SuSE 8.2 Pro Review
I’ve been using SuSE 8.0 on my Sony PCG-F370 laptop (dual boot with Win98SE) and on my ancient cobbled together desktop for over a year now. I skipped the upgrade to 8.1 because everything was working and I didn’t hear any rave reviews of 8.1. On the contrary, many upgraders to 8.1 seemed to end up breaking things, so I’ve waited until now to make this move. I was also scared of the switch from LILO to GRUB. I’d like to see three things from SuSE 8.2 Professional:
I’m going to start on the Pentium III 450MHz laptop first, mainly because I care less if it happens to trash everything on that computer. Also, since it has a DVD drive, I’m hoping to swap discs just once during the whole install.
I picked up SuSE 8.2 Pro at my local Fry’s Electronics for $79.99 + tax. The first thing I noticed was that the seal on the bottom of my box was broken. Doh! I hope no one stole my SuSE sticker! (8.0 offered no stickers at all!) Aha, once you open the bizarre CD holder, a puzzling SuSE sticker reveals itself. It’s not the familiar chameleon/lizard, so far as I can tell, but looks to me more like a green radioactive symbol. Ok, in goes DVD 1.
I choose “Installation” (while wondering what “manual installation” means) and it starts loading the Linux kernel. I’m surprised at the blue screens, since SuSE has always been green in the past. Looks nice. After five minutes the laptop’s touchpad is working to allow me to select English as my language. (My USB mouse is not yet working). SuSE has recognized that I already have linux on this laptop and so I select “Update an existing system”. I am automatically prompted to create a backup of config files and I comply. I can choose an update mode, and go with the default system, allowing it to “clean up the system” by deleting unmaintained packages. It realizes that I have SuSE 8.0 and is going to update 340 packages and check 14 packages manually.
There is a button called “Detailed selection…” and, perhaps foolishly, I click it. SuSE finds a dependency conflict between cups and lprng and between libdvdnav for xine versus the one for MPlayer. I choose to delete lpdfilter and lprng and to “not set libdvdnav to Protected” (whatever that means) to resolve the conflicts. It looks like that resolves the cups/lprng issue, but now my only option is to remove MPlayer and xine-dvdnav, as that conflict remains. It is happy now.
Apparently SuSE would like me to delete GAIM, IBMJava2-JRE, several dvd libraries, ogle, RealPlayer, StarOffice 5.2, and xine. I’d like to make the latest version of GAIM work anyway, and don’t much care about the rest, so I’ll delete ‘em all to make the installer happy. Wait, there’s an option to “update if newer version available” which apparently works for RealPlayer and some of the dvdlibraries.
Under Package selections I see that none of the Games will be installed. What!? This is a laptop I’ll be taking to classes and to the library. How am I supposed to procrastinate without games!? I check the box to install all of them!
Under Multimedia packages it looks like gtk 2.2.1-29 is already scheduled for installation. Woohoo! This should hopefully mean I can manually install the latest GAIM without incident.
Under Package Groups, Applications, Internet, it looks like I can tell SuSE to update GAIM. I’m gonna try it.
One last Dependency Check and bindutil conflicts with bind9-utils and postfix conflicts with sendmail. (I don’t recall messing with any of that!) Telling it to remove bindutil and sendmail fixes things. I click Accept and realize it does its own final dependency check. A screen comes up whose “Next” button barely appears on the screen due to the lousy 640×480 resolution we’re working in.
One last warning comes up indicating I’m about to do some installing and I say, “Go for it!” The clock indicates I’ve got around two hours of installation time ahead of me, so I go to the other computer to play.
Clock is moving much faster than estimated. After just 20 minutes, I’ve only got 42 minutes of installation left (supposedly). While waiting I think about the fact that my wireless access point uses 128-bit encryption. I wonder how I’ll configure that… A quick glance at page 80 of the included User Guide suggests that SuSE’s setup tool, Yast, has a way to handle this. We’ll see!
After just 50 minutes I’m on a screen that says “Finishing Basic Installation”. I never had to put in DVD #2. It claims it’s going to install the boot manager and prepare for initial boot. [Tremble!]
The initial boot is in process, and if that is GRUB, it looks just like LILO but is blue. Perhaps 8.2 merely updated my boot manager?
Ooh. The USB mouse works now! (But the touchpad seems not to work anymore.) We’re back in Yast and the resolution is more like 1024×768 or something much more bearable than before. It’s writing the system configuration which Yast used to always do when you made system changes. Now I’m back to the blue startup screen apparently bringing down and back up PCMCIA among other things.
Wow. I’m at a login screen and it remembers my users. KDE 3.1 is booting up and looking sleek! My old desktop is back with different icons and the blue background. It thinks that my USB connected Sharp Zaurus is a modem, perhaps because the Zaurus has its own wireless card. I’m gonna let it try to detect it to see what happens. It knows to call it a Sharp SL Series (It’s the SL-5500 PDA), but I have a feeling it shouldn’t be set up as a modem! What the heck I’ll let it do this since it wants to.
A quick Konsole check of ‘ifconfig’ shows eth0 without an IP address, so I’m gonna start up Yast2 and hope to configure the wireless card. Hmm. I don’t know what I’m doing, but iwconfig says, “no wireless extensions”. Can’t check GAIM out until I’m online, and I’d like to do it with the wireless card. If necessary, I’ll try the regular ethernet card. More on this later…
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