Mint, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE

Last time out I was on an adventure of my lifetime, traveling to our Pune, India office to meet others in BMC's R&D Support team. I had taken my Dell D620, configured with Mint 3.1. It was reliable and trouble free. What was left over from that trip was an issue from the previous post about OpenSUSE 10.3. It was troublesome enough on the D620 hardware that I ejected it at the last minute in favor of Mint 3.1.

I had two days back in the office between trips, and spent one evening after everyone left setting up a new set of Linux test systems.

Laptops

I tend to use laptops to test all things Linux desktop for these reasons.

1. Linux on a laptop is usually a harder test for Linux, since the hardware can be less standard. Call it a stretch goal.
2. My office is only so big! Laptops save space, and power, and have built in screens so I don't have to have to have a KVM infrastructure.
3. Laptops now outsell desktops, and why not? Dual core, 64 bit, increased memory on RAM and Disk... what do I need a desktop for?

This approach has been borne out by my recent D620 work with OpenSUSE 10.3 and Mint 3.1. OpenSUSE was problematic, Mint was largely flawless. This is not to say that there would not be a different laptop where the exact reverse could be true. This is one finding on one laptop. It would be a scientific mistake to generalize this one data-point. That is where the IBM T41 and Dell Inspiron 8100 come in.

OpenSUSE 10.3 on the IBM T41

Replacing Mint 3.0 on the T41, I installed OpenSUSE 10.3. OpenSUSE has run well on the IBM in the past, and frequent contributor to this blog Richard Meyer has it running well on his IBM T series laptops, so I assumed it would work, and it largely does. Yeah, OK, there is that qualification "largely". I can not say it has been perfect. The IBM Thinkpad support is installed, but the screen bright / dim keys are frankly acting wonky. Set the screen brighter, and it steps up to "brighter, brighter, full dim". If I look away, and then back, the screen will be full bright. I have no idea what it is playing at. Previous installs of OpenSUSE did not do this, nor did Mint.

The other thing that is not working very well is external / dual head support. The T41 is in a docking station, and a Dell 1280x1024 60 Hz refresh flat panel attached. The two dual head modes YAST knows about are to stretch the desktop across both screens, or to replicate the primary display. What is not available but should be is to treat the second display as a second desktop. Fedora knows that trick, and it has historically worked very well on this exact same hardware.

The problem with dual head is that the internal panel is 1400x1050, and so the size mis-match is something Yast can not correctly configure, not even when I force the 1400x1050 panel into 1280x1024 mode. The external panel is driven such that the virtual display is larger than the real one, and it does not pan to let you get at the virtual edges not being shown. Phooey. I wanted this so I could run VMware on the second display and have two OS displays on one computer. Looks like I'll have to put Fedora on if I want that... assuming I can figure out how to get VMware working on Fedora.

Meantime, Evolution is working fine, and I have hidden the SLAB menus away where they belong. I know: I am such a Luddite sometimes. Week after next, when I am back from BMC Userworld, I'll work on tweaking out this setup more completely. One annoying thing: Once I installed the security updates, it *removed* one set of debugging symbols for Evolution. I do not know why the debugging symbols were not updated when the base package changed, but that hurts my ability to report issues.

The install process itself is much better than it used to be, but still not up to Ubuntu standards. It takes way longer, and enabling the alternate repositories is a slow, chatty bit to the install, while Yast seems to refresh all sorts of things from all over the place.

OpenSUSE does something in their install I wish all Distros did: When I told it I was going to use user "steve", it asked me if I wanted to change all the ownership for the current "/home/steve" to match this userid. I am beyond hoping that all the Distros will ever agree as to what the UID of the first added userid should be: 500, 501, 1000, or whatever. Unless LSB defines this someday it will always be different. Adding a check to see if the home directory of the userid just added already exists is so simple, but saves all sorts of issues later.

Ubuntu 7.10 on the Dell Inspriron 8100

Replacing Mint 3.1 on the Inspiron is Ubuntu 7.10. Ubuntu did not drop in as easily as Mint, and it appears to be because Ubuntu does not enable the "restricted drivers" automatically anymore. The Dell's 1600x1200 screen was mostly black on the first few boots. Finally I used safe graphics mode and 1024x768, and Ubuntu went in fine, although the screen had huge black borders. Once installed and rebooted, I turned on restricted drivers, had it install the Nvidia drivers, and then the screen was fine.

This was the only major hiccup in the install, and I hope Mint 4.0 does not follow this path and enables these drivers when it sees that the graphics card is there. It was not a big problem, but it was annoying and did not add to the overall feeling that Ubuntu really knew what it was up to. It just felt sort of braindead: "I know what video card you have, and I have its driver over here, but I am not going to use it till you tell me to". I know the correct 'Restricted Drivers" incantation too: Would a new user think highly of this is they had to google up the solution? I get the deal where the Open Source community wants these drivers opened up, and I agree with that position, but how about a prompt asking me if I wanted the drivers enabled at install time so I could decide back then? At the very least, if I was "Shirley First-time-user" I would know what was up.

If there were any changes in the install process from Ubuntu 7.04 they were small enough to escape my notice. Same simple, fast install.

Evolution 2.12 appears to work well, but I did not have any real run time on it before I had to go home. Between my day job and changing time zones from IST to CDT, it was all I could do to get this far.

Evolution 2.10 is "obsolete"

Part of what drove me to do the above OS swizzles was the fact that the current status on the bugs I have reported against Evo 2.10 was first "Duplicate" and then "Obsolete", I.E. Evo 2.10 is replaced now by 2.12. OpenSUSE 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10 both has 2.12. Mint 4.0 will be out in November, and being based off Ubuntu 7.10 should also have 2.12. I'll take the D620 to that release as soon as I can.

Next week I'll be at BMC Userworld, and no doubt my post here will be informed by that experience. After that I will put up a post about the final configuration for our HA Linux NAS that is replacing the Tru64 TruCluster.