Okay, after a period of linuxless computing at home due to the loss of the HDD which it resides on, I'm back again to being able to mess around with linux. Especially that now they have a 3D window manager. Compiz, Beryl, and now the merged version called Compiz-Fusion.
So, since I was hooked to OpenSuSE 10.2 before the disaster, I thought I'd just see what OpenSuSE 10.3 can do now, since it's got compiz-fusion and most softwares are readily available through YaST (that's the tool which handles the system configuration of OpenSuSE). And me, being a cheapskate, didn't want to get a DVD-RW drive and so ended up downloading just the bare minimum of a single mini CD.
OpenSuSE 10.3 (First Attempt)
Managed to download the ISO, double checked it with the MD5SUM, managed to burn it to my CD-RW, as usual, I'm a cheapskate, and I don't want to generate too much rubbish just by burning another CD-R. Rebooted the PC got it all nicely loaded and then got it to do a check on the media, ... and found that it's corrupted somehow. :(. So I got back to burning it again on different CD-RW and got the same problem again. So I mounted the ISO this time instead and check the MD5SUM of all the rpms on the ISO. And it checked out OK. So got the CD-RW loaded and did the same thing, lo and behold, I'm getting checksum failures. So I tried to burn it again, and this time the failures are on different rpms. So I guess my CD-RW is kaput.
Sabayon Linux 3.4
Okay, let's leave OpenSuSE aside for the time being go go for Sabayon instead. Went the www.distrowatch.com and found it's actually climbing up the chart of page hits ranking. It's derived from Gentoo and is suppose to work almost out of the box, err.... in my case would be out of the ISO into the CD, so it's out of the CD :D. Downloaded the ISO, md5sum it, burned it and tried installing it. Hey it works and without any corruption on the burned CD.
Got it all installed without a hitch and got it up and working, sweet! :D Got myself a nice red motif desktop. I didn't even need to be bothered about mp3 drivers, etc. Okay, almost not bothered, since I've only downloaded the mini version (single CD) so I've gotta start downloading other stuff their servers. Since it's basically derived from Gentoo, the package management is also like Gentoo's using ebuild, emerge, unmerge commands. It's got a nice tool call Portato, which is suppose to be what Portage is to Gentoo.
Now here's the "not for the faint hearted" portion. Since it's derived from Gentoo it means that when you try to install additional programs, it's actually the source code that you download and then the tool will then compile that source code for your machine. So do expect this to take much longer than installing programs in deb or rpm based distros. Sabayon, like Gentoo, deals with source tar balls. And it seem that in order to make the mini edition possible, there are a lot of programs and most source code missing. Programs like vi and man, could not be found on the installed system, it has to be downloaded and installed with Portato.
Here's the happy part, you'll be sure that the binaries are actually all optimized for your processor, because normally in most deb or rpm distros they'd compile it against a standard i586. Some of these distros even compiled their binary for i386. So you can see how unoptimized those binaries are. On top of this, the installation disk of Sabayon has this nice little option to install the Boot Loader only, but it's a little lame as it does not allow you to specify the image to load especially if you have another Linux distro installed on the same box.
So here I was happily Portato'ing' away, and one of my installs actually maimed Portato itself. Me being not so familiar with Gentoo, temporarily gave up at this stage. So I've decided to give it a go with OpenSuSE again.
Burning ISO to CD-RW with K3B
This time instead of burning the ISO with Nero (as that came with the CD burner I got), I used k3b instead. It's a CD, DVD buring tool from KDE. Yippie!! Burned it, checked the md5sum on all those rpms on the disk and it all came out OK. So now I'm wondering whether Nero is as good as people say it is.
OpenSuSE 10.3 (Second Attempt)
This time during installation, I've selected to get updates from the openSuSE repository servers as yet and wan to get the installation done first. It all installed without a problem, except that there is one thing that I didn't quite like this time. There wasn't an option to install the Boot Manager during the installation this time. Now it's up to you to go through YaST to the Boot Loader configuration and install it there.
Mp3 on OpenSuSE is a real pain though, since it practically a patented codec and xmms is no longer around in their repository either and it seems that their default audio player now is Amarok which even after manually installing LAME (which stands for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder), Amarok still won't be able to play mp3s. So I ended up downloading RealPlayer instead, which was available on the OpenSuSE repositories. Sad thing is that it doesn't have the nice UI that one would see on Windows, and I don't see a playlist on it either.
One nice feature that's been added in which I like is their 'One-click Install'. Basically it's their *.ymp files which tells YaST what to install. So the user would just click on the *.ymp file which would run YaST, which you'll need to enter root's password, and your package is installed.
For those who have Nvidia cards, Nvidia actually has a OpenSuSE repository set on their ftp server which make installation of their proprietory driver much more simpler.
So, since I was hooked to OpenSuSE 10.2 before the disaster, I thought I'd just see what OpenSuSE 10.3 can do now, since it's got compiz-fusion and most softwares are readily available through YaST (that's the tool which handles the system configuration of OpenSuSE). And me, being a cheapskate, didn't want to get a DVD-RW drive and so ended up downloading just the bare minimum of a single mini CD.
OpenSuSE 10.3 (First Attempt)Managed to download the ISO, double checked it with the MD5SUM, managed to burn it to my CD-RW, as usual, I'm a cheapskate, and I don't want to generate too much rubbish just by burning another CD-R. Rebooted the PC got it all nicely loaded and then got it to do a check on the media, ... and found that it's corrupted somehow. :(. So I got back to burning it again on different CD-RW and got the same problem again. So I mounted the ISO this time instead and check the MD5SUM of all the rpms on the ISO. And it checked out OK. So got the CD-RW loaded and did the same thing, lo and behold, I'm getting checksum failures. So I tried to burn it again, and this time the failures are on different rpms. So I guess my CD-RW is kaput.
Sabayon Linux 3.4Okay, let's leave OpenSuSE aside for the time being go go for Sabayon instead. Went the www.distrowatch.com and found it's actually climbing up the chart of page hits ranking. It's derived from Gentoo and is suppose to work almost out of the box, err.... in my case would be out of the ISO into the CD, so it's out of the CD :D. Downloaded the ISO, md5sum it, burned it and tried installing it. Hey it works and without any corruption on the burned CD.
Got it all installed without a hitch and got it up and working, sweet! :D Got myself a nice red motif desktop. I didn't even need to be bothered about mp3 drivers, etc. Okay, almost not bothered, since I've only downloaded the mini version (single CD) so I've gotta start downloading other stuff their servers. Since it's basically derived from Gentoo, the package management is also like Gentoo's using ebuild, emerge, unmerge commands. It's got a nice tool call Portato, which is suppose to be what Portage is to Gentoo.
Now here's the "not for the faint hearted" portion. Since it's derived from Gentoo it means that when you try to install additional programs, it's actually the source code that you download and then the tool will then compile that source code for your machine. So do expect this to take much longer than installing programs in deb or rpm based distros. Sabayon, like Gentoo, deals with source tar balls. And it seem that in order to make the mini edition possible, there are a lot of programs and most source code missing. Programs like vi and man, could not be found on the installed system, it has to be downloaded and installed with Portato.
Here's the happy part, you'll be sure that the binaries are actually all optimized for your processor, because normally in most deb or rpm distros they'd compile it against a standard i586. Some of these distros even compiled their binary for i386. So you can see how unoptimized those binaries are. On top of this, the installation disk of Sabayon has this nice little option to install the Boot Loader only, but it's a little lame as it does not allow you to specify the image to load especially if you have another Linux distro installed on the same box.
So here I was happily Portato'ing' away, and one of my installs actually maimed Portato itself. Me being not so familiar with Gentoo, temporarily gave up at this stage. So I've decided to give it a go with OpenSuSE again.
Burning ISO to CD-RW with K3B
This time instead of burning the ISO with Nero (as that came with the CD burner I got), I used k3b instead. It's a CD, DVD buring tool from KDE. Yippie!! Burned it, checked the md5sum on all those rpms on the disk and it all came out OK. So now I'm wondering whether Nero is as good as people say it is.
OpenSuSE 10.3 (Second Attempt)This time during installation, I've selected to get updates from the openSuSE repository servers as yet and wan to get the installation done first. It all installed without a problem, except that there is one thing that I didn't quite like this time. There wasn't an option to install the Boot Manager during the installation this time. Now it's up to you to go through YaST to the Boot Loader configuration and install it there.
Mp3 on OpenSuSE is a real pain though, since it practically a patented codec and xmms is no longer around in their repository either and it seems that their default audio player now is Amarok which even after manually installing LAME (which stands for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder), Amarok still won't be able to play mp3s. So I ended up downloading RealPlayer instead, which was available on the OpenSuSE repositories. Sad thing is that it doesn't have the nice UI that one would see on Windows, and I don't see a playlist on it either.
One nice feature that's been added in which I like is their 'One-click Install'. Basically it's their *.ymp files which tells YaST what to install. So the user would just click on the *.ymp file which would run YaST, which you'll need to enter root's password, and your package is installed.
For those who have Nvidia cards, Nvidia actually has a OpenSuSE repository set on their ftp server which make installation of their proprietory driver much more simpler.
