough, their specs for the test box are higher than the Citrix machine I used to admin. We used to run 40 users on a Dual PPro w/512 MB and mirrored 40 Gig drives. It turns out th
              • Not sure which version was installed in the laptop, tbh, but I hated the desktop colours (I know...) and it didn't seem any faster than any other distro I've used. It just seemed like a branded version of suse. It would be interesting to try it, however, to see whether it properly configures my ATI card out of the box, since it's actually a non-free linux... I'm off to ask for a copy :->
                • Not sure which version was installed in the laptop, tbh, but I hated the desktop colours (I know...) and it didn't seem any faster than any other distro I've used

                  It was probably the first version then. The second version was much more colorful and easier on the eyes. The first one was real drab and made the purple look like it was nothing but a field of grey.

                  I can't say whether your 3D card would be auto-configured or not. You need to keep in mind that JDS is a business desktop. For a business desktop, t
                  • The problem is that I just cannot stand KNOWING I have something on my PC that is not properly configured. I used to go crazy when I had a little "!" next to a driver in Windows 95, even though the system was working fine. Anyhow, as of today, I am not using Suse any more. I don't know why but I cannot use mplayer anymore it segfaults. I have no idea why, it probably has to do with my messing around with the graphics drivers, but I really don't have the patience to go through all that again.

                    However, I'm st

  • One simple solution everyone seems to forget is checking your mouse. It might be broken. I had simmilar problems with my old MS IntelliEye that would lock up or just go crazy. Turnes out it got broken somehow. My new Logitech works flawlessly.
    • Nope. I've had this problem happen on two separate mice. I had to replace my previous one (which I used with RedHat 8) when my kids managed to peel the left mouse button off.

      Right now I'm testing the Legacy USB fix that another user gave. So far, I haven't had any lockups.

  • If/when you finally find yourself giving up on SuSE/ looking for something better, I would suggest giving gentoo a shot.

    Now I know you might be thinking, what ?? the distro that takes days to install and compiles everything from source... no way.

    Bare with me for a moment. Yes gentoo takes a while to install. However, it is relatively stress free. There is no rpm hell. You want to install VLC... emerge vlc. Bang your done. Come back in an hour and your computer has done it all for you. Maybe you could have
    • s/gentoo/FreeBSD/g

      I'm quite happy in the FreeBSD world, thank you. :-)

      The purpose of this experiment was to test Linux as a quick to install, end-user Desktop. To be perfectly honest, I'm too familiar with Linux as it is, and it tends to have a way of driving me mad. As an OS with a pretty GUI on top, it's reasonably acceptable though.

    • I really cannot understand how compiling things from source takes care of the problem of dependencies on its own. Answer: it doesn't. Debian (apt-get) and Mandrake (urpmi) as well as SUSE (yast2) make a very good job of solving dependency problems without *needing* compiling from source. I've heard this thing many many times and yet it strikes me as completely unreasonable. OK, so in gentoo, if you have a dependency problem, the problem will get the missing libraries and compile them for you before installi
  • It's time to decide whether Linux wants to be a "hacker's system" where everything is compiled from source, or a "desktop system" where binary compatibility and simple installation is a must.

    It has been decided long ago. GNU/Linux (assuming you meant that, because a kernel cannot be a "desktop system") is a hacker's system, where everything needs to be compiled. Companies can make diributions for the home user, but the system development should not be bothered about that stuff. Packaging companies, which
    • Fair enough. Then what the distro companies need to do is band together and build a set of technologies for home linux. A few things that can be done:
      1. Define a set of "super-kernel interfaces" built on top of the standard kernel. Try to make these interfaces as compatible with the existing kernel as possible (so that future kernels won't require a rewrite of the code). These interfaces could provide some much-needed functionality like binary kernel modules.
      2. Define an easier way to distribute and install de
      • Exactly, mouses should work fine with Linux, there is no excuse for that. In your particular case, I am almost sure that it is a problem from X conflicting with the kernel when accessing the mouse. Suse handles that ina a very strange manner. I used manual configuration, and do not own a USB mouse, but I think your problem will be fixed soon now that the X future seems to be the task of more hands-on people than before.

        What you say about distributions is right, but as a former Windows developer, I can assu
        • What you say about distributions is right, but as a former Windows developer, I can assure you that the binary compatibility issue is DLL-hell for developers, and very hard to solve.

          A couple of points:
          1. Making life a little harder on developers is far less of an impact than making life harder on end-users
          2. It doesn't have to be that way. I've *never* had binary issues when developing on Mac OS X. The developers of the OS were kind enough to smooth out any and all binary issues so that development is easy a
  • when your mouse freezes try killing and restarting x, its a bitch but it works, also in the XF86Config gile, if your mouse is misconfigured this may happen , it happend to me, the line 'Option "Protocol" ' has multiple options, PS/2 or Auto is what it is probably set to, try setting it to IMPS/2 if you have an intellimouse or whatever your mouse (that seems to work for logitech mousemen too) good luck
    • Thanks for the tip. Sadly, I've already tried the whole logout then login procedure (which restarts X) and it doesn't work. :-( Once the mouse is dead, it's dead. Right now it seems that it works fine with my BIOS set to Legacy USB. HOWEVER. If I watch a video with Kaffine, the mouse apparently goes into a low power mode at some point and freezes up. That's now pretty much the only time it happens.

      Good news, though! I just got my Java Desktop CDs today! If I still have the mouse problems, I'll make Sun fix

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