Hi All,

for the last few years I've been a Mandriva fan but after their last release I've decided to give Suse a go, and I hope some of you can provide a few Do's and Don't's before I start.

No rush, I've only just ordered the disk and it'll take a couple of weeks to get to me. US mail is incredibly slow and way overpriced.

To give you an idea of the information I'm after here's some of the things that have put me off of Mandriva:

Default symlinks are accessed by some programs but ignored by others.

Most Gnome based applications won't run, they open, you see a splash screen on your desktop for a few seconds, then they disappaer again.

I don't know what they did to KDE but several programs cause curruption of the user profile, then many programs won't open (just like the Gnome programs) including the Mandriva Control Center and then you have to set up a new user and migrate all your stuff across to the new user.

Many applications won't run when logged in as a user but run flawlessly when logged in as root, not a wise option but again points to either user profile corruption or symlinks with busted arses.

GTK+ is installed but no programs can find it.

And they started playing J Edgar Hoover with the user access which is probably the root cause of all the troubles, so I had to learn which scripts to edit to enable root login, to give su FULL access rights and even to allow users to burn DVDs and shut down the computer.

Am I to expect any or all of these problems with Suse?

Hope you can help.

Cheers,

Andrew.

.

Well as an GNU/Linux advocate I have to say SUSE?????
After their deal with m$ that is a distro that is totally off my list. Their are very (technically) good. But I have never been so sure about their vision of what Open Source really is.

Given this, I am sure you will have a lot less trouble than with Mandriva witch was my first attempt with Linux, from witch I ran away as soon as I could.

My advice: Ubuntu
I have only a few complaints, it has given my almost no problem. You can run it live also, before you make up your mind, and you can have the latest full version.
Plus they are truly Free as in Free Beer and will always be, since they are Debian based.

I do suggest you give SuSE 10.2 a try. While bertlef had some gas over the m$ deal as he calls it and many people are trying out Ubuntu, SuSE is still a good Distro and none of this takes away from the very fine release in SuSE 10.2. Each to his own I say. Many people have had issues with the SuSE package management, but the latest updates have fixed that problem for me.

The biggest issue I think you can have is hardware support. Built-in sound and network can often be a problem. The older the computer the more likely it will work. I always use a sound blaster sound card for instance but you got to stay away from the x-fi series while everything else works. By far, nVidia provides the best video support for Linux and I have had good luck with d-link network cards. It does not hurt to try out your default hardware, but don't panic if something built-in does not work. For instance, network cards that work at 1 gbit and work with Linux can cost as little as $10 (at our local Fry's which also sales such online).

If at first you do not succeed in your installation, wipe it out and try again. This is how you learn a distro. For instance, the first time I had a video problem (I had set the resolution beyond my monitor settings) I had to reload Linux because I did not know how else to fix the problem. That would be silly for me to do today, but I learned a lot from my many trials using SuSE Linux.

By all means, try out other versions of Linux. As bertlef suggests, give Ubuntu a try as well. As for gnome and KDE, I use KDE and prefer its setup in SuSE. Everyone should go with what works best and makes the most sense for them and how they work and understand software setup and configuration.

Good luck and do let us know how you did.

Thank You,

Thanks, this is exactly the type of advice I'm after. Mind you, my built in nVidia AC97 sound is crap in all operating systems but only when it comes to direct acceleration, it still plays music fine which is it's main use.

And don't I know it! Even as a small child every toy I ever had got pulled apart and broken so I could see how it works. I learnt back in the early days of Microtoss to make a second partition for all of my stuff and leave the first partition purely for the OS. I was quite pleased with myself when I discovered that this is a default setup for Linux. My second partion is /home.

Ubuntu was going to be my other choice but one of the main considerations for me is how much extra software ships with the distro as I only have dialup internet, that made Suse look good to me. Especially when the extra software is also shipped with it's source as one of my next projects (given enough spare time) is going to be Linux From Scratch.

I do prefer the KDE desktop but there's so many good programs that are Gnome based, ideally for me is to run KDE but have both installed. That's how I used to do it in Mandriva but the later versions have made this more and more difficult. Now they've stitched over KDE as well there's almost nothing useful left in it.

I want KDE, I like Konquerer, but I also really love Grip, Amarok and K3B. And I miss Kaffeine.

Thanks to both of you for your comments.

I'll keep in touch and let you know how it goes.

Cheers,

Andrew.

I was happy to help. When you get into using SuSE 10.2 and have an issue, come back and ask for help. I use Amarok, K3B and Kaffeine in SuSE and they all work great! I guess I use the xine DVD player the most and my sound card has direct optical out which gives me up to 7.1 sound to my receiver. One thing about included applications, I hear that SuSE 10.3 will come on a single live CD and that most applications will be downloaded over the net as standard. That means that 10.2 might be the last SuSE versions that comes with so much software included. It seems like the distros in general are moving to live CD's that can also be installed and then you pull down the other apps you want over the net. This is not ideal for someone with a dialup internet connection. For what it is worth, I still have SuSE 10.0 loaded on my laptop and I still can get full online support and updates. Each release finally will get booted off of full support, but you can use 10.2 for a couple of more years before you must switch to something else if you want current updates.

Thank You,not

Hi All,

Just a quick note to let you know I haven't forgotten you. My SuSE disc arrived today but I won't try to tinker with it until the weekend when I can afford some time.

Tempted though, with the disc leaning jauntily against my monitor and beckoning like cheap chinese bling bling.

Yeah, I know it's been three weeks but it does say "US Air Mail" on the outside of the package, maybe it comes via ruptured seagull.

I'll let you know how I went in a few days,

Cheers,

Andrew.

.

OK, it's on! My Saturday morning "Help, my Windows is broken" failed to answer the door when I came around, I've told all my mates I'm going to a barbecue this afternoon, doors and windows shut like no-one's home, aircon on and fridge stacked.

My first install of SuSE has had mixed results, partly because now I can't find anything, partly because my Mandriva KDE profile was still in the home folder when I installed, and that bloody Xine problem.

I'm in SuSE now, by the way. A quick couple of first impressions and then some questions.

The gui for disk partitioning and formatting - they've taken a relatively simple task and made it that bloody complex and convoluted that even an old hand could easily make mistakes.

I never got a look at the initial desktop layout as I already had a desktop profile setup, but I really love the wallpaper in the root desktop. Nicely done.

So far, most things run absolutely sweet, KDE and Gnome installed, all the games play, all programs that I've tried so far have worked well, except for sound. You did warn me.


So far, I've felt a lot more confident in the overall stability of the system compared to Mandriva, except - when I tried to dial out this morning I got "Modem dev/modem not found." so I changed it to ttys0 and it's got no more problems. Strange though, 'cos it was happy with dev/modem last night. Residual symlinks with busted arses left over from Mandriva maybe? Or does this symlink problem crop up in SuSE too?

User access to programs - how? KPPP required root access? In properties of the desktop icon I selected "open as root user" or whatever and it'll ask me for the root password then open, but I didn't have to do that in Mandriva. Where in Yast do you allow these privileges and others?

Where or how do I open K3B Setup? Root access thing again.

Amarok has no MP3 codec? The Xine problem, I know. But why does Amarok only have one engine (xine) in it's list? What happened to Arts and Oss and OggVorbis? Not to mention Alsa. Are these easily available downloads maybe?

Haven't tried ripping another cd just yet, not much point if I can't hear it, but Grip seems to work fine. I've also installed Lame and Bladeenc, surprised that Amarok didn't find and use one of those as a decoder. Xine problem or have I installed them to the wrong place? I just did the plain old ./configure, should I have used --prefix=/usr ?


Mostly basic questions, I know. And probably simple answers that I'll end up working out for myself, but any input would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew

OK,

Job done!

With the exception of the Xine problem the whole thing is basically a flawless setup straight out of the box.

I've installed almost everything except the server side and everything runs just like it's supposed to. I've played with about half of the apps I've installed so far, just opening them and having a quick play around and close again. I can't find anything wrong. It's a weird feeling.

I haven't tried switching to the Gnome desktop yet, but I will, just to see it works. Would be cool if you could run both at once and switch back and forth between the two, is this possible?

Haven't got around to it yet but I'll do a bit of script editing to fix the K3B root privileges problem and handle the Kppp problem the same way. I think this is actually caused by the old user profiles already in my home folder during install because although K3B complains about not having root it burns everything flawlessly. DVD full of MP3's in 9 minutes - suck on that, Microtoss!

And my crappy built in sound was set up correctly straight out of the box too. It's the installation of Xine that was broken. Here's my fix, for any newbies that come across it.

First I read redazz's wonderful tutorial sticky at the top of the page but I was too impatient to work out how to setup a new update source in Yast so I just went to PackMan's site and flipped through all the downloads to see what I could see. Wow, what a site!

Download everything that has "alsa" in it's name, everything with "xine" in it's name and anything else you think might be nice, include LAME mp3 encoder, MPG123, SDL, Cairo and Pango. Also get any available dev packages that go with your chosen apps, quite often you need them.

You'll probably also want the libdvdcss decoder for commercial dvd's from the videolan sight. I had problems with that, see below.

Once you're sure you've got everything you need and it's all in an easily accessible folder use Yast to uninstall Xine, this'll also take out Amarok, K3B and a couple of others.

I installed all the packages I downloaded just by double clicking on them one by one and installing. I did all the alsa first, then all the xine, then everything else. Then use Yast to put Amarok, K3B, etc back in.

When I tried to install the libdvdcss rpm I kept getting dependency conflicts so I downloaded the source and compiled it. Now it works. Here's my routine for newbies:

GCC must be installed, use Yast to check available programs on the suse disk and if you see anything in there called GCC something or libgcc then install it.

When you download source it's usually in a type of zip file called a tarball. When you click on the tarball in Konquerer (your file browser) it opens and you can see a folder in there, click and drag the folder to your desktop. You'll get asked if you want to copy or move the file. Choose copy, that way you've still got the original left for just in case.

Next open a terminal, it's a window you can type commands into, there's normally one on your taskbar right next to the K Menu klicker. When the terminal opens type in

cd Desktop

and hit enter. These commands are case sensitive, so Desktop is not the same as desktop. Your command prompt should have changed to show that you're now in the Desktop folder. Now use the cd command again to go into the folder of the program that you want to install, remember, it must be typed in exactly as it is named, dots, dashes and all.

Once you're in the program folder type in

./configure --prefix=/usr

and hit enter. Your terminal is going to blur with text for a minute or so, when it finishes check the last 4 or 5 lines of type to make sure nothing says "error". If all is fine type in

make

and enter. More text flying past for a while, then the last command, but it needs root privileges so type in

su

and enter, you'll get asked for your root password, type it in and hit enter. Now the final :

make install

and enter. More text flying up the screen and you're done.


You never know, someone might find that helpful.

Cheers,

Andrew.