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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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Comments (22)
2 earlier comments in the full thread.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Back on topic, sadly, Ctrl+Alt doesn't work in VMWare (running in 'native' Gentoo this time!) neither.
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....
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the OpenSuSE distribution is now doomed, it would be well advised to take a look and rescue as much good design as possible.
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.
> Since the OpenSuSE distribution is now doomed
Oh yeah... MS must really love you....
Oh yeah... MS must really love you....
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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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