On Saturday 07 May 2005 00:18, Ken Schneider wrote:

...

- Keyboard layout ( Finnish/Swedish ) on IBM T41 laptop seems completely broken. It's broken from the initial grub menu to the X. Looks like it thinks the numeric keypad is on the middle of the keyboard. Have no idea how to fix this - any ideas?

It would appear that somehow boot-up numlock is turned on when it should be off for a laptop. Check the bios setting.

Thanks. That solves this one. As previous versions of SUSE have worked fine with numlock-on, doesn't this version initialize keyboard by itself anymore? -- // Janne

On 5/6/05, Preston Crawford wrote:

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 23:39 +0300, Janne Karhunen wrote:

...

Let me first say that i'm a Linux professional, i make my living off it and have been using it since -96. So far i've been a happy camper with SUSE (for 6 years now), but now i honestly have to say that i'm very, very, VERY disappointed with the quality of the latest release. Really sad :(

If you can, go back to 9.2. I think there are far fewer problem with 9.2. At least from what I've seen on this list.

I did some soul-searching this week (publicly and privately) about whether to stick with SuSE. I downloaded and seriously considered Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.

In the end, however, I decided that with Centos or Fedora or virtually any other distro you either have to do beta testing for someone who may some day may pull the rug out from underneath you or you are stuck with a distro that may or may not be supported next week because the community isn't strong.

SuSE has neither problem. I think Novell/SuSE is here to stay and the community is strong, if at times challenging. And even if the releases head more down the Fedora path, I guess I'd rather do beta testing for Novell than for Red Hat, if that's what it comes down to. As long as they continue to distribute SuSE Pro close to how they do today.

So I would advise you to go back to 9.2. It's basically stable unless there's something in 9.3 that you need. Wait for 9.4/10 and hope they do a better job next time. That's what I'm doing.

Well, I've found that 9.3 is much better then 9.2. With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.. didn't matter what settings were changed. I don't know where the final bug was.. but I loaded 9.3 on one of these same machines yesterday and it took 3 minutes 18 seconds to reboot. A marked improvement. The machines are 4x3.2Ghz machines w/ 12 SATA drives in them that are connected to a 12 port 3Ware sata card. They aren't small boxes. I don't know why some would have issue and some do not. I'm just thankful that 9.3 fixed that bug.. because some of the PHB's were talking Gentoo. I think I'd quit prior to that. :) -Ben -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."

On 5/6/05, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Saturday 07 May 2005 03:07, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.

Why would it take that long to run reiserfsck? reiserfsck always runs on every boot, because it shouldn't take any time at all, regardless of the size of the partition. It just replays the journal log, unless you're running it manually. For reiserfsck in itself to take that long I would consider a bug

well, that's where it stopped in the boot process. And if I commented out that slice in the fstab the machine would boot as normal. I tried various things to try to fix this but nothing seemed to work. Then 9.3 came out and I picked it up at Fry's.. *bam* The problem didn't occur with 9.3 and the machines aren't giving me a headache. So I've had really good experiences with it so far. I've even put it on my workstation in the office in place of 9.2 .. because 9.2 started telling "operation not permitted" when I would do things like "man fetchmail"... it would give me the same error when logged in as root. In my experience 9.2 wasn't all that great. I wish I'd stuck with 9.1 and went to 9.3.. skipping the .2 release. -ben -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."

Anders Johansson wrote:

On Saturday 07 May 2005 03:07, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.

Why would it take that long to run reiserfsck? reiserfsck always runs on every boot, because it shouldn't take any time at all, regardless of the size of the partition. It just replays the journal log, unless you're running it manually. For reiserfsck in itself to take that long I would consider a bug

Wasn't there a problem with SATA back then? BTW Anders, my 9.3 USB problems - modules not loaded and needing "mount /proc/bus/usb after manually loading the modules - were fixed by a reboot of the SuSE kernel and on 2.6.12-rc3 with the usual initrd modules compiled in, it needed an initrd as initrd when run says it's done something with udev, loaded udev module or something like that. This XP3000+ box and the x86_64 laptop are fine, I'll have to reboot the P-II/333 and see what gives on that. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks

Sat, 07 May 2005, by twe-suse.e@ferrets4me.xs4all.nl:

Sat, 07 May 2005, by andjoh@rydsbo.net:

...

On Saturday 07 May 2005 03:07, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.

Why would it take that long to run reiserfsck? reiserfsck always runs on every boot, because it shouldn't take any time at all, regardless of the size of the partition. It just replays the journal log, unless you're running it manually. For reiserfsck in itself to take that long I would consider a bug

There is indeed a problem, I had the same experience. The solution is simple though. [..]

Forgot to tell: without this patch init forced a fsck for all filesystem in fstab (in /etc/init.d/boot.localfs), with automatic repair. Not what you want.. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply.

On 5/7/05, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Saturday 07 May 2005 14:17, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:

...

Forgot to tell: without this patch init forced a fsck for all filesystem in fstab (in /etc/init.d/boot.localfs), with automatic repair. Not what you want..

No, but not something you'd want to ignore either. It runs fsck with the -a flag, which will only switch to full repair mode if there are errors flagged in the file system. While this can take time, I don't think just bypassing it is the correct log term fix. It would be better to find out why the file system is flagged as broken

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Perhaps SuSe/Novell ought to think of a longer dealy period for new revisions? Mandrake/Mandriva have done so. Instead of cutting edge they are now looking at more stability and less bugginess. SuSE have a loyal customer base and a rightly fantastic reputation for stability but that can so easily be lost literally overnight. -- Take care. Kevan Farmer 34 Hill Street Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR

Sat, 07 May 2005, by andjoh@rydsbo.net:

On Saturday 07 May 2005 14:17, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:

...

Forgot to tell: without this patch init forced a fsck for all filesystem in fstab (in /etc/init.d/boot.localfs), with automatic repair. Not what you want..

No, but not something you'd want to ignore either. It runs fsck with the -a flag, which will only switch to full repair mode if there are errors flagged in the file system. While this can take time, I don't think just bypassing it is the correct log term fix. It would be better to find out why the file system is flagged as broken

It would I guess so, but sofar I'm unsuccessful in finding out. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply.

On 5/6/05, Preston Crawford wrote:

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 18:07 -0700, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

Well, I've found that 9.3 is much better then 9.2. With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.. didn't matter what

That's very odd. And I guess it proves the point of some other posters here, that sometimes some people have bugs that others never ever see. Because I've never seen this one. 9.2 has been very smooth for me, on the balance.

Yeah. I kind of figured no one had seen this problem because I posted to the list a couple times about it and no one responded. :) Doesn't matter now.. 9.2 is a bad memory for me.

Yuck. Gentoo is never something I'd consider. I ran FreeBSD on a box at home for a time. Great idea. Optimized software and all that, but when the rubber meets the road, it's not such a good idea. For example, I went to install OpenOffice.org from ports. After downloading 20-some libraries it spent the next hour compiling the software. Needless to say the part I was least happy about wasn't the hour of compilation. It was the fact that suddenly I had 20 libraries I may never need sitting on my machine taking up space. I'll always prefer binary packaging.

We tested FreeBSD with the custom software we are build and Linux was about 30% faster... which hacked off one of my co-workers who is a freeBSD person. *laugh* One can do pkgs with Gentoo but then what would be the point to using it? If one uses the pkgs then it's just an infant Linux distro with a way smaller userbase the SUSE or RH. :) -Ben -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 07:24:31PM -0700, Preston Crawford wrote:

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 18:47 -0700, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

On 5/6/05, Preston Crawford wrote:

...

That's very odd. And I guess it proves the point of some other posters here, that sometimes some people have bugs that others never ever see. Because I've never seen this one. 9.2 has been very smooth for me, on the balance.

Yeah. I kind of figured no one had seen this problem because I posted to the list a couple times about it and no one responded. :)

Doesn't matter now.. 9.2 is a bad memory for me.

Weird. I'm scared to go to 9.3, personally. I've even thought about NLD. $50 and all. I was thinking about this yesterday and maybe I do need to adopt a mindset similar to what another poster said when they said they install all their own major software. Maybe I just need to find a distro with a solid kernel, GUI and userland and then just install my own software. I kind of did this when I ran Fedora. Relied on them for the basic distro functionality such as the Desktop Manager, web browser, mail client, etc. then installed my own Apache, MySQL, Java, Tomcat, etc.

...

...

the fact that suddenly I had 20 libraries I may never need sitting on my machine taking up space. I'll always prefer binary packaging.

pkg_add -r

...

We tested FreeBSD with the custom software we are build and Linux was about 30% faster... which hacked off one of my co-workers who is a freeBSD person. *laugh*

That doesn't shock me. I found it fast for some things, but I've met many in the FreeBSD community who admit it's slower. They'll say it's because of the task switching in FreeBSD being bad and I think they're right. 5.x may be better and faster. But it's still true, regardless of cause.

5.X is mainly for SMP. The toher improvements they need to concentrate with are hardware support / drivers, and something for updates better than what they have now.

...

One can do pkgs with Gentoo but then what would be the point to using it? If one uses the pkgs then it's just an infant Linux distro with a way smaller userbase the SUSE or RH. :)

I won't even start on Gentoo. I can't stand it, or their user base.

Totally.

Preston

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On Friday 06 May 2005 08:47 pm, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

Yeah. I kind of figured no one had seen this problem because I posted to the list a couple times about it and no one responded. :):)

Doesn't matter now.. 9.2 is a bad memory for me.

Ben, I still have that problem on one of my machines and have no idea how to fix it. So far I've installed 9.3 on two machines and no problem, but then I no longer use reiserfs, I went to jfs or xfs. Got tired of the reiserfs mucking up the machine for no reason. Happened on three different machines. Looks like 9.3 is stable as a rock for me. Only 4 more machines to go. Richard -- Old age ain't for Sissies!

On 06 May 2005, at 18:47, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

On 5/6/05, Preston Crawford wrote:

...

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 18:07 -0700, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

...

Well, I've found that 9.3 is much better then 9.2. With 9.2 we had issue where it had a strange bug where it would take 15-25 minutes to reboot because EVERYTIME it booted the system it wanted to run reiserfsck against the 1.8T data partition.. didn't matter what

That's very odd. And I guess it proves the point of some other posters here, that sometimes some people have bugs that others never ever see. Because I've never seen this one. 9.2 has been very smooth for me, on the balance.

Yeah. I kind of figured no one had seen this problem because I posted to the list a couple times about it and no one responded. :)

Doesn't matter now.. 9.2 is a bad memory for me.

I have complained, fairly vehemently, about installation problems with SaX2, the X Server, and nVidia device drivers and with KDE 3.4. The SaX2 problems were, in a sense, created by me. I used SaX2 during the initial boot after installing SuSE 9.3. When installing SuSE 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2; I accepted the default SaX2 settings and deferred changes until after I had downloaded the drivers from nVidia. As an aside, other operating systems that I have used provide a warning not to make changes to the X server configuration during installation of a new release. Should have remembered that. While extremely irritating, the KDE 3.4 problem involving maximizing and restoring windows was more of an annoyance than a real problem. It didn't prevent KDE from functioning. The same could be said for the problem displaying bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3. My primary system at home and work over the last 15 years has been BSD/OS. It was not by any stretch of the imagination an end-user desktop system. It was designed as an operating system for servers. It was great for implementing firewalls and bastion hosts or simply being a high-reliability server that ran 24 hours a day 365 days a year. It wasn't unusual to have these systems up for 3 years between reboots. It had an excellent patch system for applying security updates and other software updates. After acquiring BSD/OS from BSDi, Wind River Systems suddenly announced in 2003 that support for BSD/OS would be discontinued at the end of 2004. Based on experiences of friends in other engineering groups at work with other Linux distributions and my own experience with Red Hat and SuSE, I decided to adopt SuSE Linux Professional as a replacement for BSD/OS, at least at home. A key element in its selection was its patching and update system. It's about as close in reliability to BSD/OS as you're going to get. The second was price. Two releases a year at $86.00 each versus $600.00 a year. Given the amount of software included in the distribution the above "problems" aren't really that bad. I'll stick with SuSE Linux Professional 9.3. Merton Campbell Crockett Ps: If you look closely at this message, you will noticed that I hedged my bets. I started using Mac OS X due to its having BSD under the hood. -- Merton Campbell Crockett mcc@CATO.GD-AIS.COM General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems Multi-source Intelligence Systems Advanced Technology 112 Lakeview Canyon Road Thousand Oaks, CA 91362-5027

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

On 5/6/05, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:

...

Ps: If you look closely at this message, you will noticed that I hedged my bets. I started using Mac OS X due to its having BSD under the hood.

But sticking with them doesn't mean blind obedience either. I use them for desktop workstations in the office, servers and a home server (big data repository) but as far as home work environment .. I'm quite pleased with my Powerbook running 10.4 (Tiger) as it gives me what I need and is basically UNIX... with the exception that they've gone and replaced init with this new launchd stuff that I've yet to figure out.

That sounds vaguely familiar. Desktop workstations at work are SuSE 9.3 as is my server/workstation at home. Actually, the latter has removable drive trays and can boot BSD/OS, SuSE, or WindowsXP by switching trays. There is, also, a PowerBook G4 17 running Mac OS X 10.4 for mobility. I developed a secure, collaborative environment for work using the BSD/OS IPFW System. The latter was derived from work done by BSDi and Wind River for several firewall vendors and incorporated into BSD/OS from their embedded product line. It's difficult, now, to find hardware on which BSD/OS will run. I'm hoping that either SuSE or Mac OS X will provide a reasonable alternative to BSD/OS. One big problem is documentation. Neither Novell/SuSE or Apple provide the "nitty-gritty" details that was the hallmark of the BSD/OS manual set. Are there any good resources for details on SuSEfirewall2/IPTables or Mac OS X/Darwin/FreeBSD IPFW? Merton Campbell Crockett -- BEGIN: vcard VERSION: 3.0 FN: Merton Campbell Crockett ORG: General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems; Intelligence and Exploitation Systems N: Crockett;Merton;Campbell EMAIL;TYPE=internet: mcc@CATO.GD-AIS.COM TEL;TYPE=work,voice,msg,pref: +1(805)497-5045 TEL;TYPE=work,fax: +1(805)497-5050 TEL;TYPE=cell,voice,msg: +1(805)377-6762 END: vcard

The Saturday 2005-05-07 at 09:57 +0300, Janne Karhunen wrote:

That said, it's not that 9.3 is all bad. Some of the work done with it is just great. I really like what they have done with the bootup sequence,

Hummm. The init.d new system is undocumented and buggy. I reported that here.

desktops,

Not quite. I have found that gnome is calling kde tools for which there are gnome equivalent. And OO is... oh, well. :-/

xen, OO.org and god knows what else. Polish 9.3 up, and you have a clear winner when it comes to the Linux desktops.

The overall feeling I get is good, but it needs a good polish, yes. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

The Saturday 2005-05-07 at 08:29 -0400, Ken Schneider wrote:

...

The init.d new system is undocumented and buggy. I reported that here.

I found this in 9,2 and may apply to 9.3:

YaST-->System-->/etc/sysconfig Editor-->System-->Boot-->USE_MAKE

Perhaps you can turn off the "new improved but broken" way of starting the system.

Yes, it does apply - I was not aware that the feature appeared in 9.2 - but it doesn't solve it. The thing is that once upon a time I made a temporary backup of an init script while I decided which to use. It's name was "/etc/init.d/postfix.rpmorig.borraralgundia", and the consequences were not trivial: * service postfix did not start on boot, nor did it stop on halt * "chkconfig postfix on" did not insert the service, nor "off" removed it. Same for innserv or Yast. * Creating/removing symlinks (like /etc/init.d/rc3.d/S17postfix) does not work, they don't run on init. The cause was that the file "/etc/init.d/.depend.start" contained this wrong entry: postfix.rpmorig.borraralgundia: network named syslog xntpd ldap ypbind instead of one for "postfix" alone. Notice that if an rpm update leaves a file named *.rpmorig or similar, as they usually do, that will break the bootup/halt sequence. It also means that the existence of script's symlinks in the appropriate directories do not guarantee that the scripts do run when they should: also the Makefile and "depends" must be correct. And this last thing is not documented. Nothing is mentioned about the "make" like behaviour in the admin book or on/offline manual. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 23:39 +0300, Janne Karhunen wrote:

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 23:39 +0300, Janne Karhunen wrote:

...

Let me first say that i'm a Linux professional, i make my living off it and have been using it since -96. So far i've been a happy camper with SUSE (for 6 years now), but now i honestly have to say that i'm very, very, VERY disappointed with the quality of the latest release. Really sad :(

If you can, go back to 9.2. I think there are far fewer problem with 9.2. At least from what I've seen on this list.

I did some soul-searching this week (publicly and privately) about whether to stick with SuSE. I downloaded and seriously considered Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.

In the end, however, I decided that with Centos or Fedora or virtually any other distro you either have to do beta testing for someone who may some day may pull the rug out from underneath you or you are stuck with a distro that may or may not be supported next week because the community isn't strong.

SuSE has neither problem. I think Novell/SuSE is here to stay and the community is strong, if at times challenging. And even if the releases head more down the Fedora path, I guess I'd rather do beta testing for Novell than for Red Hat, if that's what it comes down to. As long as they continue to distribute SuSE Pro close to how they do today.

So I would advise you to go back to 9.2. It's basically stable unless there's something in 9.3 that you need. Wait for 9.4/10 and hope they do a better job next time. That's what I'm doing.

Preston

And wait for the patches to come out or just stay one version behind. Greg Wallace