Bad SuSE experiences
WLANA few moths ago, a friend of mine who knew I was 'good with Linux' asked me to help with Suse. He had the distro on a CD, and with a lot of energy I started working with it, only to find out I couldn't get it to work in a good manner. Since the laptop should use a Wireless USB adapter to connect to our wireless router, we had to find a WLAN driver. Since Linux didn't have a WLAN driver for that Wireless USB adapter, we had to use the NdisWrapper, which emulates Windows on Linux to such a degree, that Linux can run the wireless Windows drivers in that emulated Windows environment. Or, more simply put, it enables you to use Windows WLAN drivers in Linux.Of course, the USB WLAN adapter not having a Linux driver, can't be blamed on Suse. My friend didn't know he was going to use Linux when he bought that adapter, though he is aware of the HCL now, and we should blame the hardware manufacturer (Made in Taiwan probably). Circumvent the problems!So, I decided I could get around the WLAN problem by means of installing the NDISWRAPPER. Then, my trouble started. Since I used OpenSuSE 10.1, it wasn't possible to use SuSE's update (Note: I probably didn't use the final version, since this bug seems to be fixed in 10.1 Final) . That was a known problem at that time, but a simple fix wasn't available back then. Also, the YaST tool was really slow in my opinion. I also had to type the root password every time I started the thing. It's normal to be forced to enter the root password once installing something, but since I use Gentoo with $sudo (emerge) on my boxes which remembers the root password for like 15 minutes, I wasn't used to typing it three times a quarter.Adding ftp repositories was impossible for some reason. I tried looking for a solution, but couldn't find one at that time, neither at Novell, nor at the OpenSuse site. Yes, there were solutions probably, but none that worked for me. That's when I noted the OpenSuSE site is not that easy to work with. Maybe that's because I'm used to the Gentoo site for my stuff, but I found it hard to find my stuff at the OpenSusSE and Novell sites anyway, and moreover I didn't know the exact difference between the two sites. Both seemed to contain usable information, but I couldn't really find my way around. Anyway, since I read about Linux a lot, I suddenly remembered an article by Steven J Vaughan Nichols about the problem I had, which mentioned the Smart Package Manager. Surprisingly, that worked like a charm. Sadly we couldn't get the WLAN adapter to work with NDISWrapper. Nonetheless, I played around with SuSE 10.1 on that laptop a bit, only to find out it worked really slow for me. Note however, the laptop had a 2400+ Mobile AMD processor and 256Mb RAM. I read the Suse / Vista smackdown written by SJVN, in which he claims SuSE works on modest hardware too. Well, I'm sure it worked well on his modest hardware, but it didn't work that well on our Acer Aspire laptop. Too bad. Apart from the package manager and the OS feeling very slow (waiting a long time when starting the Yast tool), all things worked like they should. However, those two issues are that important, I don't have to look at the other features to know I'm not going to switch from Gentoo to SuSE, which I very seriously contemplated back then. What? I can't kill?Then, I should talk about a more complex topic: SuSE's user friendliness when it comes to configuration. Or better: The lack of user friendliness. I just told I'm used to Gentoo. Configuring Gentoo is more easy than someone might think: I use the nano text editor to change configurations, and I use dispatch-conf to update my configuration files. One might say it isn't user friendly, but as long as you know what you are doing, it works fine.Than, there is configuration the SuSE way. I must say, the Suse people put a lot of time trying to make SuSE easy to use. If all works like it should, users don't have to use the command line and text files to configure their system. The trouble however, starts when these GUI configuration tools fail. That happened several times to me. Then, SuSE becomes less user friendly than Gentoo. For example, another friend of mine needed phpMyAdmin to run on Suse which was in turn running on Microsoft Virtual PC. He had the problem of a wrong screen resolution in Suse 10.1. I checked that it used the right driver, and as far as I could find out, that was the case. Therefore, we decided to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, like I'm used to in Gentoo. Not that there wasn't a GUI to change the screen resolution. In contrary, there was a nice GUI, but for some reasons unknown to us it didn't work, and it didn't give a helpful error message. I have 'manually' changed xorg.conf and the old XFree86.conf a lot, so I already know where in the file I would have to look. However, editing xorg.conf while X was still running wasn't an option; as far as I know that doesn't work. Therefore, we had to get out of X, and find a terminal. There must be a nice solution to do so, but I wasn't aware of a nice one at that moment. Therefore 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. No real problem, I started a term in KDE, and did a 'killall kdm'. Then, I was able to use the command line. I made a backup of xorg.conf and edited it. After doing so, I wondered how I could change which deamons do and which don't start at boot time in Suse. I thought it was just making / deleting symlinks in /etc/rc.d/rcX.d, since that's what I learned with LPIC 1 (Gentoo works slightly different, so not much experience there). I deleted the kdm symlink in rc5.d, but not the expected result. Instead, X started with the new resolution, and scrambled the whole screen because of some driver problem: Only a lot of black with some vague shadows of a cursor which was three times to big appeared. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn't do the job, so obviously, I made a mistake. Such things happen, but I was really screwed now, since I wasn't able to type anything at the command line and my graphical environment didn't work. Time for some ugly hacks?"Then I should do some 'hackin'", I found myself thinking. There's a nice hack to get around any boot deamons by means of changing init to /bin/bash. That means, directly after the kernel boots, it starts /bin/bash before it does anything else. Therefore, except for the kernel, nothing can go wrong, and the kernel 'boots into a command line' directly. Well, this worked with Debian and Gentoo for me, but it didn't for SuSE; SuSE was angry 'I attempted to kill init'. Such a message happened to me before, and I thought about solving it, when the fellow I tried to help suggested booting his old SuSE 9.0. That old SuSE had support, but the teacher lost the right 'keys' to get support (stupid!). Therefore, we should try to get that old SuSE 9.0 legacy stuff to work with only 'free' support and package repositories.Soon, I found a SuSE 9.0 ftp package repository. I tried to point YaST at it, but YaST wasn't happy at all. That's because the repository tree should follow the structure YaST expected it to have. Probably, because I used an old ftp 'backup' repository, this wasn't the case. Sadly, I couldn't find out at all what structure SuSE expected. When it asked for a directory called 'i386' and I pointed YaST to it, it asked for a directory called 9.0. When I pointed it to a directory called 9.0, it asked for the 'i386' directory again. Enfin, we almost gave up. I say: Almost gave up. Because, at that moment, I suddenly realized SuSE uses rpm's. Though I had _never_ used the rpm at the command line before (though there were questions in LPIC1 about it), I remembered I could use rpm --install. I downloaded the .rpm files I needed from the legacy repository, and strangly, it just worked! ConclusionsSo, though the GUI's in SuSE tries to make it easier for the users, it makes it more difficult in my opinion. First, you have to know how everything looks like, where to click, how to click through all pop-up screens (Yes, looks like Windows!), and how the configuration tools work. If that doesn't work, you find yourself switching back and forth between the GUI and the command line. This makes it more difficult to handle, then when you only used the command line.If you know how Linux works on a 'below GUI' level, that isn't much help in SuSE. The SuSE people changed a lot from the default configuration by the way, so it's hard to find your way around in SuSE in the command line also, if you're not used to Suse. Furthermore, the package manager SuSE provided was (I really hate to say this) crap, at the moment of the first 10.1 SuSE release (I hope it's fixed now, though 10.2 is not released as far as I know if you're not used to SuSE. Of course, most of those issues are fixed now, and the OpenSuSE site has a new clean design too, it seems. Nonetheless, a distribution that ships with that kind of flaws can't really be a true Vista competitor; even though OpenSuse isn't SLES. Let's hope the OpenSuSE team learned from this, and this kind of failures won't happen in the past. I also still hope OpenSuSE 10.2 and the ones following them will work faster on older hardware, but I'm afraid it is heading for the opposite. Nah, I'll still stick with Gentoo, and try some new OpenSuSE LiveCD maybe, to see all eye-candy I _could_ have used to lighten up my day. |
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| Subject | Topic Starter | Replies | Views | Last Post |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bad SuSE experiences? Not! | NoCaDrummer | 21 | 2,630 | Dec 1, 2006 7:15 AM |
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