[TriLUG] Tony's second report on Suse installation from Lockergnome's Penguin Shell

[al johson]

  12.04.2001 PenguinREPORT


Regardless of where you live in the world, it's a safe bet that as you read
this, my 6'4" frame is stuffed into a coach-class airline seat, winging my
way over the Pacific to Japan. I'm not looking forward to the flight, the
serious jet lag, or the time away from friends and family. I am, however,
looking forward to Kansai, Osaka and Bisei. If all goes well, I may even get
a few days in Tokyo and Kyoto before returning home. I've already helped to
take test images with this telescope. Even under light-polluted skies, the
view is startling. I can't wait to spend a few nights under a dark sky
watching the labor pay off with incredible images. I'll try to share some of
them with you next week in the webcam images.

In the meantime, let's talk about Suse. If you go back a ways with Linux,
it's hard to realize just how far graphical installs have come. That is,
unless you're putting a new distro on your machine every week. As much as I
liked the installer interface for Mandrake, the install for Suse was nearly
as clean and easy.

I'm normally a pretty persnickety guy when it comes to install size. With
Suse, I just couldn't resist the lure of 7 CDs. For a change, I chose the
full 3200 package install. What the heck - I've got 60 gig to play with.
Installing that many packages took approximately 50 minutes on Frankenbox
(newly blessed with 512 mb of RAM).

Overall, the install went well. While not quite as visually appealing as
Mandrake, Suse easily did as well in recognizing all my hardware. The
network card, the CD burner, the PCI video card and SoundBlaster -
everything was at least recognized by the install and configuration tool,
YaST2. That's a measure of the power of today's installers. These were the
very things that drove new Linux users nuts over the past several years.
Today? No problem.

YaST2 did have one small drawback. The configuration screens left me a bit
puzzled. After recognizing all the hardware, YaST2 notified me that my
hardware was ready, though it might need more configuration. Out of
curiosity, I clicked on the configure buttons. I did, in fact, need to
reconfigure the network card and video resolution, both of which were easy.
But, had I not been paying attention to the wording of the screens, I might
have missed altogether that YaST2 hadn't *completely* configured my devices.
A small thing, I know, but a potential land mine for a new Linux user.

I've been digging into the programs the past few days. Most of what I've
seen is very good. As always, there are a few things that can only raise a
"huh?" We'll dig into the installed application base with Suse tomorrow.


Tony Steidler-Dennison