Bad SuSE experiences? Not!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| NoCaDrummer Nov 29, 2006 8:59 AM EDT |
Okay, perhaps Mr. Ruecker is an "old hand" at Unix and Linux. As such, he knows the ins and outs of configuration files, diddle-bits, and tweaking that most of us probably only dream of. As for my past, I'd only had nasty experiences with Unix because of dealing with SUN through my previous employer, Philips N.V. At the time, I was doing most of my work on a Macintosh, and the silly gyrations that one had to go through to get anything to work seemed ridiculous. Especially given that the programs were nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive than their Mac equivalents. Alas, my latest Mac (a G3) was left orphaned less than 3 years after its purchase when Apple decided to introduce OS-X (a Unix-based OS). While the old Mac does some things remarkably well, there's no new software written for Mac OS 9.2, and hasn't been for several years. So, about two years ago I decided to "jump ship" and go for Linux. Heck, if I was going to be forced to use a Unix-like OS, why not one that was "free" (as in beer). I bought the components to put together my own PC, and assembled it easily. I purchased "Linux for Dummies", the "Red Hat Bible", and a couple of other Linux books, read them carefully, used their discs. I downloaded several different distributions, including Red Hat's, Novell/SuSE's, Mandriva's, Gentoo, Slackware, Yellow Dog,... and burned the ISO files to CDs. I tried installing each on my new PC, to get a "feel" about how they worked. Most were as arcane as the SUN machine I'd hated when I worked at Philips. "Command line"? Huh? What's the gibberish mean? Sure, I'd created batch files in MS-DOS, I'd programmed in C and C++, and I've written in assembly language, but trying to find out what the command line parameters in Linux meant took me back to the bad old days. I'd gotten spoiled by the Mac. Yes, I'd used ResEdit to modify programs, but even that was easy. Oh, well. The two distributions that seemed easiest to install and get in a state of operation that I wanted were Red Hat and SuSE. I finally settled on SuSE because I had more visual (read GUI) control on what was installed and what was left out. I just wanted a desktop computer which would allow me to browse the web, write documents, view pictures, listen to music, do some drawings, and do simple editing on images. I didn't need a server for thousands of other computers, I didn't need the fastest PC on the block. I needed what was probably common for most folks - a solid, reliable PC with a graphical interface. The one "quirk" that I really wanted, however, was to be able to get files from my old Macintosh. Again, SuSE seemed to make that available easier than Red Hat had at the time. Since then, several of the distributions have made remarkable progress. But most require command-line interaction to get the simplest of functionality. In the meantime, the two front runners in my original comparison have improved. I still prefer SuSE (now "OpenSuSE") and have installed it on dozens of computers. It works well on a wired desktop PC, so I'm pretty darn happy. Maybe it's not the ultimate for portable computers, or those who are running with a wireless modem. But I've yet to see a distribution that makes wireless easy. Even Windows-PCs have difficulties. Lest you think that I'm averse to programming, I can assure you I'm not. I've written whole operating systems (in assembly language) for microcomputers for such items as preamps, equalizers, and other consumer electronics. But when I go home, I don't want to have to program the computer to get it to do what some other programmer should have thought of in the first place. I just want it to work. OpenSuSE 10.1 does that for me. Maybe it's not for everyone, but for a sizable portion of the population, it does what it needs to do with a minimum of command-line intervention. My 80 year-old father who was completely befuddled by anything more complex than a Mac has SuSE on his PC. Although I talk to him weekly, he calls me less than twice a year with computer questions. Can't get much better than that. - R |
| jdixon Nov 29, 2006 9:06 AM EDT |
Well, he had specific problems, which he knew how to resolve in the other distro's but not in SuSE. That's unfortunately fairly common. In one case, however, he should have known what to do: > I just pressed Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, after which I found out KDM was running. Every time I killed X, it respawned, and I wasn't able to kill it. You needed to change the runlevel. A simple telinit 3 or init 3 should have done the job. Slackware keeps one console terminal open for just such X-Windows problems. I don't know if SuSE does or not. |
| qcimushroom Nov 29, 2006 9:25 AM EDT |
>Slackware keeps one console terminal open for just such X-Windows problems. I don't know if SuSE does or not. How about 6, accessed with [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1-F6] |
| salparadise Nov 29, 2006 9:51 AM EDT |
IIRC SuSE has all 6 terminals available.
In fact, as far I know, only Slackware has only one (F6). (I'm no guru, so maybe wrong). I thought that Ctrl+Alt+del was supposed to restart X, not kill it, on the other hand, I've never used Gentoo so don't know what the difference is. The command line can be daunting, looking at the MAN page for most commands and you see dozens of available options. But a lot of common stuff can be achieved with only one or two. The best option for such things is http://www.linuxquestions.org or one of other many many help sites/forums. Ask an expert and get help. |
| hkwint Nov 29, 2006 9:59 AM EDT |
Quoting:perhaps Mr. Ruecker is an "old hand" at Unix and Linux Mr Ruecker posted it, I am the writer of it. I'm no 'old hand' at Unix and Linux; I'm 22 years old and only discovered Linux, Open source and free software in late 2002. Before, I only had experience with Windows and a bit with DOS. The reason that I'm 'good with the commandline' is because I have been rather ill for one year and a half, and I couldn't do much more then, than sitting behind my computer. Linux (and especially Gentoo) was a great way to spend my time back then. I also started my whole 'Linux' experience not with Linux, but the 'reverse' way most people go: First I used OpenBSD (before I _ever_ used Linux), because that was too difficult (couldn't get Opera compiled, Firefox didn't exist)I tried NetBSD, because then I had a problem with accessing my old FAT partitions which contained my MP3's, I switched to FreeBSD. That worked for me for a while, but some things which work in Linux don't in FreeBSD. For example, I used LPD instead of Cups which was real hard I remember, and nVidia didn't have property-drivers for FreeBSD back then, but I wanted to connect my computer to my TV (for watching movies). Then I switched to Gentoo (well, a friend did it for me), and suddenly, all stuf just worked like it should in no time! However, Gentoo is a lot of work to 'build' (not only compiling, but also a lot of manual configuration). Because I wasn't that ill anymore and had to get things done, I started thinking about another distro. The first distro of choice was SuSE, because of what I heard from it; especially from SuSE 10.1. Quoting:I don't want to have to program the computer to get it to do what some other programmer should have thought of in the first place. I just want it to work. Well, that's exactly what I wanted, and that's why I wanted to switch from Gentoo to SuSE. I really thought SuSE would make my life easier. A lot of my problems are probably caused by lack of SuSE experience, but I wanted to learn it. It is probably easier to learn SuSE when you're used to Gentoo than the other way around. Nonetheless, I found SuSE lacking. It really made me a bit sad, since SuSE has always been the 'best distro' as far as I knew; mainly because what I heard of it from others. Quoting:I can assure you I'm not. I've written whole operating systems (in assembly language) for microcomputers Good old time... They don't do that kind of things at Philips anymore, do they? Quoting:My 80 year-old father who was completely befuddled by anything more complex than a Mac has SuSE on his PC.That really IS a great story. Quoting:You needed to change the runlevel. A simple telinit 3 or init 3 should have done the job.I tried that, but only after I screwed up the xorg.conf. Therefore, I couldn't get a graphical shell - like xterm, and because Xorg respawned all the time, I couldn't go back to the normal terminal (tried Ctrl+C after Ctrl-Alt-Backspace): It didn't give a shell, and immediately rebooted Xorg. Quoting:How about 6, accessed with [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1-F6]Tried that too. Ctr + Alt didn't work either, because that key combination is claimed by Microsoft Virtual PC (same in VMware), which is really nasty by the way. Suggestions to this problem are welcome. When OpenSuSE 10.2 is out, please remember me I should review it! |
| herzeleid Nov 29, 2006 10:22 AM EDT |
Quoting:Tried that too. Ctr + Alt didn't work either, because that key combination is claimed by Microsoft Virtual PCYikes, that explains everything - all bets are off, if you have been struggling with a captive linux install inside a windoze peecee. Even the simplest things inexplicably fail in such an environment, as you discovered. |
| hkwint Nov 29, 2006 1:44 PM EDT |
Well, the friend I was talking about does the ICT course (two years, full time). The course is almost Windows only, because that's what 'Dutch Business' uses (they are very conservative when it comes to software, more like in the US than in France or Germany), and students should be in an environment which simulates business as much as possible. For me, it was one of the reasons to opt for the mechanical drawing course instead of the ICT one - I don't want to use Windows the whole day. I can't handle that much frustration, and I know it. So now, I use Autodesk the whole day, which is Windows only(...), but anyway, as long as AutoCAD or Inventor are running, I see almost nothing of Windows (thank God!), and portable Firefox on an USB stick does the rest of the trick.
Nonetheless, I almost entirely 'converted' one ICT cursist (the one with the laptop with the Wireless LAN) to Linux. That's a problem for him; since he hates Microsoft more and more (and I'm the one to blame / praise for that), and he has still to work with that stuff far too much. Back on topic, sadly, Ctrl+Alt doesn't work in VMWare (running in 'native' Gentoo this time!) neither. |
| herzeleid Nov 29, 2006 1:49 PM EDT |
Quoting: Back on topic, sadly, Ctrl+Alt don't work in VMWare (running in 'native' Gentoo this time!) neither.Don't get me started on vmware, it has issues too, it's not a panacea by any means. We've found it unsuitable for hosting linux servers of any consequence due to the inability of the VM to get enough CPU priority to keep the clock even vaguely on time. which reminds me, I still need to investigate xen and uml for those purposes.... |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 29, 2006 2:14 PM EDT |
Quoting:I also started my whole 'Linux' experience not with Linux, but the 'reverse' way most people go: First I used OpenBSD (before I _ever_ used Linux) So did I. I was pretty much forced into FreeBSD about 4-5 years back when some support company tried to rip us off. We gave them an old desktop to install a LAMP stack on. They charged us $2000 for 20 hours of work installing FreeBSD + Apache + PHP. Apparently they had to "re-learn" everything because they were only used to OpenBSD. They had to use FreeBSD instead because we liked to have the GD library 2.0 to generate images in PHP. I picked up an identical old box, read the FreeBSD manuals and installed everything in under 4 hours with zero prior experience in any unix based system. I only had to ask help on IRC once because I couldn't figure out vim. Based on that we refused to pay and the support company went tits-up three weeks later. I continued playing with FreeBSD for a year or so, then switched to Linux. |
| Abe Nov 29, 2006 4:52 PM EDT |
Quoting:installed everything in under 4 hours with zero prior experience in any unix based system. That was then, recently I installed XAMPP stack ( Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27, PHP 5.2.0 & 4.4.4 & PEAR + SQLite 2.8.17/3.2.8 + multibyte (mbstring) support, Perl 5.8.7, ProFTPD 1.3.0a, phpMyAdmin 2.9.1, OpenSSL 0.9.8d, GD 2.0.1, Freetype2 2.1.7, libjpeg 6b, libpng 1.2.12, gdbm 1.8.0, zlib 1.2.3, expat 1.2, Sablotron 1.0, libxml 2.4.26, Ming 0.3, Webalizer 2.01, pdf class 009e, ncurses 5.8, mod_perl 2.0.2, FreeTDS 0.63, gettext 0.11.5, IMAP C-Client 2004e, OpenLDAP (client) 2.3.11, mcrypt 2.5.7, mhash 0.8.18, eAccelerator 0.9.4, cURL 7.13.1, libxslt 1.1.8, phpSQLiteAdmin 0.2, libapreq 2.07, FPDF 1.53, XAMPP Control Panel 0.6) (some of them I don't know yet what they do) and Secured on PCLinuxOS IBM Think Pad T42 in less than 10 minutes. Amazing what a difference 4 years make in the world of FOSS. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html |
| Scott_Ruecker Nov 29, 2006 7:26 PM EDT |
my2cents, I have used SuSE since 9.1 and I still use it(10.1). I do not do a lot of command line but what I have done has worked. I will admit that I have looked up a lot of things before trying it and some of it has worked, and some of it has not. I have run FC1 through FC5, (K)Ubuntu and others and have run into similar issues as Hans has. I think that Hans makes some very good points and at the same time suffered from not having a friend who uses SuSE nearby as well. Am I riding the fence? You bet I am but everyone knows as well as I that we all work better with tools we are familiar with. I have learned what I know about Linux from the people I have asked for help from. He was faced with a system he was not familiar with and had trials and tribulations in using it. That is no ones fault. You cannot get anything done when you are using something you are not familiar with. That is too much to ask of anyone. |
| jdixon Nov 29, 2006 7:47 PM EDT |
> IRC SuSE has all 6 terminals available.
In fact, as far I know, only Slackware has only one (F6). (I'm no guru, so maybe wrong). I've never used SuSE, so (as I said) I don't know. Slackware has all six console screens available when in the default runlevel of 3 (from which you run startx manually), but turns off all but one when you go to runlevel 4. Of course, it's a moments work to turn them back on, which I've done on my system. |
| salparadise Nov 29, 2006 9:32 PM EDT |
Yes.
There is a message in inittab about having all 6 terminals available in runlevel 4 having some effect on the system load.
Personally I have no idea what the "system load" is, but I presume it means the system is doing more than it needs to. Personally I rarely need to drop to a terminal as 99.9% of what I do is in gui land. But I'm more of a desktop person who stumbled onto Linux through a desire for moral, clean computing rather than a serious techie or sysadmin. This "running Linux in an MS virtualisation" thing seems to me a bit like buying a porsche and then putting in into a cart pulled by a couple of donkeys. But I guess you have to work with what you have. |
| herzeleid Nov 29, 2006 9:40 PM EDT |
Quoting:This "running Linux in an MS virtualisation" thing seems to me a bit like buying a porsche and then putting in into a cart pulled by a couple of donkeys. But I guess you have to work with what you have.I couldn't have put it better myself. |
| swbrown Nov 30, 2006 3:15 AM EDT |
OpenSuSE is pretty nice. They have a lot of functionality that people would have a common need for highly visible in the distribution, and they've done a lot of nice things with the desktop. However, I've never been able to get into RedHat-ish distributions that have a limited package selection. Having an absolutely massive portion of the world of Open Source available, customized, upgradeable, cross-platform, and supported by security updates from a single source like in Debian is simply priceless to me, and I can't do without. Since the OpenSuSE distribution is now doomed, it would be well advised to take a look and rescue as much good design as possible. |
| Scott_Ruecker Nov 30, 2006 1:53 PM EDT |
Quoting:Since the OpenSuSE distribution is now doomed, it would be well advised to take a look and rescue as much good design as possible. I really hope you are wrong. I hope it causes them to circle the wagons and continue the good work that has been done. OpenSuSE by its design cannot be affected by the Novell/MS deal. That decision was made the brass, not the people who actually work on it. I just don't see how developers and mostly un-paid contributors are to share the blame in what Novell did. I don't get it. You think that if they had known they would have agreed to such a deal? That's crazy! Like or don't like .rpm's that's fine, If you don't like SuSE now then you would not have liked it long before they were acquired by Novell. But all the years of hard work by talented people all over the world do not deserve to be condemned because of a business decision they had no say in. |
| jimf Nov 30, 2006 2:29 PM EDT |
> Since the OpenSuSE distribution is now doomed Oh yeah... MS must really love you.... |
| swbrown Nov 30, 2006 4:35 PM EDT |
"I just don't see how developers and mostly un-paid contributors are to share the blame in what Novell did. I don't get it. You think that if they had known they would have agreed to such a deal? That's crazy!" I'm not saying that, I'm saying the company that employs most of those that do the heavy lifting in OpenSuSE is now unstable. It's developed more by paid staff than most distributions, so progress would be significantly impaired with Novell having issues funding them, deciding not to fund them for no-compete reasons (e.g., Hula), or by developers leaving in anger or a difficulty in replacing the turnover. I think what we're seeing is the beginning of another OpenLinux. When that distribution's parent went unstable, OpenLinux became doomed. |
| jimf Nov 30, 2006 5:50 PM EDT |
swbrown, I really believe that you and many others in the Linux community are reacting exactly as MS planned it. Is Novell culpable? Sure, but, only for being stupid and greedy. I would also expect that they are getting a hard lesson here. |
| swbrown Dec 01, 2006 1:30 AM EDT |
"I really believe that you and many others in the Linux community are reacting exactly as MS planned it." So we're supposed to welcome this with open arms? I'm sorry, but I'm not going to set a precedent that attempting to sublicense the community's code is acceptable behavior. If Novell didn't expect this to happen, Novell would cancel the deal, as it's not finalized yet. They've stated they have no intention of doing so, which is unacceptable. If they canceled it, it would be a non-issue. |
| dinotrac Dec 01, 2006 7:05 AM EDT |
>I'm not saying that, I'm saying the company that employs most of those that do the heavy lifting in OpenSuSE is now unstable. How do you figure? They were in trouble before, may still be in some trouble, but the company's just gotten a huge cash infusion. If you count the previous settlement with Microsoft -- which was in the neighborhood of $500 mil, they are now $700-800 mil to the good. |
| Abe Dec 01, 2006 7:15 AM EDT |
Quoting:they are now $700-800 mil to the good. Although money would help, but having all the money in the world wont solve the problems Novell has. |
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