OK,

So I altered my system around to put my RAID set on SATA ports 2 & 3 and my planned Linux drive on SATA 0 … this had the unintended consequence of completely destroying my Vista RAID partitions but since I was finding that OS increasingly tiresome it’s no biggie. I now have XP Pro back on the system and have tested connecting and disconnecting the drives successfully.

I disconnected my RAID drives and installed OpenSuSE 10.3/64bit on the system and everything went swimmingly until the very end when the mouse (a Saitek GM3000 USB gaming mouse) locked up so I proceeded on keyboard alone.

Ultimately I was stumped by the fact that on the second “Hardware Configuration” screen (after a series of OSS & non-OSS repository downloads) and UserID configuration the install simply locked up. The result is that I can boot OpenSuSE from the hard disk but it goes into install & configure mode each time I do.

I suppose I could try the 32bit version but I am unsure if that will resolve the issue.

Kyu

Weird, your hardware should be supported. I had some doubts about the TV card but that appears to be supported too. Have you actually tried any other distros? The thing is, I have assisted with similar issues in the past and it has happened more than once that Suse simply refused to work (properly) on hardware that works fine with any other distro.

See if you can get to a terminal while booting (Ctrl + Alt + F1) and/or run the dmesg command so you can spot any error messages. Better run it like: dmesg | less so you can scroll through the output.

Unfortunately the 32bit version failed to resolve the issue at all ... I got back down from lunch and the entire machine had gone black screen. I rebooted it and it resumed install but then locked on hardware detection (as per usual).

Yes many (and I do mean that) .... recently? No ... only SuSE in the past 6 months or so.

Yes, I suppose I will have to look for an alternative distro ... it's just a shame because SuSE was my first Linux and the one I've always had a soft spot for. Somehow I just always liked the way SuSE did things.

OK, before I trash it for another build I will try that (and, of course, won't trash it if I see anything worth reporting back).

Thanks Jay

Kyu

OK, although things aren't right yet we have some progress ... I have managed to install openSUSE on my system This was done by selecting the failsafe option on the menu which forced the system into a text based install mode.

The problem I have is with my mouse but I will start a fresh thread on that.

Thanks for all the help

Kyu

I have Dell Inspiron 1520 and I installed Gentoo about a month ago. I had problems with sound, so I upgraded it to ALSA 1.0.15 which was a keyword mask. I recently got Intel 3945 Wi-Fi to work although I thought it was going to be hard. Almost everything works, such as changing brightness from the function key and the radio kill switch. I have not tried IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or i.Link), Express Card (hot-swappable PCIe), 8-in-1 Flash card reader, and web cam. On my to do list, is putting the notebook computer in stand-by mode and optimize it for longer battery life.

OpenOffice is over rated. I suggest try KOffice and Gnumeric. Gnumeric is my favorite spreadsheet program. For instant messaging, I suggest try Pidgin (aka GAIM). I rarely use RealPlayer in Linux, but I use the RealPlayer plugin in mplayer. VideoLAN is pathetic because it crashes and it is too picky with hardware and the way how a video or audio is written. To play videos from the internet, I suggest mplayerplug-in, but this plug-in only works in SeaMonkey, Firefox, and Netscape. To edit images, I suggest either GIMP or Cinepaint. I do not know what is audiograbber. If it is just a sound recorder, I suggest Audacity. A professional audio recorder and editor is Ardour. I use Cinelerra CVS for simple and complex video editing.

I recommend use wired input and output devices because they provide the most reliability and stability than wireless.

If you said that you use Linux for 10 years, you are joking. If you have used it that long, then you will not be skeptical that Linux does not have support for your hardware and alternative software. I used Linux as a desktop OS for four (4) years. I have found that Windows is very limited in the video capture card department and it is very annoying.

TIPS:
* Use OpenGL as the video output device in mplayer or other media players. This will speed up video playback and make it be very fluid.
* Use "alsamixer -V all" to get a lot of audio options than the defaults. Great for setting up audio recording.
* arecord | hexdump is a way to test audio recording.
* tvtime is a simple program to test video capture cards. Test with either Composite (RCA) or S-Video before using the tuner.
* Always select a video capture card with a line-out jack.
* When using two or more hard drives on different channels, try adding a swap partition and set the pri to the same number. Instant RAID-0 with out any configuration with software RAID.
* When setting up software RAID from either the controller or in Linux, always have a non-RAID drive to store boot data.
* When using SCSI drives, format partitions with labels. Less hair pulling later on.
* use gtf to help create modelines for desire resolutions and refresh rates. Place the code in the monitor section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
* Do not use a proprietary Linux distribution like SUSE because are not going to learn anything.
* Database of alternative software go to osalt.com.
* Use gentoo-portage.com to find out what software is stable and what is not.

Try Wubi. Installs Ubuntu(or one of the like) on windows. Not sure if you can completely install it on another partition though...I have yet to find out! If I can't, well, I'll continue messing around with it like this until I get the hang of things as I have the hang of things on windows! Good Luck!

What I actually said was, "I've been playing about with Linux for about 10 years but never quite managed to migrate" ... I have experience of Linux running back 10 years and I have learned much about it BUT (and this is the idea I am trying to put across) even though I know a lot it hasn't really *gelled* in my head, I know how to do a lot of things but that gives me no particular expertise in others and certainly does little about the many more things I do not know.

If you're saying what I think you're saying then good for you ... you love Linux and you're happy, that can only be a good thing. I know very little about the relative merits of TV capture applications under Windows vs Linux.

In my experience Linux is an OS built by techies for techies and in that sense represents something of a "holy grail" to me, a return to real computing ... I would love to be more expert in it but I'm not, installing things in Windows is generally simplicity itself, installing them in Linux is a highly variable experience.

I am a Windows techy and although I dislike Microsoft's licensing scheme I understand why they do it and that has pushed me part way towards trying Linux (again) ... the other thing that really pushed me was Vista which is very slick, mostly works fine but is basically boring as hell.

Thank you for the list of tips, I will certainly bear those in mind

The one I wish to address is your advice not to use SuSE which (for now at least) I am going to politely ignore because I like SuSE ... I did ever since I picked up my first copy (version 7 IIRC) at an Expo for a fiver (before that I had only seen RedHat and I really didn't like it that much). That may seem like a bad decision but given that I have used 25 of the top 100 distro's (as listed at DistroWatch), including Gentoo, and maybe another dozen or so besides in the 10 years I have been playing with it I think I have earned at least some right to decide which way I want to go

I mean don't misunderstand me ... eventually I wish to build my own distro from scratch, layering each useful layer, utility and application on the thing until I can finally be confident I know the OS I use back to front and side to side but until that day I'll have to use something else

For now however I have openSUSE working on the system and I have a plan which, in essence, is to gradually migrate my application base away from Windows and see if I can now work with Linux as my primary OS. It may not work, I've tried enough times before, and if so I will simply drop back to Windows but with enough help from people like those round here I may succeed

Kyu

Thanks for that

Kyu