Hey all,

Just installed Suse 9.0 the other night (ftp install w/ the minimal boot cd) and everything went well. Now I've used mainly Gentoo and Debian based distros in the past and so I consider myself mostly an rpm based distro newbie.

I've got a few questions about Suse, rpms, and all that fun stuff.

1.) Why will yast2 not seem to let me specify another source for installing software? (tried multiple running ftp sites from the suse mirror list and they never seem to be able to connect via yast). I'm probably going to just jump to apt-rpm which brings me to my next question. (Note: yast2 update works when I specify a different ftp source though....freaking odd)

2.) I notice all these RH version based rpms and very few suse based rpms. if I want to use a RH based rpm what is the minimal version that I should use if any? So if I want to locate an rpm version of apt-rpm to install, what would be ok to install? [RH 7.2, 8.0...?])

3.) The yast2 autoupdater shows the kernel-sources as unavailible/not able to install.... so, how do I get the kernel sources specific to my athlon w/ the .config file that suse utilized? I've downloaded the current kernel sources from suse.com but the versions don't match up w/ what I have. I've got 2.4.21-166-athlon, I downloaded the only version availible 2.4.21-144.

4.) Got a Nvidia card, not going to ask questions on this now

Cheers!

To answer your redhat rpm question. SuSE should be able to use just about any redhat rpm there is. SuSE follows LSB very closely and so does redhat, therefore the rpms should work for both. But to be on the safe side, go with the RH 8 rpms

Now, I hated the ftp install for suse. It always gives me problems. Your best bet is to go to ebay.com and buy a burned copy of SuSE 9.0 pro for around $10. You can also go to one of the ftp sites on suse.com (chose your closest mirror) through ftp or a web browser, and download the source rpms manually and install from the command line.

But my best advice would be to go to ebay and get a copy. Its only $10-15

How about apt-rpm for suse? Will that help in any way?

Don't really know. I havn't really had any need for apt-rpm. You can try searching the fourm on suse.com

thanks rshaw, thats the first link I've seen for apt secifically for suse.


Also, I had to do a chmod 666 /dev/hdc to get my regular user to be able to play cds. Is that normal on first install of suse? Shouldn't that have already been taken into account? (Perhaps its just the ftp install again).