Fair warning, this is going to be a long post.
So, Microsoft or one of the other software giants makes you want to pull your hair out with their arbitrary actions? That’s what happened to me.
First, it’s probably fair to tell you that I’ve never been a PC guy. I lamented the death of CP/M and PIP. Nothing like PIP’ing some files. I couldn’t bring myself to touch a pre-Darwin Mac. I drooled over the way-too-expensive NeXt machines. In the end reality set in — I gritted my teeth and used MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2K, and finally XP. Sure, I messed around with early releases of Redhat, but found it to be, well, quite unsatisfactory.
My main machine these days is a G4 Powerbook. I love being able to pop open the terminal and do things that you just can’t do on a PC (on Windows, anyway). Then came the run ins I wrote about in my last post. I guess I should tell you that I have a thing about bullies, it borders on being pathological. I see someone being bullied and I usually work my way into the conflict just so I can get a clean shot. Well, needless to say, being extorted by these guys really gets my blood boiling.
So, that aside, how did I end up choosing SUSE? To tell the truth, it wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to be up and running with minimal installation trauma. The first box I installed on was a Compaq Proliant DL360 1U server. My first choice was FreeBSD. FreeBSD didn’t like the hardware configuration one little bit. I couldn’t get it past the video card and ethernet card setups. I had five tabs open in Firefox with Google search results. In a side note, the box had a “Lights Out Remote Admin” card installed. I ended up having to pull it completely. Rodger the Dodger is in possession of it and is going to try getting it going on one of his boxes.
FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu Server (in that order) all failed to install. Still the same issue with the video and ethernet hardware. It didn’t seem to matter what config I tried. I was near wits end when The Dodger suggested SUSE 10.1, so I pop open Bittorrent and download the installation media, we pop in disk one, voila, it just works.
Configuring from there wasn’t too bad. /sbin not being in the path was default, I thought that was a bit odd as I couldn’t ifconfig from the get go. Easily overcome with the export PATH=$PATH:/sbin, but I really think that should be part of the base install. Network config drawing DHCP didn’t go so smoothly. It got the mask wrong for some reason (the ethernet card rearing its head again I suppose). I disabled DHCP and set up the network address statically.
YaST (the SUSE package manager) didn’t seem to want to install from any media other than the CD’s (even with the option disabled and a valid HTTP source selected, I burned Google up on this one to no avail). I installed GCC from the CD. I opened a port for SSH (don’t worry, the port ain’t open to the public) and popped it into the server rack. From there I quickly tired of getting up to swap CD’s, so I worked around it by installing apt-get to bring in Nmap, Ruby, Ruby Gems, and whois.
Compiling lighttpd was no sweat, configuring it (my first time with lighttpd) is another story. I’ll post it when it actually works like I want it to. So the server is up and running.
Since the server is running SUSE 10.1, I decided it would be the best desktop replacement for Win2K at home. This install also was no sweat. The only hangup being the driver for USB wireless, a Belkin 6050. I downloaded and installed a driver (firmware-1.3-14.noarch.rpm) I saw in an article specifically mentioning the Belkin 6050, but it didn’t work. I had also accidentally downloaded a different version (firmware-1.3-1fc3.noarch.rpm) so I figured, what the heck? It actually worked, although upon disconnecting the hard-wired connection and restarting network services I couldn’t get outside the local network. I popped open a terminal and ran ifconfig. It still pointed to the default gateway for the ethernet card (I have a seperate one for hardwire). I disabled the ethernet card and restarted network services and it found the correct default gateway. BTW, you can restart network services on the command line with “sudo /etc/init.d/network restart”. It’s likely I could have just re-ordered the connections in Yast, moving the wifi up a notch, but the ethernet card won’t get used in this particular installation, so I just left it disabled.
So, is SUSE 10.1 Linux ready for mainstream use? Sans the wireless bit, I think it is. I still think the default path should include /sbin to bring basic diagnostic tools in on installation. GCC? I would put it in there too. For Yast, the jury is still out. I think the media selection needs a bit of work, although it worked much better on the desktop than on the server.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still use my Powerbook as the main machine at home (and the Mini will still be the Home Entertainment Center), but I no longer groan as I boot up the PC to do some work.
