thelinuxlink.net

Posted: **Thu Feb 08, 2007 6:37 pm**

After running 10.2 for about a week I am going to delete my kubuntu 6.10 installation. This means I need to really start committing to learn the finer details of suse administration and how things work. Since Troels seems an expert in this area I figured this to be the best/first place to ask questions.

I did a net install and then followed this guide immediately afterward.

http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/60

My installation sources looks as follows:

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ftp://64.50.236.216/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss
ftp://64.50.236.216/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/non-oss
ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2/
http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.2/
http://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/update/10.2

I added all the sources after install except for the kernel.org which seemed to get auto setup during the install. I also disabled the kernel.org source because it always stopped yast in it's tracks trying to look it up. The first two in the list are for suse.mirrors.tds.net but Yast doesn't seem to be able to find them by dns name.

So a few questions:
Is the kernel.org source redundant with my other sources? Am I missing any sources required for basic suse updates? Whats the difference between a YAST and a YUM source? Why can't yast find the tds mirror without the ip address? Any other things I should know about installation sources and how many I should have or which ones?

Thanks

Posted: **Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:13 pm**

Don't use SUSE! MY LAST 5 SUSE INSTALLS BLEW UP, DON'T DO IT! TURN BACK NOW!! That Troels is nothing but bad news!

Seriously though I will never be recommending SuSE again but hopefully you won't have the same problems I did.

*me waits for T to make some bad 'GCC screensaver' joke*

Posted: **Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:36 pm**

CptnObvious999 wrote:Don't use SUSE! MY LAST 5 SUSE INSTALLS BLEW UP, DON'T DO IT! TURN BACK NOW!! That Troels is nothing but bad news!

Seriously though I will never be recommending SuSE again but hopefully you won't have the same problems I did.

*me waits for T to make some bad 'GCC screensaver' joke*

LOL.

I'm curious what kind of problems did you have? At this point I just want something that works, is adequately up to date, and looks good. So far I've only had two problems.

1. fonts aren't real good.
2. My second sound card doesn't get loaded at boot.

Other than that this is the most stable linux desktop ive used in the last two years.

Posted: **Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:50 pm**

hellonorman wrote:I'm curious what kind of problems did you have? At this point I just want something that works, is adequately up to date, and looks good. So far I've only had two problems.

1. fonts aren't real good.
2. My second sound card doesn't get loaded at boot.

Other than that this is the most stable linux desktop ive used in the last two years.

I've had a few wifi cards not load right even though they would on other distros such as gentoo. After adding a few repos and waiting several hours and it not finishing I ended up killing it and screwing up everything and had to do it all over again. I could not install the NVidia drivers using any method. I know there were more but I cannot think of them off the top of my head.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 7:34 am**

CptnObvious999 wrote:Don't use SUSE! MY LAST 5 SUSE INSTALLS BLEW UP, DON'T DO IT! TURN BACK NOW!! That Troels is nothing but bad news!

Seriously though I will never be recommending SuSE again but hopefully you won't have the same problems I did.

For the first time since I started using Linux, I'm gonna take a little bit of an elitist attitude. I think you're full of sh!t. Yes, SUSE has it's quirks, but you are obviously incapable of using it anyway.

CptnObvious999 wrote:I've had a few wifi cards not load right even though they would on other distros such as gentoo.

How many ******* times do I have to ******* tell you, that they pulled the rt2500 driver out of 10.1 because it was not ******* stable at the time of their code freeze!!!!

CptnObvious999 wrote:After adding a few repos and waiting several hours and it not finishing I ended up killing it and screwing up everything and had to do it all over again. I could not install the NVidia drivers using any method. I know there were more but I cannot think of them off the top of my head.

First of all, I completely agree that ZMD is an incoherent pile of vomitted sh!t, any business would be insane to deploy such a pile of goatsh!t.
(Was that good enough?)
However, had you followed the instructions I gave you wouldn't have had those problems with ZMD.
Or you could have freaking read some forum posts, done some research or something! If I had never used Gentoo before and then right off the bat complained that I couldn't get something to work because I didn't know to run env-update, then you'd shake your head too.
If I went back and used a 4 year old version of Gentoo and then went out and said that Gentoo was a piece of crap because a 4 year old version was garbage, then you'd shake your head. You're basing your statements on SUSE 10.1, and yes as I have said a billion times already, that release was an absolute disaster, but it's absolutely unfair to not just live with that and get on with life and then judge newer versions, that do work, for what they are, instead of always rehashing a stupid mistake made over a year ago.

CptnObvious999 wrote:*me waits for T to make some bad 'GCC screensaver' joke*

Or just mention the absolutely terrible QA Gentoo employs. And WTF is up with not ever having a solid, frozen distro that you can actually rely on, and not have to update freaking glibc or udev, only to find out that after you ran etc-update, it hosed your system.

hellonorman wrote:1. fonts aren't real good.

By default, you're right, they're way too small. If you're gonna use the proprietary NVIDIA driver, that should be fixed as soon as the driver is activated, if you're sticking with the nv driver (Which I am), then adjust KDE to use the DejaVu Sans font at the size of 10 (The fixed font, should be Monospace at size 10), that should make it look pretty good, at least it does for me at 1280x1024. Also, if you're having font problems, bring up YaST, go to hardware and select Graphics Card and Monitor, and verify that YaST detected your monitor correctly, because using the wrong monitor configuration can have a huge impact on the fonts (I'm speaking from experiences with Kubuntu).

hellonorman wrote:2. My second sound card doesn't get loaded at boot.

Try opening up YaST, go to hardware and enter the sound card configuration, try removing your sound card, reboot, and then add it again, that might fix the problem.

By the way, hellonorman, here's a few tips for ya. The thing that made SUSE 10.1's package management so crappy, was the introduction of the ZENworks Management Daemon, or ZMD, which was a HUGE change to the package management system. ZMD still does not work correct. Luckily, in 10.2, if you're using KDE you can be without ZMD. Here's how you would take it off your system:

First of all, exit whatever updater applet you may have running in the system tray (It looks sort of like a globe with some stuff around it), so right click on it and select Quit, then we gotta disable zmd (We need to be root for all of the following):

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rczmd stop

Then we throw it out:

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rpm -e libzypp-zmd-backend zmd rug zen-updater
rm -rf /var/lib/zmd

Now you need to make sure that "zypper" and "opensuse-updater" are installed:

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rpm -q zypper opensuse-updater

The output should look like this:

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zypper-0.6.15-0.1
opensuse-updater-0.4-31

Congratulations! You've freed your system of the absolute sh!t that is Novell's ZMD.

Log out of KDE and log back in, if a new icon (Looks like a blue ball with a green arrow, when it's not checking for new updates and none are available) doesn't show up, pop into the menu select the Applications tab, go to System --> Desktop Applet, and select openSUSE Updater Applet. This updater does not use ZMD, and integrates much better into KDE.

You also have a cool commandline tool for package management called zypper, since I also have a few tips for you regarding packages, I can show you how to use it.

Open up a terminal and make yourself root, the try typing in:

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zypper sl

That will list the current repositories added, I'd recommend removing all of 'em if you added them when using ZMD, just to clean everything out. If you look at the beginning of each line representing a repo, you can see that they all have numbers, so just do like:

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zypper sd x

X being the numer, it's easiest to start with the highest number and go down.

Now we gotta add a few repositories, I have poked around the US mirror sites, and found a set of repos I think are good, the following are the commands you would use to add them using zypper:

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zypper sa --type YaST --no-refresh ftp://mirror.colorado.edu/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss oss
zypper sa --type YaST --no-refresh ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/non-oss non-oss
zypper sa --type YUM ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/suse/update/10.2 update
zypper sa --type YUM http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2 nvidia
zypper sa --type YUM http://madwifi.org/suse/10.2 madwifi
zypper sa --type YUM ftp://ftp.skynet.be/pub/suser-guru/rpm/10.2/RPMS guru
zypper sa --type YUM ftp://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.2 packman

The first one can take a long time to add, but it's also a really big-ass one, containing the majority of everything. As a free software kind of guy, I'm not gonna endorse use of the non-oss, nvidia or madwifi repos, they are only mentioned for informational purposes, should you choose to use them, that is your choice. The last two repos are located in Belgium, and contain a lot of stuff SUSE can't include because they'd be sued for patent violation if they did, so have a blast with those! The guru contains a lot of neat KDE themes and window decorations along with all sorts of other goodies. The Packman repo has a whole sh!tload of multimedia stuff (Install libxine1 and kaffeine to fix the multimedia playback).

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 8:20 am**

Tsuroerusu wrote:For the first time since I started using Linux, I'm gonna take a little bit of an elitist attitude. I think you're full of sh!t. Yes, SUSE has it's quirks, but you are obviously incapable of using it anyway.

hehe well your right I can't use SUSE and have given up on trying.

Tsuroerusu wrote:How many ******* times do I have to ******* tell you, that they pulled the rt2500 driver out of 10.1 because it was not ******* stable at the time of their code freeze!!!!

Who said this was just on 10.1? I had this happen on 10.0 when I tried installing it on another friends computer using the same wifi card as mine and it wouldn't work, he ended up just reinstalling Windows. Also the rt61 driver installation didn't work on my friends system using SuSE 10.2.

Tsuroerusu wrote:First of all, I completely agree that ZMD is an incoherent pile of vomitted sh!t, any business would be insane to deploy such a pile of goatsh!t.
(Was that good enough?)
However, had you followed the instructions I gave you wouldn't have had those problems with ZMD.

Agreed, and on installing SUSE 10.2 I did follow your instructions and yeah "YaST no longer sucks" (at least thats what my friend said). I think that should be disabled by default though but I think you told me it might in the next version which is great.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Or you could have freaking read some forum posts, done some research or something! If I had never used Gentoo before and then right off the bat complained that I couldn't get something to work because I didn't know to run env-update, then you'd shake your head too.
If I went back and used a 4 year old version of Gentoo and then went out and said that Gentoo was a piece of crap because a 4 year old version was garbage, then you'd shake your head. You're basing your statements on SUSE 10.1, and yes as I have said a billion times already, that release was an absolute disaster, but it's absolutely unfair to not just live with that and get on with life and then judge newer versions, that do work, for what they are, instead of always rehashing a stupid mistake made over a year ago.

Before doing a Gentoo install I did not look into the forums, chat, wiki or anything else and it worked perfectly even though this was a distro I tried after only using Linux for a year. And yes ypu are right I did not know how to use env-update untill months later but it is not required that you update your etc files and if you make changes to them you don't want to as that is how things break. Also I was asked to list my problems that I have had with it in the past, and I did. You should not take such offense. Besides you have already been saying bad things about Gentoo for a long time so I wouldn't care if you say even more because you used a 4 year old version.

Tsuroerusu wrote:
CptnObvious999 wrote:*me waits for T to make some bad 'GCC screensaver' joke*
Or just mention the absolutely terrible QA Gentoo employs. And WTF is up with not ever having a solid, frozen distro that you can actually rely on, and not have to update freaking glibc or udev, only to find out that after you ran etc-update, it hosed your system.

First of all it has been very very rare that I break my system. It is clear that maybe you do not know how to use etc-update and you are just doing a update all which is not smart. People who do not know how to use etc-update should not use it (oh and for the record I do not like etc-update but dispatch-conf is much better). Gentoo allows you to be as bleeding edge as you want but you don't have to be, there is a stable branch you know.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:12 am**

CptnObvious999 wrote: First of all it has been very very rare that I break my system. It is clear that maybe you do not know how to use etc-update and you are just doing a update all which is not smart. People who do not know how to use etc-update should not use it (oh and for the record I do not like etc-update but dispatch-conf is much better). Gentoo allows you to be as bleeding edge as you want but you don't have to be, there is a stable branch you know.

Not to start Gentoo bashing, but the Gentoo devs have always been quick to throw half-implemented, half-tested features into the stable tree. They were one of the first distros to jump on the 2.6 kernel series, and the modular Xorg 7.0, which caused lots of havoc for people running a branch that is supposed to be stable and well tested. I have to side with Tsuroerusu, in that Gentoo really needs to make a RELEASE, and SUPPORT IT with security patches. One of my biggest gripes with Gentoo is that I can't just install it and forget about it. I have to keep upgrading core system components again and again, or my system will start to fall apart. Oh yeah, and they really need to get a better installer. You know, one that actually works and doesn't crash? Anyway, enough ranting.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:18 am**

Yeah, I'm going to have to jump into the fray on Gentoo's defense.

I have not seen this lack of Q&A that you guys speak of. I have been using Ubuntu lately, but I've already had some minor breakage a couple of times, and just yesterday I discovered that when I upgraded without reading the forum (bad news, of course) the kernel package is messed up. Given the amount of instructions you had to include to get OpenSuse to work correctly and how much reading it most likely takes to gain that sort of knowledge, I fail to see how learning to use Gentoo's portage system and dispatch-conf are really too much to ask if you want to give it a serious try. Particularly with the amount of control and flexibility you gain from learning these things. Then I'll never let anyone forget that Gentoo is a shining example of great documentation and great forums.

A real problem one might have with Gentoo is that if you wait too long to upgrade you'll probably have to deal with some nasty issues, and big changes like the move to modular X might cause problems, though I didn't have any issues because of the great docs. (By the way, you had to make the conscious decision to move to Modular Xorg, and I waited a while, and had no problems.) Other than that, they go through at least a month of testing before a package is released. Yeah, gentoo moves really fast, so it's best to find a middle ground between upgade-itis and not updating your box for a year. If you want a slow-moving, stable distro, there's already Debian and Slack. If you know exactly what you want on your system and want a lot of control, and realize that it's going to take regular maintenance and some work to keep it that way, then Gentoo might be for you.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:18 am**

Wally Balljacker wrote:One of my biggest gripes with Gentoo is that I can't just install it and forget about it. I have to keep upgrading core system components again and again, or my system will start to fall apart. Oh yeah, and they really need to get a better installer.

The price of being a bleeding edge distro. My feelings on Arch are somewhat similar. I really like what they're doing but the amount of breakages is a little disheartening. For most of my systems I want a stable machine that has packages that are fairly new.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:31 am**

Patrick wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote:One of my biggest gripes with Gentoo is that I can't just install it and forget about it. I have to keep upgrading core system components again and again, or my system will start to fall apart. Oh yeah, and they really need to get a better installer.
The price of being a bleeding edge distro. My feelings on Arch are somewhat similar. I really like what they're doing but the amount of breakages is a little disheartening. For most of my systems I want a stable machine that has packages that are fairly new.

Oh come, now. What you (and the rest of us) really want is a distro that has the absolute latest packages, is preposterously customizable, rock-solid stable and more beautiful than all the Victoria's Secret models combined. With a cherry on top.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend gentoo for the "set it and forget it" crowd. Debian and Slackware? Yeah, probably so.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:36 am**

Speaking of this sort of package manager thing, I don't really understand conary, but do we have hope for the software appliance approach that rPath is taking for upgrades?

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:41 am**

Vogateer wrote:
Patrick wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote:One of my biggest gripes with Gentoo is that I can't just install it and forget about it. I have to keep upgrading core system components again and again, or my system will start to fall apart. Oh yeah, and they really need to get a better installer.
The price of being a bleeding edge distro. My feelings on Arch are somewhat similar. I really like what they're doing but the amount of breakages is a little disheartening. For most of my systems I want a stable machine that has packages that are fairly new.
Oh come, now. What you (and the rest of us) really want is a distro that has the absolute latest packages, is preposterously customizable, rock-solid stable and more beautiful than all the Victoria's Secret models combined. With a cherry on top.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend gentoo for the "set it and forget it" crowd. Debian and Slackware? Yeah, probably so.

I don't really want a distro that forces bleeding edge packages on me, but I like having the ability to compile them on my leisure, which is what makes Slackware so great. Slackware is well-tested and stable, but it's also a breeze to install or compile brand new kernels and software.

Distro wars are fun.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 11:04 am**

I still love Gentoo, but I'm reaching that point that so many others have, where bleeding edge features and customization just aren't worth the time it takes to maintain it all. It's not that I believe Gentoo took a ton of time to maintain, but the ideals of Slackware, Debian, and Ubuntu are becoming much more appealing.

For teaching me about linux and the command line, I owe Gentoo a lot, but now I feel that if I want to learn more, I'm going to have to try Linux-From-Scratch, and for my desktop I'll pretty much stick with a relatively stable distro that will get around to the newer programs within a year. The desire to try everything all at once has left me, and now I just want a stable platform to work on and spend more time learning about python and trying to teach myself how to make proper web pages. That book by Andy Clarke is really great. He's not a linux guy, but he's really big on standards, and that's the kind of guy I can support. Designers do seem to love their Macs, not that I blame them; when you appreciate beauty and design, I think the aesthetics of Apple's hardware is appealing.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 11:30 am**

Since this conversation has already careened way off the rails, I'll add my 2 cents. Most folks know I'm an Arch lover - once I found it I knew it was what I wanted from a distro. I have had numerous problems with Arch since I've started using it, but I've also had the same system up and running for some time w/o the need to reinstall. There are almost always tradeoffs when you choose a distro, and I feel like the ones I make to run Arch are well worth the benefits. I *have* gotten pissed off and looked around for alternatives on a few occasions, but I've never strayed far or for long.

That being said, using Arch on my lappy is a) more work than I really want to put into "Linux on a Lappy" and b) puts me in a situation where I have breakage on both of my "production" machines if there is breakage in Arch. Currently I run Kubuntu on my lappy, and while the acpi support is second to none, I really don't enjoy using it.

I highly recommend Frugalware for anyone who wants a "stable Arch." I've been running it for a while now (the -current branch, actually) and love it. They have a -stable branch, and a surprisingly large selection of packages. They have essentially taken pieces of slackware and pacman, polished it up (well, KDE at least), and made themselves a very nice distro.

Posted: **Fri Feb 09, 2007 11:35 am**

I think Snarkout has a good point. The choice we have with linux means we can choose to use two different distros on two machines and achieve a sort of "diversification" that you look for in an investment portfolio, particularly if you're willing to learn the ins and outs of a couple of different package managers.

thelinuxlink.net

A Few OpenSuse 10.2 Questions

A Few OpenSuse 10.2 Questions