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Just Passing Through

Stuff not fit to publish elsewhere

Posts tagged with "suse"

Back to openSUSE 11.2

Sunday, 15. November 2009, 02:13:36

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Apparently my hardware is just a little too new for Ubuntu and friends. I never could get it talk to my DVD-R. Since burning CDs and DVDs are critical to my volunteer work, that means I had to find something else. SUSE had released the full version of 11.2, so I gave it a try.

So far, it's working quite nicely. I'll let you know if anything bothers me too much.

Update: I won't go into gory details, but I had to fix a few things.

  • sound -- I had to tell ALSA the hardware (Intel HDA) was configured by Dell using the Realtek ALC888 codec so it could operate the various sound ports properly.
  • aisleriot -- GNOME project folks decided to drop the older card faces and forced everyone to accept this ugly, unreadable "cool" looking design. I hunted down the graphical source file (bonded.svg) for the original card set and fixed that.
  • screensaver -- The GNOME screensaver has been broken for a long time, and it seems the same on every Linux distro. It tries to put desktop machines into suspend mode, and most will not recover without rebooting. I cut it off and changed the controls to run the original Xscreensaver, since it works better and has better options.

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It's Karmic Koala, After All

Sunday, 1. November 2009, 03:51:46

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On my Inspiron 545 MT, I never got CentOS 5 to recognize the harddrives. I never got Debian Lenny to recognize the ethernet port. I never got openSUSE 11.1 or 11.2 to behave properly. Lots and lots of little glitches which probably won't ever be fixed. I had trouble with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope -- the entire I/O would lock up randomly while typing. It usually did this while I was writing something important and I would lose my work having to reboot.

So I decided it wouldn't hurt to try Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10). Aside from everything working quite well, as you would expect, there were a couple of small issues. For now, I can't get the display to power down after the idle time I set. The other problem was audio: The sound quality was just a bit off, and when I plugged in the headphones, the main speakers didn't cut off. I had that in openSUSE, too, but I never could find instructions from them. There was a diagnostic provided by the Ubuntu community, and I was able to fix the audio.

I still prefer CentOS, but it until 6.0 comes out in the spring, I have no hope there. I can tolerate Ubuntu and Debian, but SUSE has had too many chances and failed me. Novell has really messed it up, and it won't ever recover, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, as I understand it, 9.10 is just one release away from an "LTS" release (Long Term Support) which means that release will be good for three years. I really do hate jumping from one Linux to the next, but sometimes you have to work at it. Maybe I won't have any lock-ups, and I'm still working on fixing the screensaver/power-down bug.

Update: Fixed the screensaver issue. Turn off the Gnome Screensaver app, and install the old Xscreensaver. It works, and offers more options for power management on the display.

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Geek Talk: Linux on Mac Hardware

Tuesday, 30. September 2008, 15:21:19

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Having become frustrated in my work flow, I am about to try the ultimate Mac Taboo: installing Linux on it.

There are several distributions of Linux which offer a version for Mac hardware, usually referred to as "PPC" -- the CPU on an older Mac is quite different from what you find in most PCs. It's called the Power Processor, made by IBM. Without getting down to the nitty-gritty details, the main advantage is the basic design is a little more stable, and a good bit more secure. Software written to run on a PPC has slightly fewer bugs and security holes because it's handles things differently. Certain types of coding errors aren't possible. There's no real measure to provide concrete proof of this, but folks who write software code generally agree it works out that way.

At any rate, I've settled on the openSUSE version of PPC Linux for now. As I must head out for a busy day shortly, I'll wait until I come home before trying it. I want to give myself some time. Just in case, I've downloaded the latest Mac Leopard updates, burned to a CD, and backed up my important files.

Perhaps I'll be posting from my "new" PPC SUSE box later this evening.

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Typical Stupidity

Friday, 23. May 2008, 03:33:13

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My stupidity.

I was having serious trouble with my FreeBSD installation. I couldn't use any of my GNUPG keys. I couldn't encrypt of decrypt, and my email extensions refused to recognize I even had a key.

So in desperation I switched back to SUSE. Well, fine. I managed to move all my important files and configurations... except one. I left out my email settings. I lost all my email from the past few months.

Yep, stupidity.

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SUSE to You

Saturday, 1. March 2008, 16:49:02

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The server was assembled last night. There were a few tense moments because the BIOS had to be reset. Problem was, using the standard reset jumper didn't work. We had to remove the CMOS battery for a few minutes before it worked. Finally, after rebooting to the BIOS twice more, it began to behave properly.

I chose to give openSUSE x64 first shot. I understood from my research the chipset was fully supported. Things did indeed go as expected. However, we were using my brother's peripherals, so the configuration for X was a little rough around the edges. That's to be expected.

The one biggest gotcha was knowing which nVidia package to use with 64-bit: nvidiaG01. There's nothing during the installation, etc. which indicates this. Once I figured that out, the acceleration for the GeForce 6100 graphics chip worked fine. However, SaX misread the monitor specs, so I had to manually set the screen size to get a properly balanced DPI at 103x103. Now I'm looking at the Net via a 1600x1200 display, and glxgears runs about 1930fpm.

I would note something significant: While a dual-core processor usually doesnt' make any difference, it does when you try to do two things at once. I can run YaST in one window and still run heavy applications in another, and there's no lag. I'm truly blessed the Lord made this hardware available to me.

Now, if we could just get spellchecking in Opera to work....

Update: Okay, the only quick fix guaranteed to work is the UserJS script you can find here and follow the instructions in this video. However, what they don't tell you is you have to allow cookies from yet another site to make it work. Still, it gets me there.

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SUSE Gets First Shot

Friday, 29. February 2008, 02:12:52

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I've got the parts for my server. I'll be enlisting my brother's experienced help assembling the thing. It's not a super box, because the parts are all low-end, but that's still a dual-core AMD64 system. From what I can discern, openSUSE 10.3 should support the nForce 405 chipset on the the little micro-ATX board. I'll give that a shot first. If it works, that's good enough. If not, sadly I'll be stuck with some version of Windows.

Let's pray it works. I don't care about all that multimedia stuff. I won't even have speakers for a few weeks until my new job starts paying off. I'm not much on Flash videos, so I won't miss that -- it won't be worth the hassle of running any 32-bit apps. This will be my primary storage and Net machine, and where I'll continue most of my writing. It will also be our household LAN server.

I'm downloading the ISO image right now.

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