Michael Staggs wrote:
Ok, I'll start in the order I noticed these problems:
First, I could not start the installation. It would freeze up saying something about looking for an info file. This also kept the cd from being used as a rescue disk. The only workaround I could find was to use "Manual Installation".
Stick a floppy in the drive and it stops the complaining and the freeze, not really a freeze, but a loooong wait. This has been a SuSE feature since about 8.1 or 8.2. once it sees any floppy it's happy.
During installation, trying to load sata_sil on my own, or waiting for the installation program to detect it gave me the same result: the installation locked up. This is sort of disparaging. You would think that SuSE would make sure their product worked with SATA drives. They're quite common now and the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard I have is a very popular motherboard.
So, I had to install an EIDE drive in order to do the installation. But, after cd 1 was finished and the installation rebooted, I was not able to use my mouse (USB Microsoft Intellimouse). After the installation finished completely, the computer started locking up while trying to load the Intel8x0 driver. The only workaround I found to this was to boot into my previous SuSE 9.1 installation, mount /root under /mnt/drive and install a standard 2.6.9 kernel. Then, I had my mouse and sound back. I can't get 9.2 installed on the A7N8X-E mobo, it bdoesn't like my 9.1 drive and can't mount it. The 9.0 drive is fine, but I use that as backup for stuff on my other boxes. I can dive into VC 02 and manually mount it, but that doesn't help. I had the same problem on my x86_64 laptop, but after a few hours trying, something kicked it into life.
I use gaim from CVS and I noticed SEVERAL devel packages were missing from the installation cds. The listing is as follows:
libao-devel texinfo gdbm-devel libopencdk-devel lzo-devel checkinstall
So, I had to download the sources of these rpms from the suse ftp server and recompile them. That turned out to be a problem when recompiling gdbm and texinfo. Gdbm required texinfo and texinfo required gdbm. SO, I had to get texinfo from the 9.1 directory and install it. Then, and only then, could I rebuild gdbm and texinfo.
I haven't tried building anything other than kernel.org kernels, they work fine.
One problem I noticed during this recompiling was that root didn't have /opt/kde3/bin in its path. I had noticed this in SuSE 9.1 as well. I see no reason for this...especially if you have installed KDE as your only desktop environment. I also noticed that if you type rpm -Uvh libao*rpm then it will complain that the files conflict with the libao package you already have installed. Since you are upgrading, it should catch this and not complain. This was a problem with 9.1 as well. This makes rpm -Uvh useless. You have to rpm -e the package in question, then rpm -i or rpm -Uvh then.
The path problem is usual. You could probably have gotten away with "rpm -Uvh --replacefiles"
As far as the running of the system, I don't notice any huge problems. I did notice something that was very annoying though. If I select my kicker to be small, then add an external taskbar, the taskbar is normal size...which makes it twice the size of kicker. I had to search through settings to find out how to change the external taskbar to small. I've never had this problem with any other version and KDE. x86_64 seems stable, just wish I could get my A7N8X-E install going. I have a new 160G drive and I will rsync the stuff from /dev/hda1 to it and see if that will make it happy.
I'm also noticing that PAN is having problems realizing that read messages have been read. If I delete the messages, it will download them again as unread. I'm going to have to reinstall PAN from the website, I believe. This SuSE version is just a bit too buggy...if for no other reason than that one alone.
Other than that, I haven't noticed any real problems yet. But, I think that these problems keep SuSE from appearing to be a professional product on installation. A sixth cd would be much more preferable to simply not including the devel packages. Also, if hardware is listed as supported and a kernel module is included for it, then it should install on that hardware. I would expect these problems from a .0 release, but not a .2
That would hugely upset some of us who need the devel packages. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====