[ILUG] Suse 7.3 - Final Thought

[Stephane Dudzinski]

Hello all,

After some well deserved holidays, 1 week ago and a couple of extra
nights to work around the beast, i deliver today my final thought about
Suse 7.3 Pro.

My last message was a complaint filled in with anger against Suse's Lilo
boot manager which (i thought) was delivered from Mars but certainly not
tested on earth.

I took the same system again (AMD 1.4Ghz with 36GB drive all SCSI) but
wiped out Redhat 7.2 this time and allowed lilo to install on /dev/sda
(MBR). I took nearly the same partitioning:

/dev/sda1	/boot (ext2)
/dev/sda2	vfat partition
/dev/sda5	---Extended---
/dev/sda6	/ (ext3)
/dev/sda7	Swap
/dev/sda8	ext3 data1
/dev/sda9	ext3 data2
/dev/sda10	reiserfs

I went for a full install but Games, manuals and StarOffice resulting in
a 7.5GB install proposition which i accepted. 

Thanks to Rik Dunphy, i knew what to expect by installing / as ext3 and
it went right into it http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/ext3_rootfs_73.html
explains it all. Having installed an ext3 / partition will stuck the
system if you don't replace the mk_initrd script, which i did, the
system then started happily.

This time, while upgrading the kernel to 2.4.17, i've decided to leave
Suse more options from its 2.4.10-Suse .config file. I then made
oldconfig and removed some extra uneeded modules. Compilation went fine.
Yast2 tested it succesfully proposing to set it as default.

Upon restart, i could detect my sound card by installing the latest
alsa, detect my scanner by leaving Yast2 dealing with modules and
upgraded my system to evolution 1.0.2 (0.12 delivered) by installing a
couple of Ximian packages (just what's needed for Evolution).

At the end, i got squid running in 1 minute, Mozilla upgraded to 0.9.8,
galeon to 1.0.3, and installed straight the latest OpenOffice (641c).
Upgraded to Nvidia closed-source but 3D killer drivers.

I am quite happy to say that this distro can be a real pleasure as long
as you know where to look and what to fix ;)

Now, some problems remain. Kppp will not put its nameserver line in
/etc/resolv.conf for some strange reason even though i put it myself.
Could it be because i run kppp as a normal user ? (redhat's 7.2 was
asking for root privileges). Also, mplayer won't play fullscreen.
Version of XFree is 4.1.0 with 2313 drivers (2314 kernel drivers). Any
other app will go fullscreen but mplayer (0.60) which was compiled the
same on debian and working.

This is all for the questions. Any input on the last paragraph might
make me very happy with the green lizard.

Good day to you all.
Steph

-- 
______________________________________________
"Linux philosophy: Do it Yourself" L. Torvalds
Stephane Dudzinski       Systems Administrator
a n t e f a c t o            t: +353 1 8586009
www.antefacto.com            f: +353 1 8586014