openSUSE 10.2 GA / Linux Mint 2.0

This is another 'stream of events' or perhaps 'stream of lack of consciousness' postings, this one for last Geekend,(and my last post this calendar year). This adventure occurred on the 9th and 10th of December, 2006.

I started out to get ready for testing openSUSE 10.2 as an enterprise Linux desktop. Then, I realized that was just not the right direction for openSUSE : jumping ahead, if you want an Enterprise Linux desktop, unless you are a computer shop stocked with computer savants, you probably don't want what openSUSE is: a rawish, unsupported version of Linux that is intended as a technology exploration and in some way an Alpha/Beta level proving grounds for future tech for the enterprise version of the product.

In fact, most of my recent posts have taken me down that bunny trail of looking at versions of Linux for use as an enterprise Linux desktop that only an experienced Linux hand would want to use. That is not to say there is not value in looking at things like Fedora Core or openSUSE: they are windows into the future of their parent Distros. Someone in the enterprise desktop support team should have them spinning so they know what is coming. The whole SLAB interface to Gnome being promulgated by SUSE is a good example of that: you would really want some time to re-write your support doc and do new screen captures if you knew you were about to migrate your users from the Gnome classic interface to SLAB.

Other than my MacBook, I live on an IBM X30 running Linux. I love the little computer, but I disliked openSUSE on it. It had been running Ubuntu 6.10 before, which meant tons of things "just worked" (tm), from a mobile laptop hardware point of view. Wireless for example. And the ThinkPad buttons. Sure, I could get all that to work under openSUSE too. Eventually.

I decided at the end of it to try a version of Ubuntu 6.10 called Linux Mint 2.0. Mint is supposed to take all the goodness of Ubuntu, and make using it as an everyday desktop/laptop even easier, by pre-installing things like Flash and Java. Really: I know Java is not GPL yet and all, but the pain "they" (the Linux distros) put us through to get it working.... Sun can't get that open sourced fast enough to suite me. I am pretty sure I am not alone on that.

Saturday: openSUSE 10.2 GA

My early testing in VM's with Beta 1 and Beta 2 "made" me decide to spend the Geekend installing the GA version of openSUSE 10.2 on my personal IBM X30, to prepare it for testing in the office on Monday. There was nothing too weird about the install, other than the partitioning software said it could not grok the partition table of the hard drive, and so was not going to be able to do things like resize the partitions. That is odd, because it understood them enough to pick hda1 as NTFS and mount it as windows, hda2 as /, hda3 as swap. But it would not let me do hda4 as home. weird. I'll fix the fstab after its booted, but that means I'll be mounting my /home partition over the installers /home directory, and having to manual change all the file ownership in my real home directory. OK for me, but I am thinking this is not so not for first time installers. But then, if there is a pre-existing Linux, one is sort of by definition not a first time installer. This hard drive has seen about 10 or more versions of Linux.

Background information and the Install process

Before I get into how well everything went on the install, it is worth knowing what my expectations are and why.

First up: I installed this on my personal IBM X30. I used the DVD and extras CD I downloaded with Transmission (A bittorrent client) on my MacBook, and I also burnt there. I let the Mac diskutil program verify the burn as well, which is its default behavior.

The IBM X30 is a frankencomputer, as are so many computers I own. It started life as a mix of about 5 systems and some superglue. Really. It ran for six or so months, then broke. A couple more donor systems off eBay were mixed in, and a few new parts for good measure. The new parts are recently a memory stick and an external battery with increases my undocked runtime to about six hours. The newish hard drive is an 80 GB Samsung which was a mid-life upgrade to my old eMachines 5312. It has a 1.2 Ghz Pentium Mobile processor (pre Pentium M vintage: has two speeds: 798 Mhz, and 1.2 Ghz). The RAM chips are a 512 and a 256, so obviously memory is not interleaved. They are PC133: Slow by today's standards. it may seem like a lot of trouble, but I can't afford a new X series. Not an put a kid through University. truth be told, I like taking IBM / Lenovo laptop computers apart. They are built so nicely they are a pleasure to work with. There are other brands I have taken apart and run screaming rather than putting them back together. But I digress.

For all that hardware munging, when the X30 was running Ubuntu 6.10 right before this install, it felt crisp, booted in less than minute, and browsed the 'net fairly quickly via its D-link DWL-G630, Atheros chipped, Wifi card. That basic feeling of speed will be the benchmark for me of how well openSUSE is running.

Would an Enterprise really be using hardware of this vintage? Not this particular ones heredity obviously, but this general specification? Sure: One reason Linux would be used is to keep older hardware alive and useful beyond the normal three to five years a desktop normally lives. Many parts of this X30 used to be in the enterprise, if the auction stickers on the various parts are to be believed.

The DVD booted and took just over one hour to install everything I selected. I selected tons of stuff: in part because I picked both Gnome and KDE desktops to be installed.

I really really am going to try and put aside my dislike of the SLAB/Gnome look and feel for this. My question with this is only whether or not this is a viable Enterprise desktop. Not if I like SLAB. I am fairly certain in fact that most anyone coming from an MS Windows desktop will love SLAB. Or at least like it. And I would be a bit disingenuous after writing "Which GUI " to not acknowledge a GUI preference when I have one. And I'll be further honest about why I think I don't like SLAB. While it is not really a rip-off of MS Windows XP's user interface, it does for some reason feel like it is. Poke at it for a bit, and you realize if is better, and more flexible in many ways, but the feeling remains.

I don't live in an MS Windows world for the most part. I run it when I need to at the office of course, but other than that it is pretty much gone from my life. My wife has moved over to using a MacBook now, so our last MS Windows user at home is gone. Only Linux and Mac's remain there. So having a GUI version of a Linux desktop manager that kind of looks a bit like XP is mentally jarring in a way. I expect it to *be* MS Windows. And it isn't. I have to change gears and adapt. So, there you have it anyway. Just trying to be honest here. Use this to evaluate anything I may say about openSUSE 10.2 when it is running Gnome.

This brings me to 'Why load KDE"? I have a couple reasons for that:

1. I will be interested to see if KDE is getting full development time, what with SUSE's move to a Gnome default. SUSE doing that has to influence the openSUSE project I would think.

2. I like KDE: It was my favorite desktop interface for years. Oddly, I have maintained for a long time that people migrating from MS Windows would prefer KDE over Gnome in it's pre-SLAB incarnations. But I never found KDE to be jarring to my poor slow mind the way SLAB is for me right now. I can not tell you why.

3. Under FC6, in order to have Evolution work right now (I re-verified this last Friday), I have to run it under KDE. This is utterly backwards of how one would think it would be, since Evolution is the default email client for the Gnome project, but I am fairly sure it has to do with untested-by-the-Fedora-team bits of Evolution Connector.

First Boot

I rebooted after the installed was complete. There were Santa-Penguins on the Boot screen! How cool is that? Then it fsck'ed /dev/hda2 for some reason. Humm: what *has* Ubuntu been up to? This might be nothing: it says the partition went 49710 days without an FSCK, but since it was just formatted by openSUSE, I doubt Ubuntu did anything weird.

We went back into the installer, where it said it was synchronizing with Zenworks. Interesting, because the only network installed is the D-Link Wifi card, which flashed about for a bit. I am not really sure it did anything though: when it next went into network config, the wireless was not displayed. Only the IBM built in NIC. I added the wireless, disabled the built in NIC for now. But that was not the path to full goodness. It could not connect to the Internet to download release notes that way. Clearly the wireless is not working. Another thing to fix post-install....

Really. What are the chances someone would be installing this on a laptop with only a wireless connection these days? Pretty good I would think. Even in the enterprise there are some places that have wireless at the office. You can always tell them: Everyone brings laptops to the meetings, and in those meetings they answer questions like what emails really said in real time. “Look: see, this is what I wrote!”. There must be a Dilbert in there someplace.

The graphics card was correctly detected, and I changed its' defaults only to move it from 16 bits to 24 bits for color depth, and to enable 3D acceleration. I have no idea if this card support 3d. Just trying it. I also enabled Bluetooth here.

Of course, X wouldn't start. Phooey. Log in to root, run yast in curses mode, fix the settings back to the ones the installer picked. That works. Up it to 24 bit color. That works. Must be 3d acceleration not working. Probably not supported on the Intel i830 video card. I admit: I didn't look it up first. I would have, but I knew I could fix it easy enough with Yast. Call me lazy. (Note: After openSUSE was completely installed, I tried via the regular menus to enable 3D again, and got a message saying this card did not support it. The regular system configuration process looks to be a bit smarter than the one at install. They should learn to share knowledge like that better!)

Reboot.

Second Boot

Well, there it is. My X30 booted into SLAB-Gnome. No Network. Wrong FSTAB. But up. Add Gnome Terminal to my favorites because I need a command line! I log out as steve, in as root, add a command line to favorites there, and then in gnome terminal mount /dev/hda5 as /home, cd /home, and chown -R steve steve. Not too hard, but I am pretty sure a new user would have run screaming by now.

Third Boot

Now the system won't boot. Doh. Finger check in the fstab. Really really not in first time user space now. The error message would have one think it is a corrupted file system, not a loose nut at the keyboard. Changed /dev/hda4 to /dev/hda5 for /home and system boots. That is the last time I am going to document pain with openSUSE brought about by it not being a clean install. I think the point is: migration of hardware from other Distros (and probably previous versions if they are too far back) is not for beginners. At least not migration from Ubuntu to openSUSE. I am sure a clean install would have been very different to this point.

Nothing about Distro migration explains this next pain point.

Oh NIC

If you have never watched the “Thin Man” movies, that heading will be an unresolved external reference.

My first generation X30 does not have a built in mini-PCI wireless card. Everything I have for it is PCMCIA. It looks like openSUSE is a bust by default for any Wifi card I have. I can't locate my orinoco-chipped card at the moment. The TI ACX100 chipped DWL-650+ is missing firmware. The Atheros chipped DWL-G630 blinks but does nothing else. The Netgear WG511 V2 just issues error messages. The Apple Airport card just gets an unknown vendor message (no, I didn't expect it to work: was just curious).

At no point in the install did it ask me for the 'Extras' disk. I wonder if the missing Wifi support is there. Using Yast and the 'Add on Product' menu, I had it scan and configure that installation source. Then I went browsing on the disk, picking various packages like 'Opera': most everything was already on! I guess the DVD includes the 'Extras' disk. That was part of the doc I did actually bother to read, and that was not clear to me. It mentioned there were more packages on the DVD, but not what they were. Must be the packages on the 'Extras' disk. That was a waste of time. Still no Wifi card support.

I sat back a sec and thought about what I was trying to do here: If I was looking for whether or not this would work in an Enterprise, how easy it is to install and configure would not be as important as whether once it was configured the average enterprise user would like it. But so far, I have been looking at this from the point of view of the desktop support person trying to get this going. That is not for nothing: if the person installing the software learns to hate it, they will not be enthusiastic about deploying it. That can't be a good thing.

I went to http://madwifi.org/suse and snarfed the bits I needed to get the DWL-G630 going. Google is my friend. With the network going, it is time to look at this project with fresh eyes.

That means later today. It's after 2:00 am now.

Sunday, Geekend day 2

Fresh eyes made me see the folly of my ways. I was asking the wrong questions. openSUSE is not about enterprise anything... yet. If you are an enterprise looking at Linux on the Desktop, you are probably looking for what you can get vendor support on and from. Duh. openSUSE is not that. If you are looking at SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) then openSUSE is a preview of things to come in that space. I have heard that many times before. This experience popped that into focus in a very visceral way.

openSUSE in not an enterprise desktop candidate because is not classically supported in any way: not by central patch management tools like Marimba, not on various hardware stacks: nothing like that. openSUSE is all about what is to come, and really only about the future of SLED on the Open Source side. Nothing binary or not otherwise not open source included. Only those things that have been 'opened' are here. SLED will include much of the non-open-source stuff. Thus a great deal of my frustration. yes: You can make openSUSE usable via Internet support, such as what I did with the Atheros Wifi card. You can replicate that for every major issue you are likely to have. But that is not enterprise support. May be as good or some would argue even better, depending on who you talk to. The fact is to make openSUSE usable on my personal X30 I am going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Another thing I realized here (Sleep is a wonderful thing) is that I need Wifi to work on my X30. No matter what PCMCIA Wifi card I have with me, or where I am at. Some folks need a computer part of the time. Some folks need a computer all the time, but may or may not need it hooked to the network or the Internet. On my personal X30, I need it all the time, and I need for it to have Internet access all the time. openSUSE is not the Distro to be running on it.

To test enterprise features of openSUSE at work... things like Evolution, all I need is a VM on one of my production Linux systems. Just like I had been doing. openSUSE never promised to do what I was trying to do. In fact, the doc is pretty clear about all the things they have left out of the Distro. This experience was not a waste of time either: it is always good to know exactly what the doc means in a very real way. There are so many times when 'unsupported' really just maps to 'untested, but may work fine'

What I need to do it look at a Distro that does profess to do what I want, out of the box.

Meeting Linux Mint 2.0

Linux Mint , code named 'Barbara' is "based on Ubuntu 6.10 and uses the Ubuntu installer. The desktop is Gnome 2.16.1 and the kernel is 2.6.17" . I was running Ubuntu 6.10 before on the X30, so this is very interesting.

I hope you appreciate how hard it was to not type Mint puns here. uhnnnn .... Minty Freshness... doh. Sorry.

Mint installed just like Ubuntu 6.10 for the most part. Same installer, but in shades of blue rather than Orange. Total of about 20 minutes to answer the install questions, move the swap to hda2 and / to hda3 (something I had wanted to do before, but forgot. I wanted swap closer to the front of the disk.) and watch the CD spin. Reboot. Install alone is 1/3 the time of openSUSE.

29 updates to install... and.. whoa there nellie: That it even knows that there are updates to install means that the DWL-G630 Wifi card was already configured! OK... Ubuntu did that. But openSUSE didn't. And it grabbed the updates in less than a minute! Impressive.

Mint figured out that my 'steve' userid was already in /home, and didn't make me do anything to fix file ownerships. It even has my new background of the Space Shuttle night launching yesterday already set up! (that was a cool launch!)

The MS Windows partition on /dev/hda1 is there and mounted. It doesn't boot because it was there when this disk was in the eMachines 5312, but I can read the data. That is all I want. The CF card in the X30's CF card reader slot is there and mounted (openSUSE did that too).

Firefox is there, and is 2.0. The videos at http://comedycentral.com work! And Youtube. And Video Dog. and video.msn.com. OK.

The flash player is working when tested over at adobe.com.

The ThinkPad buttons all work, except the one labeled “ThinkPad”, which normally does something like launch a special program in a hidden partition on the harddrive, but since this harddrive started life in a small box in the computer store and was first formatted in an eMachines 5312. I don't really expect that button to do anything. It would be nice to program it to be useful, like launching FireFox or something.

I am officially a happy camper.

Twenty minutes to install and configure versus an entire evening. On the other hand, no Santa penguins on the boot screen.

The end of the geekend

Don't think I am trying to pile on openSUSE here. It is a Distro that has a purpose. But that purpose is *not* to be an easy to use, easy to install, easy to configure and maintain for the end user or the folks in the glass house, or supported by a vendor type of Linux.

openSUSE is a technology playground for what is to come with SLED. As such, if I were the manager of desktop support in a place using SLED, I'd have openSUSE spinning on a system or three to be sure.

That test install place is not (well... should not be) my personal, use it every day Linux laptop. I don't think it is my office IBM T41 laptop either: Not yet anyway. FC6 is working there, even if I have to use KDE for Gnome's Evolution to work right. But it is working so well, I hate to mess with it.

That home, personal type Linux usage demands a different kind of Linux than what openSUSE currently is. I should never had used my personal IBM X30 for this experiment, because I have such a personal investment in it working all the time in a non-enterprise like environment. VMware at the office will be the right place for this.

Will it always be this way? That is a whole other post to be sure. I would think that the forces of convergence will make both FC6 and openSUSE have to play catch-up to the easy to install and maintain crowd like the Ubuntu family, Xandros, and Freespire.

Speaking of families, my family demanded I leave the computer room and hunt for food. So I downloaded the weblog posting from docs.google.com to the X30, and ran over to Taco Bell to hunt for food and spelling errors. Found both. The reason I have the X30 is that it is so utterly portable.

One last test, before heading home. I told the X30 to hibernate, and once home restarted it. Worked. Very cool. It wasn't that long ago such things were just not do-able without serious hacking.

A Lenovo X series running a Core 2 processor and Linux Mint: now that would be a cool machine. But I digress.

I'll be on vacation for the next few weeks, returning in January 2007. I won't have been near a Linux computer other than the newly updated X30 in the meantime. No phone and no Internet. Just manual labor and recreational hiking in the Big Bend.

Happy Holidays!