Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2161 mails)

[G T Smith <grahamsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Good in parts....

I have just bitten the bullet, and upgraded my Linux unfriendly laptop
to SuSE 11.0 It has so far been an interesting experience (somewhat
compounded by the internal DVD Drive on the machine finally giving up
the ghost). I thought it might be an idea to share some of the issues I
came across and how I fixed those I could fix.

Installation Method

As the CD/DVD drive was unusable I therefore did the installation via
PXE and FTP from a loop mounted ISO image for which the current
instructions on the SuSE site

http://en.opensuse.org/SuSE_install_with_PXE_boot

mostly worked (the only problem was the installation of the 10.2 atftp
RPM on the server did not create a tftp account so the tftpd daemon
failed to load, creating this account seems to have fixed problem,
though there is probably a better way of fixing this).

Firstly the good bits,

I had two pleasant surprises the WiFi actually worked properly without
having to write a script to load it, and sound seems to be stable (it is
usually is a bit hit and miss, involving a couple of obscure tweaks).
The Thunderbird Funambol plugin started working though it is having a
problem resolving hostnames (DNS settings are OK so I need to
investigate this further). Software management is much improved.

Then the not so good ....

The Firefox version on the DVD broke a couple of plugins, but this was
resolved with Online updated version. Not really convinced about Firefox
three so far and it would be nice to have the option of downgrading to 2.

The yast2 sax based mouse selection tool only seems to allow the
definition on one pointing device and could not identify or communicate
with my USB mouse. On this laptop this left me with the barely usable
touchpad. Manually editing the xorg.conf file solved this, settings in
old version xorg.conf did not work and some additional options seem to
be required. (A novice would be up a creek without a paddle with this one).

Attempt to mount with cifs with a previously working cifs mount script got

mount error = 20 ... not a directory... (etc etc)

messages. Various manual mount variations got similar results....

A quick google found...

echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled

which solved this problem, but I have yet to find out exactly what the
implications of this are... and I also suspect this will need to be
performed each time the mounts need to be made after a reboot....

and then the bad....

There seem to be a major issue with installing of some Perl modules that
are not part of the SuSE distribution with cpan from CPAN. I am still
investigating and working on this. I think something has gone AWOL but I
have not established exactly what yet...

and finally the bad but not unexpected....

Enlightenment 17 and Entranced are not available for 11... I will need
to try and compile from source at some point (more fun :-) )

Conclusion

I think on the basis of this I will not be upgrading my server machine
for the moment (this is a bit more standard configuration but the Perl
issue is a potentially a major show stopper for me).


- --
==============================================================================
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone.
My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup
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