Category: Martin’s Annual Linux Experience

Over the weekend I was ping-ponging back and forth between installations of Mandrake 9.0 and SuSE 8.1–I think a must have done about seven or eight of them in total. During the course of this experience, I learned a number of things:

• Having your /home directory on a separate disk partition is a good thing. That way, you don’t lose all your personal settings and tweaks when you reformat and reinstall.
• Mandrake 9.0 is much better than SuSE 8.1 about auto-detecting and enabling hardware. Mandrake picked up my PCMCIA wireless network card without any problems, and my MS Intellimouse, too. SuSE needed some twekaing to get both of these going.
• Even if I tell YaST (the SuSE installer) during the hardware detection phase that I’m using a PCMCIA card, I still have to explicitly specify the PCMCIA package and tools in the package selection step, or it won’t install them.
• Even when the PCMCIA tools are installed, I have to manually configure some variables in the file /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia (specifically, PCMCIA_PCIC=”i82365″)
• Although SuSE picks up that I’m using an Intellimouse, it won’t enable the mouse wheel until I’ve manually specified that I want to use the “IMPS/2” driver (in the SaX2 configuration app), and added a line to my .xinitrc file to start up the imwheel service. (All described in /usr/share/doc/packages/imwheel/README, and in various newsgroup postings).
• TrueType font support in KDE3 is much better than in previous versions. I was able to do a very simple import of all of the fonts I use in Windows, and they were available straight away.
• On the other hand, the anti-aliasing and rendering of these fonts is still not as good as on Windows. And there are still far too many different places where you have to configure the fonts to make them work consistently across the system.
• Install the STATIC version of Opera, not the dynamically linked one. Trying to install the dynamic version leads straight into Dependency Hell.
• Double-clicking on a shell script in Konqueror will run the file rather than fire it up in a text editor. Obviously. (Even though it’s still just a text file…)
• The .xinitrc shell script restarts the X server. Obviously. Don’t double-click it, thinking that it will open up in a text editor instead. When you still have work unsaved. Arse.
• KBear is a nice, graphical FTP client. That’s my replacement for WS-FTP sorted.
• KMail is an elegant replacement for Outlook Express, and it will even import messages and folders from an OE message store. Unfortunately it doesn’t import the OE folder hierarchy. Also unfortunately, you can’t drag and drop folders into other folders. So I spent a long time going into each folder’s preferences, and setting its parent folder from a drop-down list.
• I’m still looking for a replacement for my favourite text editor (TextPad), though. Emacs and vi are just silly, unless you either a) enjoy the pain of obscure user interfaces, or b) have worked with them for long enough that you don’t notice the pain any more. jEdit looks like it’ll work, until I find something better.

I have a lot more to explore, but for the moment, the system feels moderately comfortable. It will definitely take a lot more tweaking to get me completely happy with it. Whether I stick with it this year will depend on how quickly I get too frustrated with all the effort that goes into tweaking…

I reinstalled SuSE 8.1 again yesterday evening. This time, I found the section of the install process that asked me for the wireless networking parameters, but once the install was complete, the network still didn’t appear. Bummer.

This time, though, I was determined to get it working. From Windows, I delved into the SuSE on-line support database, read the PCMCIA HOWTO, and goggled around a bit. I came up with some information that looked plausible (here and here, namely that I needed to tweak the file /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia. This I did, setting the variables PCMCIA_SYSTEM to “kernel” and PCMCIA to “i82365” (both had been blank). I then went back into the control centre, and found that ther system had picked up the fact that the wireless network card was installed. Yay!

But although I could now ping myself, the rest of the network was still unreachable. Boo!

A reboot sorted it all, though, and we are now broadcasting live from SuSE 8.1. Woo!

I got Mandrake 9.0 installed yesterday evening. It successfully picked up the PCMCIA card, and hooked itself up to our wireless LAN first time, no problems. It did ask me for configuration information half-way through the install process, though, which SuSE didn’t. Makes me wonder if I missed it, so I’m about to give SuSE another run.

One thing that both installs had in common, though, was that they crashed out on me after I had been logged in for a couple of minutes. Working happily one moment, then the next minute the monitor shuts down. In both cases I had installed the latest version of XFree86 with 3D extensions, and had the monitor running at 1600 x 1200 in 24bit colour. With what little I know about Linux it could be anything, really, but when the monitor goes blank, I tend to suspect something in the video subsystem. I don’t plan to be runnig many 3D games on Linux, so I’ll probably do the next installs without the fancy stuff, and see what happens.

On Tuesday I ordered a copy of SuSE Linux 8.1 from Dabs, and it arrived this morning. Yay! The installation process was quite simple: I chose the basic install, with KDE and OpenOffice, and added a few other things, like Mozilla and Opera. The installer ran through its paces, picked up my graphics card, monitor, printer and webcam… but no network.

We run a wireless network here at Sunpig Central. For me, this means I have a PCMCIA wireless card (a WebGear Aviator Pro from a couple of years ago) stuck in a PCMCIA adapter. According to the PCMCIA documentation within Linux, this card should work. I know it works, because on my last two Linux adventures I have had it working. But the SuSE installer didn’t pick it up. So now I’m trying desperately to remember what I did the last time to get it running.

On the positive side, thanks to the wonders of broadband, I also happen to have a set of Mandrake 9.0 ISO images. I’m in the middle of burning these to CD-ROM right now, and I might just try installing it to see if it’s any better at detecting the PCMCIA card.

Any Linux gurus out there, please feel free to comment on my plight….

So I downloaded SuSE 8.0, and managed to get it up and running in a Virtual Machine. I had been planning to use this as a testbed for seeing how much work I need to do to to make it into a comfortable working environment, before rebuilding my machine with SuSE 8.1 when it arrives in a week or two.

Impatient little me.

I had intended to buy a small additional hard disk (8Gb or so), and do the install on that. But drives this small are actually quite hard to come by these days. On Ebay they tend to go for somewhere between £25 and £30. And when you can buy a brand new 80Gb drive for under £75, it seemed like a false economy to go for the smaller one.

So earlier this week I bought one of those big suckers. It now sits in the USB external drive enclosure we have, and acts (effectively) as Nearline storage. The external enclosure means we can easily swap it back and forth between Abi’s machine and mine, and means we’ll be more likely to take regular backups of our data. That’s pretty cool.

I’m keeping Windows XP on my 12Gb disk for now. In the 40Gb drive, which used to just hold data, I have now carved out a 10Gb partition for Linux. I had to whittle down the amount of junk data I was holding on the drive to do so (mostly downloaded software), but the Nearline means that I can offload it all very easily, but still have it quickly available. (I suppose I could just burn the lot off to CDs, but I’m finding CD burning to be quite tedious these days. Unfortunately DVD writers are still quite expensive. And sticking the big drive in our server would work as well, but a USB connection is faster than our wireless LAN.)

So if bringing up SuSE in a VM went OK, you’d think that installing it onto a real machine would be a doddle, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t. At least, it isn’t if you’re trying to install it from your own hard disk after downloading the whole 5Gb whack from one of the SuSE mirrors. Burning a CD image to boot from is simple. Getting through the next step is a little bit harder: you have to manoeuver through a fairly primitive menu system to tell the installer where to find the install packages on your hard drive. If you have the stuff on an NTFS partition, you have to make sure to load up the NTFS filesystem module as well. Not impossible, but somewhat less than 100% intuitive.

When you get through this part, you get into YAST (the SuSE graphical setup tool) proper. At this point, YAST knows where the installation packages are on your hard disk, and will happily allow you to select which of them you want to install. But if you want to proceed from that, it doesn’t work: “Could not mount the source medium.” This seems to be because in order to read the list of packages, it had to mount your hard drive, and when it tries to perform the install it wants to mount the drive again.

There seems to be a workaround available, but it involves coming out of the main install process, creating a boot floppy, mucking around with the partition tables and hacking several different config files. And I just can’t be bothered.

I know that the SuSE install process is relatively simple–provided that you’re using the pre-packaged CDs or DVDs. To comply with the GPL, SuSE has to make the source code for their distribution publicly available, but they are under no obligation to make the publicly available stuff easy to install. They don’t have to provide .ISO images on their FTP servers. They make their money off of the “free” software by charging for the packaging and convenient distribution media. This is the bst of both worlds, really: we get free and open software, and the software developer still gets rewarded.

Given that the entire distribution is available from their FTP servers and mirrors, I had been wondering whether to buy the packaged disks, or to just burn some broadband. Now, I think I’m pretty well decided that I’ll go for the package. The personal edition (3 CDs) is only £30 or so. Anything that’s not on the personal edition CDs I can download from the net. Overall, that sounds like a pretty good deal.

(Still…It would have been nice to have had something fired up this weekend already!)

I’m posting this from Konqueror, running on KDE3/SuSE 8.0 within a virtual machine. By gum, it’s gorgeous! (And thank goodness for broadband, too. I’ve sucked down all the rpm packages, but I’m still only half-way through grabbing all of the source files that come with the SuSE 8.0 distribution. 4.2GB and still going strong…)